Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Recognition
From Biocrawler, the free encyclopedia.
Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Recognition is a parody of classification schemes or ontology, in the form of an essay by Jorge Luis Borges on a fictitious Chinese encyclopedia. Animals are classified into categories such as:
- those belonging to the Emperor
- embalmed ones
- suckling pigs
- those not included in the classification
- those resembling flies if seen from a long way off
Obviously, the classification suffers from myriad defects, being non-orthogonal, self-referential, and leading to contradiction.
Borges's position on classification may be overly pessimistic. Specifically in biology, evolutionary descent actually gives on objective way of classification. On this basis, cladistics explicitly seeks to avoid any artificiality, even at the expense of some counter-intuitive classification, such as including humans among the reptiles, in the interest of avoiding paraphyly.
The Celestial Emporium is also reminiscent of a poorly designed object-oriented class hierarchy in computer science.
