Categories All the Way Down

Abstract

Scores and classifications are dual to one another. Cardinal and ordinal measures are repeatedly used to produce nominal classifications of essential worth. Conversely, presumptively natural kinds provide the basis for new measurement and scoring systems. Over time, the iterative application of nominal classifications and quantifying measures produce involuted, nested systems whose structure and origins are hard to disentangle. While careful studies of earlier systems and methods have often uncovered these arbitrary aspects, newer technical tools for classification are at once substantially more opaque than their predecessors and more likely to be employed on very large scales. The classification situations to which they give rise thus have the potential to produce the sort of naturalized facticity characteristic of classical social facts.