Sorting is never innocent. Every category you create is also a claim about what belongs together and what doesn’t.
A taxonomy looks like simple housekeeping — put similar things in the same bucket, give the bucket a name. But the choice of which properties matter enough to define a category is a substantive judgment, not a mechanical one, and it shapes everything built on top of it afterward: what gets studied together, what gets treated as an edge case, what disappears because no category was made for it. A landmark study of classification systems made this case at length: sorting schemes carry the values and assumptions of whoever built them, often invisibly, long after the reasons for a given category have been forgotten.
That’s the stake behind this essay’s closing line about “building a foundational first layer… the taxonomy, the canon, rules of interpretation” — a taxonomy isn’t just organisation, it’s the first and most consequential decision in building any knowledge system, including the one this vault is building.
Source: Bowker, G.C. & Star, S.L. (1999), Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences, MIT Press.