You've read "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins" by Borges but have you read Wilkins? Probably a waste of time: http://tei.it.ox.ac.uk/tcp/Texts-HTML/free/A66/A66045.html …
Borges rightly says the taxonomy is plagued by ambiguities, redundancies, and deficiencies, but the "dog-like" and "cat-like" division of rapacious beasts is actually standard in Linnaean taxonomy: Carnivora has two suborders of Feliformia and Caniformia.
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This isn't just a convention: they're monophylytic groups. The lesson is that sometimes we should engage with a person's categories by extension rather than by definition or vice versa, because one form can be reasonable when the other isn't, even though they should be equivalent
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