CLASSIFYING THE WORLD

ARISTOTELIANISM, INFORMATION SCIENCE AND TAXONOMY

Abstract

The central problem addressed by this investigation is to understand the persistence and transformations of the classificatory rationality inherited from Aristotle, tracing its trajectory from practices of knowledge organisation in Information Science to its incorporation into digital infrastructures, particularly platforms, algorithmic arrangements and artificial intelligence (AI) systems. The study seeks to analyse this historical trajectory in order to identify the point at which classificatory activity moves beyond the mere ordering or representation of knowledge and begins to operate directly as a mechanism of selection, hierarchisation, inference and the management of visibility. The analytical corpus brings together theoretical propositions by Aristotle, Paul Otlet, S. R. Ranganathan, Michel Foucault, Geoffrey Bowker, Susan Leigh Star, Safiya Umoja Noble, Kate Crawford and Shoshana Zuboff, alongside literature concerned with the study of platforms and algorithms. Methodologically, the study brings together a literature review, an epistemological perspective and a Foucauldian genealogical approach, adopting an interdisciplinary orientation attentive to the ways in which categories, hierarchies, distinctions and relational connections are established and reconfigured across different moments in the history of classification. The analysis indicates that classification operates as an intellectual and informational technology which, once absorbed into the digital ecosystem, shifts its focus from the organisation of documents towards the regulation of data flows, behaviours, profiles and probabilities. It concludes that technological transformations do not abolish classificatory rationality; rather, they reformulate it through different instruments and contexts, preserving certain fundamental operations of attribution, differentiation, ordering and relation.