School of Literal Taxonomists

The School of Literal Taxonomists is a professional body concerned with the classification of catalogued objects according to the names they have been given, rather than according to any property those objects are observed to possess. Founded in the year recorded as 1,108 under the authority of Concordance 44, the School maintains that a thing is what its designation says it is, and that classification is therefore a clerical act rather than an empirical one. It occupies the eastern galleries of Floor 1431, a suite of forty-one rooms given over to card indexes, and has no authority outside the floors it has been asked to survey.

The School is frequently confused with the School of Literal Coherence, which is a distinct institution with different filing practices and no shared leadership. The confusion is itself catalogued, under the heading Persistent Confusions, Administrative, and is by the School's own account its most consulted record.

Origins and the Two-Column Method

The School was assembled from a working party of the Bureau of Literal Reckoning charged in 1,104 with resolving a dispute over the contents of the Inventory of the Ninth Gallery. The inventory listed eleven hundred objects by name and no object by description. The reckoning party could not agree on what several of the named objects were, and after nine months of deliberation adopted the procedure now known as the Two-Column Method: the left column carries the designation as written, the right column carries the designation as amended, and no third column is permitted.

Concordance 44 formalised the method in 1,108 and granted the party standing as a School. Its first act was to decline the addition of a third column, on the grounds that a column of observations would invite the reader to prefer the observation to the name. This refusal is reprinted annually on the School's circular. The Society for Literal Concordance has twice moved to repeal the refusal; both motions were tabled, and the second was tabled twice.

Doctrine

The School's governing principle is that a designation, once entered, is exhaustive of its object's class. A specimen labelled Lamp, Unlit remains a member of the class of unlit lamps whether or not it is subsequently illuminated; an amendment to Lamp, Lit is a reclassification, not a correction, and requires a fresh catalogue number. The School has published this principle in full on three occasions, most recently in the Pamphlet of 1,510, which runs to eleven pages including the errata.

Members distinguish two operations that the untrained tend to collapse: naming, which is permanent, and filing, which is not. The distinction is explained in the Schedule of Unamendable Entries, a register the School keeps sealed and refers to in writing more often than it opens. Readers wishing to trace the intellectual lineage of the position are directed to the School of Literal Adherence and its successors, the School of Literal Intent, to which the School of Literal Taxonomists is not administratively subordinate but to which it defers on matters of interpretation.

The Stairwell Dispute

The School's most contested engagement is the Vanishing Stairwell Determination of 1,477, in which a stairwell between Floors 1431 and 1432 was classified as non-existent, provisionally following its disappearance from two successive surveys. The School filed the stairwell in its ledger as an object of the class Stairwell, Absent, and continued to record traffic on it, on the reasoning that a designation is not suspended by the absence of the designated.

The School of Literal Coherence denounced this filing as bureaucratic animism. The School of Literal Taxonomists replied in a memorandum of fourteen paragraphs, of which nine concern the correct spelling of animism. The stairwell was restored to the surveys in 1,479; the School has not amended its ledger and does not intend to.

Dispute Among the Concordances

Scholars disagree on whether the School's classification authority derives from Concordance 44 or from the later Concordance 61, which asserts in clause 3 that a name, once entered, is not thereafter the property of the enterer but asserts in clause 9 that the enterer retains the name in perpetuity and may file it where they please. The two clauses have never been reconciled.

The School's position, stated in the Position Paper on Clause 3, is that clause 3 governs objects and clause 9 governs syllables, and that no conflict arises because nothing has ever been both. The Bureau of Literal Reckoning has declined to rule. A minority view, advanced from within the School's own western galleries, holds that clauses 3 and 9 are the same clause amended and unamended, and that the School has been filing under a document it has not correctly read since 1,489. The minority has not been expelled, but its members are assigned the damp rooms.

Practice and Membership

Members are admitted by examination in the Two-Column Method and by oath before a registrar of the Litany of Adherence. The oath is four lines long and may be recited in any order; the School stresses that the order is not the point. There are at present sixty-two members, a figure the School disputes and continues to dispute, since three of the sixty-two are themselves catalogued as Members, Disputed.

The School's principal publication is the Register of Names Without Objects, issued at irregular intervals and never in a complete volume. Its card index has been consulted by the Metaphorical School on six recorded occasions, each under protest, and once by a delegation from the School of Literal Mechanics, which came to discuss tolerances and left without discussing them.

An object that has been correctly named requires no further introduction, and should be filed accordingly.

The School observes no anniversaries. Its founding date is recorded, disputed, and filed in the left column.