Classifying for Social Diversity

This paper argues that a new approach to classification best supports and respects social diversity. We should want a classification that facilitates communication both within groups and across groups. We should also want no group to be privileged within the classification. These goals are best accomplished through a truly universal classification, grounded in basic concepts, that classifies works in terms of authorial perspective. Strategies for classifying perspective are discussed. The paper then addresses issues of classification structure. It follows a feminist approach to classification, and shows how a web-of-relations approach can be instantiated in a classification. Finally the paper turns to classificatory process. The key argument here is that much (perhaps all) of the concern regarding the possibility that classes can be subdivided into subclasses in multiple ways, each favored by different groups or individuals, simply vanishes within a web-of-relations approach. The reason is that most of these supposed ways of subdividing classes are in fact ways of subdividing different relationships among classes.