A few weeks ago i went to see David Weinberger speak his alma mater the University of Toronto (video here). Weinberger is the author of Everything is Miscellaneous (EiM), and professor at the Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center For Internet and Society. His talk at UofT highlighted a particular conclusion of his thesis in Everything is Miscellaneous, so let me go over that really quickly.
EiM’s fundamental point is that taxonomies (any top down hierarchy) that is used for classification, will at some point, become insufficient to describe the body of objects supposedly covered therein. Wienberger did a Google Tech Talk covering the subject matter which you can watch (i advise you to do so). Basically, the claim is that every taxonomy has a sort of “other” or “miscellaneous” bin, into which problem cases typically end up (or sometimes they’re just distributed adhoc). Eventually the miscellaneous bin becomes so problematic that the hierarchy has to be overhauled or thrown away. This is a particular problem for physical objects that can have only one physical arrangement. However, as EiM points out, this is really a limitation of physical objects. Digital objects aren’t subject to the problem of only being in one place at one time (or if you want to phrase it differently, reorganizing digital objects is much easier).
So, the basic conclusion of EiM is that imposing rigid hierarchies on top of digital information is sort of a fool’s errand, since it won’t work anyway, and there are some other more useful ways of looking at and annotating data that provides more power and utility (primary example: content tagging). For the purpose of what we’re talking about here, another important ramification is the notion that we’re better off including EVERYTHING. More data, in Wienberger’s world, is always better. If you can afford to not throw anything away, you can wait for more clever, more sophisticated tools to sort through the mess for just the things you need.
Weinberger’s talk at the UofT was on what the organization of information says about some rudimentary epistemological issues. The basic premiss is that Knowledge (capital K) as an external, existent object which can be interrogated is akin to taxonomies in general. Knowledge as a concept is just as rigid, fixed and messy as any other classification system (which again, are accurate and useful in some cases). And just as we can learn about utility and accuracy of taxonomies from the internet and digital organization, we can look at what the internet and digital organization has to say about Knowledge.
So, what does the internet say about what we collectively know? Primarily that nobody agrees that we know anything. Regardless of what you want to assert, there will be someone, somewhere on the internet that’ll be willing to not just assert a counter-claim, but vehemently and sincerely argue for hours over the subject. Top down hierarchies don’t work as an accurate representation for how we collectively think objects should be organized, and Knowledge with a capital K, can’t accommodate the vast gulfs that separate the various representations of the world that individuals hold to be true.
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Weinberger’s conclusion is that it makes more sense to talk about the things that people hold to be true about the world as groups of localized “understandings”, shared amongst groups of individuals.
There are a number of caveats and notes i should insert here, both about Weinberger’s conclusion, and about whether i have accurately represented his position, but doing so in full is an extremely long discussion, which i’d like to only touch on, because i think the ramifications of his conclusion are more interesting.
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I don’t think that committing to Weinberger’s view of the world automatically commits you to full blown relativism, or to a Khunian view of scientific change. The fact that things are messy doesn’t mean that there isn’t an external real world which we interrogate for facts about how things in broad measure function (Or as my brother is fond of quoting “Science means that not all dreams can come true!”).
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Weinberger is a techno-utopian. While i do think we will have new and better tools with which we can keep sorting more information, i don’t take that for granted.
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I’m not an epistemologist. I’ve never taken any classes in epistemology, although i read about the subject and have discussed it’s ramifications in other philosophy classes i have taken, and with my friends who have taken epistemology classes. Just as i don’t think that Weinberger commits us to an anti-popperian relativism (i.e. science just happens to be what a bunch of old grey haired men happen to decide is true), i don’t think that it commits us to epistemological relativism either. There is a real external world which we must agree upon, or face the consequences. However this still leaves open the vast range of content regarding humans, human behavior, and the like, upon which we can and do disagree.
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This point i will expand upon later. I’m a semantic anti-realist. The basic ramification for me as a linguist, is that meaning and truth are not inherently fixed. This is uncontroversial for a linguist but not as much so for philosophers. The way this is relevant for Weinberger is that the notion of The Truth (capital T) is related to Knowledge (capital K).
