Form or function: A comparison of expert and novice judgments of similarity among fish

Reference Type Journal Article
Year of Publication
1989
Author
Journal
American Anthropologist
Volume
91
Issue
4
Pagination
866-889
Date Published
12/1989
Language
English
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Abstract
Ethnobiologists debate whether folk biological classifiers are natural historians attending primarily to the morphology of organisms or are pragmatists concerned primarily with utility. We argue that this question is best understood as a problem in intracultural variation: the relative importance of form and function depends on who is asked to judge the similarity of organisms as well as how they are asked to judge it. We find that expert fishermen judge similarities among fish on both functional and morphological criteria, while novices judge on morphological criteria alone and thereby approach the scientific classification of fish more closely than experts. Experts also vary more than do novices, presumably because they control more different kinds of knowledge on which to base a similarity judgment.
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Research Notes

ArticleType: research-article

Full publication date: Dec., 1989

Copyright © 1989 American Anthropological Association

Number of pages
24 pp.
ISSN
0002-7294
Short Title
Form or Function