What it means to have a folk taxonomy….

So lets play a game: Which is the odd man out?

BIRD : CROCODILE: TURTLE

If you’re like me, you put crocodile and turtle together.

But….

I’ve been reading The Native Mind and the Cultural Construction of Nature by Scott Atran and Douglas Medin, Here’s what they say about that.

If birds descended from dinosaurs, and if crocodiles but not turtles are also directly related to dinosaurs, then crocodiles and birds form a group that excludes turtles; or crocodiles, birds, and turtles form separated groups; or all form one group. In any event, the traditional separation of BIRD and REPTILE is no longer tenable.

So we all have a folk taxonomy. (We also all have a goal orientation for that taxonomy, but I won’t talk about that much until another post.)

The way we categorize the world by virtue of our innate tendencies along with our our exposure to the variety of nature and cultural support for natural knowledge constrains our minds.  Constraints: our folk taxonomies effect our decision making, our ability to recognize an issue before it drowns us, and our ability to understand each other with respect to differing claims about the environment.

The authors put it this way:

A person who cannot distinguish one kind of bird or tree from another cannot respond appropriately to changes in the ecological balance among their living kinds.  Many recent immigrants to Phoenix, Arizona, cannot identify the pruned eucalyptus trees in their landscaped plots much less surmise that the nonnative eucalyptus is not conducive to maintaining biodiversity in the face of competition for scarce water. Likewise, few residents of Chicago are able to identify a buckthorn, much less comprehend that a fire can selectively weed out invasive buckthorns without affecting bur oaks and other native prairie tree species.

The thing is that we once could, but we are losing that knowledge.  Atran and Medin did a really interesting study to show this using the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). What they show is that the number of text references to trees grew overall from 1525 to a peak at 1825 from where it dropped well below the 1525 level by 1925. In other words, by 1925 there was very little cultural support for talk about trees and (in my own interpretation, what it also probably means that by 1925 the population generally knew less about trees than the general population did in 1525).

The authors call this loss of knowledge “devolution.”

The findings provided strong support for the main prediction of the devolution hypothesis: Cultural support for trees, as measured by the relative number of quotations and sources in the OED, declined markedly in the last century.

Does it matter that we are losing this ability to make distinctions in our environment? Well, if the import of rabbits to Australia is an example, the loss (or absence) or local ecological knowledge, of different kinds and how they fit together in their local environments can make a mess of things.  I mean would you organize your house so that your toilet was in the middle of your living room?

No?

Why not?

That’s ecological knowledge.  Now imagine you knew the plants, animals and their various ecological relationships in your region as well as you know the things and events in your living room. This kind of categorization of knowledge and the orientation of that system of categories to the things and their relationships is what the authors call “ecological”.

Later in the book the authors present two case studies which show different categorization systems (or mental models of nature) in conflict over natural resources (trees and fish). As interesting as these case studies are, what the authors call “ground-truthing” is even more interesting.  They not only assess the differences in knowledge and perception of self and other in the cases of cultural conflict over resources, they measure it against actual data (that’s the ground-truthing bit). In other words, if there is a general claim that the Other’s fishing practices (for example) are damaging to the overall health of the fish population, that claim is examined by virtue of the numbers and health of the actual fish population. Radical! So not only do they investigate perceived differences but they investigate the truth of those perceived differences.

More about this in another post.