NaPoWriMo Day 27: Taxonomies

If everything is miscellaneous,
then no existing structure,
system, or binomial nomenclature
governs particular groups
of individual things.
The game plan, or
organizing principle
is up to the players.
Is this revolutionary
or merely scientific?

Creating such a system
can take an Aristotelian,
deductive, a priori path:
a given set of types
defining whole classes
orders, families, geni, species
of individual items,
establishing the rules top-down
by theory-driven practice,
like Linnaeus (not his real name)

Or a Wittgensteinian,
inductive, pragmatic path:
a collection of prototypes
drawn from those items,
leaving open the definition
of the family resemblance
between similar examples
by practice-driven theory,
like Mao or Darwin or Dewey
(John not Melville).