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to one another. Despite being designed for different purposes, they may contribute something useful to our endeavour. However, lists and taxonomies are not the same. A few words about the various kinds of organisation we have met and their general strengths and weaknesses are relevant at this point.
Objects of study
In what follows, objects of study refer to the entities being collected, sorted, or grouped. Stamps in a stamp collection could be objects of study. They are discrete entities of the same kind. In educational practice, it is not always clear whether entities are discrete objects or exist at a higher level of abstraction.
Frameworks
A framework is a general term for a structure that provides support. In this context, it has to provide support for thinking about thinking. On this basis, lists, groups and taxonomies are frameworks that may support such thought, although the frames they offer may vary from a stick to an edifice. For Anderson (1983, pp. 12–13), ‘a framework is a general pool of constructs for understanding a domain but it is not tightly enough organised to constitute a predictive theory’. It is not, however, the tightness of the organisation that makes a predictive theory, so much as the nature of the relationships in that organisation. The term framework covers a wide variety of structures.
Lists
A list is a device that presents the content of a collection or assemblage. The list may be unordered or ordered. An organising principle, if apparent, may make a list easier to use, as with an alphabetical index or a chronology of events. More than one organising principle can be present, as when a list reflects divisions in the collection and presents items alphabetically within each division. A list of the contents of a supposedly exhaustive collection may be described as an inventory.
Consider a list of words that denote thought, culled from a dictionary and presented in alphabetical order:
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assume, brood, calculate, cerebrate, cogitate, conceive, conclude, consider, contemplate, deem, deliberate, design, determine, envisage, estimate, imagine, judge, muse, ponder, presume, reason, recall, recollect, reflect, remember, ruminate, suppose, surmise.
On the positive side, such a list may serve as a menu or check list. For instance, it could be an aide-memoire that reminds teachers what they have had their students do and have yet to do. Lists can be easy to use for checking that each item has been given attention.
However, the list of words above does not indicate relationships between entries and it does not show whether particular items are subsumed by others (i.e. are of a different rank). If such a list is intended to be a menu, there may be no basis for making a balanced or representative selection from it (or, conversely, a justifiably unbalanced selection). At its least helpful, a list could be a miscellany of unrelated items that does little for further thought.
Groups
A group is a collection of items that are related in some way. An entire collection of objects of study is itself a group, often referred to as the field. The field may be subdivided into smaller groups according to more specific similarities and differences amongst the objects of study. ‘In its simplest form, classification is merely defined as the ordering of entities into groups or classes on the basis of their similarity’ (Bowler, 1992, p. 165). The Russian chemist, Mendeleev, placed the then-known chemical elements into seven groups according to their behaviour and properties. For instance, he placed lithium, sodium and potassium in Group I and fluorine, chlorine and bromine in Group VII. These are discrete groups of the objects of study (the elements). The elements within these groups are more alike than the elements in different groups. In the list of ‘thinking’ words above, several are to do with bringing knowledge out of mental storage (e.g. recall, recollect, remember). These could be grouped together and labelled, say, ‘retrieval processes’. This process of grouping may shorten the list, particularly when a word can be allocated clearly to a group. This is not always easy. ‘Brood’, for instance, has connotations of contemplation combined with dark emotion and ‘contemplation’
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sounds like a passive review of recalled events but is it ever entirely passive?
On the positive side, groups can impose order on the world and make large amounts of data more manageable, especially if the groups are named. In other words, they are economical devices that can reduce the burden of thinking.
On the other hand, as with a list of words, a list of groups may be no more than a checklist or menu, albeit a shorter one than before. At the same time, placing an object of study in a group can seduce people to ignore its other attributes. The weather, for instance, can be categorised as calm, breezy, and stormy, but the division between a very strong breeze and a light stormy wind may not exist. Similarly, a sunny day can be also a windy day and critical thinking can be creative thinking and both can involve recall from memory.
Taxonomies
Groups may stand apart or be contained within other groups (see figure 2.1) or be some combination of these. Subsuming groups within others amounts to creating ranks of organisation. This is a common feature of taxonomies.
The term taxonomy comes from the Greek, taxis (arrangement) and nomos (law). A taxonomy comprises groups (taxa) of objects of study sorted according to their similarities and differences (Bowler, 1992, p. 52). The principle or basis of the classification (the law) can be, for example, similarities and differences in structure, behaviour and
Fig. 2.1. Groups within groups within a field.
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function. The verb taxonomise refers to the process of classification; a taxonomy is the product of that classification.
The process of sorting objects of study into groups can amount to a direct, empirical comparison in which similarities and differences are noted. This is sometimes referred to as a qualitative approach to taxonomy. Social scientists also use a quantitative approach to cluster objects of study into groups. In this approach, ‘statistically speaking, we seek to minimise the within-group variance while maximising the between-group variance’ (Bailey, 1994, p. 1). Both approaches commonly seek to arrange objects of study into groups so that each group is as different as possible from all other groups, but each group is as homogeneous as possible.
For example, biologists have constructed a taxonomy of living things which sorts them into a hierarchy to show their relationships. The hierarchy of ranks in this taxonomy is: Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, and Species. Figure 2.2 illustrates a small part of the taxonomy, beginning with a kingdom and ending with a species. This taxonomy has the function of locating all organisms according to their genealogical relationships, a task that is carried out according to internationally agreed codes of practice. It supports the description of these organisms and, biologists claim, it affords a basis for making hypotheses, predictions and generalisations about evolutionary history, attributes and processes (Smith, 1979).
Fig. 2.2. A part of a biological taxonomy of organisms.
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The support for thought that a taxonomy might give is well illustrated by Mendeleev’s grouping of elements, mentioned above. He went on to sort the elements within each group and produced a two-dimensional array now known as the Periodic Table. This array had gaps, which led Mendeleev to predict undiscovered elements and describe their properties. Nevertheless, taxonomies are primarily descriptive devices and do not offer causal explanations, although, of course, they can provide information that supports speculation and the construction of theories. In the behavioural sciences, for instance, Stott and his co-workers define maladjusted behaviour as ‘that which is disadvantageous to the agent’ (Stott et al., 1975, p. 160) and then constructed a taxonomy of behavioural disturbance (see figure 2.3). While it gives psychologists concepts to think with, the taxonomy does not, in itself, explain why the groups are related or why people exhibit maladjusted behaviour.
In a taxonomy, the objects of study may be sorted into groups on one basis (a unidimensional taxonomy) or on more than one basis at the same time (a multidimensional taxonomy). For example, loaves of bread can be sorted into a two-dimensional taxonomy according to bread colour (brown or white) and state (cut or uncut). This forms what has been called a property space. Property spaces can, of course, have more than two dimensions. Bailey (1994, p. 78) describes a taxonomy of class structure with property, authority and expertise dimensions. A multidimensional, conceptual taxonomy may be referred to as a typology by social scientists, although many do not make this distinction.
The term taxonomy is usually reserved for a collection of groups that form some coherent whole. Thus, the groups, writing implements, kitchen utensils, transport devices, and weeds are mutually exclusive
Fig. 2.3. A taxonomy of behavioural disturbances.