On 8/24/06, Nick Jenkins <nickpj(a)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.