The Kindness of Strangers: Kinds and Politics in Classification Systems - administrative history of large-scale classification systems

Library Trends, Fall, 1998 by Geoffrey C. Bowker

ABSTRACT

This article offers a formal reading of a classification scheme of international scope and long duration: the International Classification of Diseases (ICD). The argument is made that this classification scheme retains many traces of its own administrative and organizational past in its current form. Further, it is argued that such traces operate normatively to favor certain kinds of narrative of medical treatment while denying others. It is suggested that the ICD, like other large-scale classification systems, is able to do its work so effectively precisely because these traces permit a coupling of classification scheme and organizational form.

INTRODUCTION

   In so far as the coding scheme establishes an orientation toward the world,
   it constitutes a structure of intentionality whose proper locus is not the
   isolated, Cartesian mind, but a much larger organizational system, one that
   is characteristically mediated through mundane bureaucratic documents such
   as forms. (Goodwin, 1996, p. 65)

In the digital libraries that are being constructed today, a burgeoning number of formal classification systems are being inscribed deep into the infrastructure of the information system.

In this discussion, some medical classification systems with a long history will be examined--notably the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-9-CM, 1996; ICD-10, 1992), in operation since the 1890s--in order to discern the relationship between the use of the classification as an information storage and retrieval mechanism and its use to encode multiple political and ethical agendas.

One classic division between kinds of classification system is that drawn by Taylor (1995), who distinguishes between Aristotelian classification and prototype classification. The prototype classification was defined by experimental psychologist Eleanor Rosch (1978). This distinction is going to be an important one throughout this discussion and will be explored in some detail. An Aristotelian classification works according to a set of binary characteristics, which the object being classified either presents or does not present. At each level of classification, enough binary features are adduced to place any member of a given population into one, and only one, class. So we might say that a pen is an object for writing within a population consisting of pens, balls, and bottles (Taylor, 1995). We would have to add in one more feature in order to adequately distinguish pens, for example, from pencils, balls, or bottles. A technical classification system operating by binary characteristics is called monothetic if a single set of necessary and sufficient conditions is adduced ("in the universe of polygons, the class of triangles consists of figures that have three sides"), polythetic if a number of shared characteristics are used (in our example, the pen could be described as thin, cylindrical, used for writing, has a ball point, and so forth) (Blois, 1984). Desrosiares (1993) indicates a typical breakdown between monothetic and polythetic classifications in the work of statisticians. He associates the former with Linnaeus and the latter with Buffon (who engaged in local classification practices, just using the set of traits needed to make a determination in a specific instance) and writes: "These local practices are often carried out by those working in statistical centers, according to a division of labor whereby the chiefs are inspired by Linnaean precepts but the working statisticians apply, without realizing it, Buffon's method" (p. 296 [authors' translation]). Aristotelian models--monothetic or polythetic--have traditionally informed formal classification theory in a broad range of sciences, including biological systematics, geology, and physics.

Rosch's (1978) prototype theory argues that, in daily life, our classifications tend to be much fuzzier than we might at first think. We do not deal with a set of binary characteristics when we decide that this thing we are sitting on is a chair. Indeed, it is possible to name a population of objects that people would in general agree to call chairs that have no two binary features in common.

According to prototype theory, there is a broad picture in our minds of what a chair is, and this picture is extended by metaphor and analogy when trying to decide if any given thing that we are sitting on counts. We call up a best example and then see if there is a reasonable direct or metaphorical thread that takes us from the example to the object under consideration. Prototype theory has been powerfully developed within the field of sociolinguistics by George Lakoff (1987) and John Taylor (1995). One finding of the theory is that different social groups tend to have quite different prototypes in mind when classifying something--e.g., a piece of furniture. Thus, when surveyed, a group of Germans came up consistently with a different set of best examples than a group of Americans (Taylor, 1995, pp. 44-57). For the Americans, chair and sofa are best fits for furniture, for the Germans, asked about mobel, it was bed and table.