We explain what a classification is, its role in learning, thinking and the criteria it can use.
What is a classification?
A classification is an ordering or organization of things into a series of categories or classes. can be classified ideas, objects or any kind of referent. In fact, classifying is defined in the dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy as "arranging something by classes", that is, organizing and dividing a set of things according to criterion chosen in advance.
The word classification comes from the Latin voices classis (“class”) and face (“make”), so it 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 schemes of thought of human being. In fact, much of the learning consists of learning to classify the information, that is, to establish the relevant categories of each thing and subsequently establish relationships between them.
All classification, therefore, consists of a singularization: a general set of objects is taken and divided into smaller and more specific groups, according to the presence of some chosen characteristic.
There are, however, many ways to establish classifications. We can do it, for example, by attending to:
- The nature of things: classify objects according to the material from which they are made, or according to the degree of purity of the same, or according to the complexity of its constituent elements.
- Its functions: to 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 they have, or the colors of their surface.
Among all these possibilities, however, it is worth highlighting the classification hierarchical, that is, the one that organizes the 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 the catalogs of libraries.
Classification 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, the taxonomy, distinguishing between the realms of life and its numerous subclassifications. To do this, note is taken of the differences and similarities in their physical and body structure that the species of living beings each.
Something similar is done by chemistry by organizing chemical elements known in the different groups that make up the periodic table of the 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 the words are classified, according to their function within the sentence, in what we know as grammatical categories. But every classification, as we have seen, necessarily establishes classes or categories, that is, a typology (of types).
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 there will be.
This is what the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) plays with 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 which He organizes them into crazy classes such as “belonging to the emperor”, “embalmed”, “fabulous”, “that shake like crazy” or “that from a distance look like flies”, 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 don't know what the universe is."
Other uses of the term classification
Some much more specific uses of the term classification are as follows:
- In the world of sport, is used to refer to the organization of players or teams of players, according to the number of points or games they have won, within a championship. Thus, it is common to speak of a team or player "classifying" when they are among the top positions in a tournament, that is, when they entered the group of winners.
- When the governments and espionage agencies give a document “classified” status, meaning that its reading is not public and is reserved for those with the necessary authority or permission. Thus, classified documents are part of the secret of nations, until they are “declassified”, that is, they are 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" the 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 the hundreds or thousands of copies available in a library's collections or in a bookstore's repositories.