On Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things

My wife and daughter and I like to play word games that we can do when we are out to dinner, or in the car on vacation. Howard Stern’s F.M.K. is a favorite, where one player names three people, and the active player has to say which one they would…make love to, which one they would Marry, and which one they would Kill. Fun game – I can’t think of another context in which I could not only get away with saying (about Cloris Leachman, as a member of some nightmare troika posited by my wife,) ‘well, I guess I’ll have to tap that granny ass,’ but have it be met with rolling laughter.

My daughter Zoe also likes to make up games – ever since she learned as a little girl that she who controls the rules controls the game.

In that spirit I contributed a new game to the family library last year. One person names three to five things, and the other players compete to see who can first name a category to which all the things named belong. For example, someone might say ‘vichyssoise, revenge, and beer’ and the category would be ‘things that are best served cold.’ A lame example, but then again, I usually lose. Trust me when I tell you there are wonderfully subtle and challenging lists.

Zoe asked me what we should call the game…and I thought of the seminal work on categorization by Berkley prof George Lakoff, with one of the best titles ever:  ‘Women, Fire and Dangerous Things.’

And that’s what we call the game now….’Women, Fire and Dangerous Things.’

So I was at a Barnes and Nobel in San Antonio, Texas a few weeks ago killing time on my way to the airport. I had to check out of my hotel at noon, but my flight back to Medford via Denver wasn’t until 3, so I had some time to kill. I still had a B&N gift certificate in my wallet from Christmas, so I decided to stop there on the way and find a book for the trip back home.

Maybe because I was away from home and missing my family I thought of Lakoff.  So I asked the bookseller if they had a copy of ‘Women, Fire and Dangerous Things’…not really expecting them to have a twenty-year-old cognitive science book.  But there it was.  Not only that, they also had Lakoff’s book on metaphor he did with Mark Johnson – subject of a future rumination related to Folk IT.  And both are now in my current ‘inner library’ – that floating set of a dozen or so books that never quite get shelved.

And today I was thinking about my previous posting, ‘On Intension, Extension, Wittgenstein and Exceptional Software‘, in which I argued that we should always make our type partitions incomplete so that we could accommodate Wittgenstein’s family resemblance categories, and I realized that Lakoff provides even more direction as to the nature of non-classical categorization that would be very useful to incorporate into our approach to modeling:

“The idea that categories are defined by common properties is not only our everyday folk theory of what a category is, it is also the principle technical theory – one that has been with us for more that two thousand years. The classical view that categories are based on shared properties is not entirely wrong. We do often categorize things on that basis. But that is only a small part of the story. In recent years it has become clear that categorization is more complex than that.”

“From the time of Aristotle to the later work of Wittgenstein, categories were thought to be well understood and unproblematic. They were assumed to be abstract containers, with things either inside or outside the category. Things were assumed to be in the same category if and only if they had certain properties in common. And the properties they had in common were seen as defining the category.”

But as a result of the seed planted by the later Wittgenstein about family resemblance categories, as well as later work by Eleanor Rosch,

our understanding of categorization has changed.

Rosch looked at two fundamental problems with classical theory:

• If categories are only defined by properties, then no members should be better examples of the category than any other.
• If categories are only defined by properties of their members, then the categorizers’ capabilities or attributes should have no bearing on the resulting category

Of course, as soon as one starts looking into it, Ms Elenor is obviously onto something profound.

What has emerged is something called ‘prototype theory.’  Thanks in large part to Lakoff, it has gotten all bollixed up in the Anglo vs. European philosophy,  objectivism vs. subjectivism debate spaces.   Which has unfortunately tended to marginalize it.

But for our purposes here, we should simply note this:

Our classical understanding of what a ‘Class’ is is simply wrong in many cases. There are classes which are constellations of other classes, not all the attributes of which which overlap.  And there are members of of a class that are best examples – not all members of a class are created equal.  As Rosch points out, a robin is a much better example of ‘Bird’ than an ostrich…or a chicken. And an expert in a field can classify a set not classifiable by a rule. Which may be related to Godel’s Theorem if set membership is  a truth-valued relation.  There is an interesting example in Dreyfus’s ‘Why Computers (Still) Can’t Think’: an expert gift-giver who can give something everyone agrees is perfect..even though no one has ever given it before or included it in a list of potentially desirable gifts or projected it from a model of gift-giving.

Because our classical object-oriented approach to classes starts to fail as the users’ perspective is brought in.  One of the practical challenges of use case realization is in the data mapping…and we are starting to realize why.

A revision of object-oriented design tenets that accomodates prototype theory will help software more closely meet users’ needs in the real world.