On 8/24/06, Nick Jenkins nickpj@gmail.com wrote:
I.e. you can still say Imagine (song) is a thing related to John Lennon, which is a thing related to The Beatles. The relationship between the Beatles and Imagine (song) is somewhat tenuous, I think.
Wave-related stuff -> Sound-related stuff -> Music-related stuff -> Music events -> Music competitions would be a hierarchy; Music competitions -> Eurovision Song Contest-related stuff would *not* be used. Instead, the Eurovision Song Contest article would be in Music competitions, and the Eurovision Song Contest-related stuff category would be *related to* the Music competitions category, not a subcategory of it, so the loop would break. Not everything related to the ESC is a music competition.
Alternatively, if we went Music-related stuff -> Music event-related stuff -> Music competition-related stuff -> Eurovision Song Contest-related stuff, the loop would just break one step later: not all Eurovision host city-related stuff is related to the Eurovision Song Contest (the overwhelming majority is not). Therefore, that would also be "related to", not a subcategory, because it fails the "all X are Y" test. So again, no loop. (And don't try to give me a counterexample, because I'm saying that categories' descendants should be a strict subset of their supercategories' descendants, and that makes loops logically impossible.)
So you're saying that supercategories should not imply any transitive relationship whatsoever?
Quite the contrary. Supercategories would be exclusively transitive; related-to categories would be nontransitive in general.
I think this is an excessively confusing conversation for a largely pointless feature, though, so maybe we should drop it here.