March 3, 2001 4 October 2005

Eric Rasmusen notes, erasmuse@indiana.edu 


http://rasmusen.org


    12.  Judith Lachman,  "Knowing and Showing Economics and Law,"
(A review of An Introduction to Law and Economics, A. Mitchell
Polinsky (1983)) Yale Law Journal, 93: 1587, 1598-1605 (July 1984).

 A footnote says:

 "Cf. M. FOUCAULT, THE ORDER OF THINGS XV (1966, trans. 1970) (quoting
and  discussing set of categories from a "'certain Chinese
encyclopaedia' in which it is written that 'animals' are divided into:
(a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking
pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the
present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with
a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the
water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies")."

  This is  an example from fiction, not reality. Keith Windschuttle
writes:

"There is no Chinese encyclopedia that has ever described animals
under the classifications listed by Foucault. In fact, there is no
evidence that any Chinese person has ever thought about animals in
this way. The taxonomy is fictitious.  It is the invention of the
Argentine short story writer  and poet Jorge Luis Borges. ... Foucault
himself openly cites Borges as his source and has no problem in using
the mere fictional possibility of such a radically different taxonomy
as grounds for his belief that Western forms of classification are
themselves nothing but the arbitrary products of our own time and
space.  The example, however, is now so frequently cited in academic
texts and debates, such as the University of Sydney history seminar,
that it is taken as a piece of credible evidence about the state of
mind of non-Western cultures." (p. 255, Keith Windschuttle,  *The
Killing of History: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists are
Murdering Our Pasts*, The Free Press, 1996.)

 Notice that Lachman is not  taking   Foucault's position that
classification is arbitrary. Her position, as I see it,  is rather
that there is a best classification for every purpose, but it differs
depending on the purpose.