We explain what a classification is, its function in learning, thinking and the criteria it can use.
What is a classification?
A classification It is an ordering or organization of things into a series of categories or classes . Ideas, objects or any type of reference can be classified. In fact, classifying is defined in the dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy as “arranging something by class”, that is, organizing and dividing a set of things according to a criterion chosen in advance.
The word classification comes from the Latin words classis (“class”) and facere (“make”), which can be understood as “make classes”, that is, establishing different classes of objects or referents is establishing a classification.
This procedure – that of classifying – is extremely important within the thought patterns of human beings. In fact, a good part of learning consists of learning to classify information, that is, to establish the relevant categories of each thing and subsequently establish relationships between them.
Every classification, therefore, consists of a singularization: You take a general set of objects and divide them into smaller groups and specific, according to the presence of some chosen characteristic.
There are, however, many ways to establish classifications. We can do it, for example, taking into account:
- The nature of things: classifying objects according to the material from which they are made, or according to its degree of purity, or according to the complexity of its constituent elements.
- Its functions: classify objects according to their relationship with another group, or according to their appearance, etc.
Thus, a set of furniture can be classified according to what is wood, plastic and metal, or according to the number of legs it has, or the colors of its surface.
Among all these possibilities, however, it is worth highlighting the hierarchical classification, that is, the one that organizes objects based on the importance they have within a simple logical model: from the most general to the most specific. This type of classification was used in the first information organization systems, such as library catalogs.
The classification It is a mental process that we carry out continuously and in very different areas of knowledge and thought.
For example, in the field of biology, the classification of all known forms of life is undertaken, that is, taxonomy, distinguishing between the kingdoms of life and their numerous subclassifications. To do this, we take note of the differences and similarities in their physical and body structure that the species of living beings present among themselves.
Chemistry does something similar by organizing the known chemical elements into the different groups that make up the periodic table of elements, taking into account their energetic properties and their behavior with respect to the other chemical elements. This method of organizing the 118 elements known to date is known as periodic classification.
Even words are classified, based on their function within the sentence, into what we know as grammatical categories. But every classification, as we have seen, necessarily establishes classes or categories, that is, a typology (of guys).
Thus, when we are asked to classify a set of referents, we always need a criterion to organize them, that is, a criterion to establish the different groups that will exist.
The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) plays with this in his story “The analytical language of John Wilkins” from 1952, in which he proposes a curious classification of existing animals, according to a supposed Chinese encyclopedia, and that He organizes them into crazy classes such as “belonging to the emperor”, “embalmed”, “fabulous”, “that shake like crazy” or “that look like flies from afar”, among others.
All this to be able to affirm that “(…) notoriously there is no classification of the universe that is not arbitrary and conjectural. The reason is very simple: we do not know what the universe is.”
Other uses of the term classification
Some much more specific uses of the term classification are the following:
- In the world of sports, it is used to refer to the organization of players or teams of players according to the number of points or games won they have, within a championship. Thus, it is common to say that a team or player “classified” when it is among the first positions in a tournament, that is, when it entered the group of victors.
- When governments and spy agencies give a document “classified” status, they mean that its reading is not public and is reserved for those who have the necessary authority or permission. So, Classified documents are part of the secret of nations until they are “declassified”, that is, made public, when it is considered that they no longer represent a danger to national interests.
- In the world of information sciences, it is called “classifying” or “cataloguing” when entry of new books or documents into an information organization and retrieval system through dimensions and other data that are part of a code. This allows the requester to search for a specific book among hundreds or thousands of copies available in the collections of a library or in the warehouses of a bookstore.
References
- “Classify” in the Language Dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy.
- “Hierarchical Classification” in Wikipedia.
- “Classification” by Alberto Marradi at the Complutense University of Madrid (Spain).
- “Classification Etymology” in the Online Spanish Etymological Dictionary.
