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@harr Thanks!
I am a Zettler
I am very late to the conversation here, and I am certain (t)his work/theory has been mentioned in this forum before, yet I haven't seen it in this thread specifically.
Bertrand Russell's philosophical view of Logical Atomism. He held that the world consists of "facts" or "atoms" that cannot be broken down any further, and can be understood independently of other facts.
What Russell says is that these "atomic facts" are statements about objects (particulars).
An "atom" can either be that a certain object a has a certain property P, of the form: a is P. For example, "that dog is fast," "this learning method is inefficient," or "I exist." Or an "atom" can be that an object a relates to another object b in some way R, of the form a R b. For example "this dog is chasing that dog," "this learning method is superior to that learning method," or "I know that man."
Russell's Logical Atomism has very much influenced my personal Inventory of Atoms, however I have tweaked Russell's method a little bit. Russell is very particular about particulars (see what I did there). For example the statements (that one might very well have as articles in their zettlekasten): "Breakfast is yummy," "Zettelkasten is useful," "Philosophy is the root of all disciplines," and "Structural Functionalism confuses Cause and Effect" are all not valid Atomic Facts, as Breakfast, Zettelkasten, Philosophy, Disciplines, Structural Functionalism, and Cause and Effect are not particulars but rather are universals (they are concepts, and one's conception/instantiation of them can change).
In my inventory I simply have two types of atoms: concepts, and claims. In concept notes, I flesh out what I mean by that concept and explain how that concept works. For example, I'd have a concept note for Zettelkasten, one for Structural Functionalism, and so on. At the top of this note I'd write my personal definition of the term in my own words. If the concept note is a theory/process, I'd also explain how it works. The rest of the note would be a structure note where I link to all the other notes I have on that topic (essentially an object-based tag hub).
Claim notes are the bread and butter of my Zettelkasten. Any statement/claim made about concepts is a claim note. "Zettelkasten is useful," "Structural Functionalism confuses Cause and Effect." These are pretty much the same as Russell's atomic facts, taking two forms: Concept x has property y, or Concept x and Concept y are related in some way R. I use the note itself to explain the relationship, reasoning, and evidence behind the claim that x is y, or that x R y. In the note, I may also link to potential challenges/expansions on the claim, themselves claim notes.
@RowanDee: Your association of note atomicity and Russell's logical atomism is super interesting. It's also super interesting that you quickly discovered that you had to break one of the core principles of Russell's logical atomism: the metaphysical correspondence of atomic propositions and atomic facts. As you admitted, once you make that break, you don't have Russell's logical atomism anymore.
The rule that the atomic proposition is the basic element of an information system (IS) was already in use in IS models in the 1960s or 1970s. But this rule did not imply the metaphysical and epistemological aspects of Russell's logical atomism. So I would guess that the more useful term to trace through history in the literature would be not "logical atomism" but instead "atomic proposition" or "atomic sentence". Russell, I would guess, played a big role in popularizing those terms as well, if only because he was an early pioneer of logical analysis.
By the way, I think it's helpful to supplement analysis into logical propositions with a logic of question and answer, of which R.G. Collingwood was a pioneer.
EDIT: Here's a succinct summary of the basic problem with the concept of an atomic fact, from Mario Bunge (1963), The Myth of Simplicity: Problems of Scientific Philosophy, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, p. 11, 86:
I think that it is worthwhile to trace logical atomism in literature.
Sascha's concept of atomicity is based on this claim (emphasis added):
Four of the six knowledge blocks deal with "the world" and "reality": concepts, models, hypotheses and theories, empirical observation.
The remaining two deal with "truth": "Arguments transfer the truth of a set of statements to another via a logical structure." "Counter-arguments disrupt the transfer of truth provided by arguments."
I see similarities to logical atomism in so far as discrete facts and logical arguments are involved. But I don't know enough about logical atomism to compare it in detail with Sascha's atomicity.
For me the keyword is "discrete". Sascha's building blocks are neither fuzzy nor overlapping, they are discrete. Sascha explicitly defines:
The big question is what Sascha means by "knowledge". Is it just the content of the "information system" Zettelkasten? Or is it knowledge about the world with some of the "metaphysical and epistemological aspects of Russell's logical atomism"?
@harr: The big problem with Russell's logical atomism is that its metaphysics and epistemology is underdeveloped. It is definitely outdated. You can trace the term logical atomism in the literature and you will find criticisms to that effect.
When I referred above to "the basic problem with the concept of an atomic fact", I meant atomic fact as conceived in Russell's logical atomism. It's not necessarily problematic to speak of atomic facts if you define them in a way that works for solving your problem.
Sascha's model is informed by the history of philosophical analysis, so it's not surprising that it shares characteristics with Russell's model, as Russell is part of that history, but Sascha's model doesn't imply all the characteristics of Russell's logical atomism, e.g. his metaphysics and epistemology.
I'm reminded of a simple formula from Ronald Giere that I've mentioned before: Scientists use models to represent aspects of the world for specific purposes. (In the linked discussion, I added some other variables inspired by the thesis under discussion there.) Is Russell's logical atomism a good model for scientific work today? Probably not, unless you want to see how far you can go with a retro model.
The paper by Hars (2001) that I mentioned recently provides some more up-to-date alternatives. Like Russell's model, they all include a type of knowledge element called proposition, sentence, statement, etc. The ubiquity of such an element is why I thought it would be fruitful to trace the terms "atomic proposition" or "atomic sentence" in the literature. I would not be surprised if Russell popularized the use of the word "atomic" in that context, but he certainly didn't invent logical statements.
Just for context: I have OP's request in mind. He is compiling a "research plan for a wider perspective on atomicity". He invites us to "hammer all the sources that you deem remotely relevant to this topic (perhaps, with a sentence to give reasoning on why it is relevant if it is obscure)."
Those criticisms might be of interest here. Can you recommend literature?
This kind of comparison might be of interest here. What characteristics do they share?
As far as I know, Sascha doesn't claim to do "scientific work". He talks about "knowledge work".
I think it makes sense to trace all of these terms: "atomic fact", "atomic sentence", "atomic proposition", …
I'm wondering how comparable these ubiquitous elements are to Sascha's knowledge building blocks and other aspects of his concept of "atomicity".
@harr said:
The critic with whom I'm most familiar is Mario Bunge, whose book The Myth of Simplicity I quoted above and contains more relevant passages. Bunge was an avid reader of and admirer of Russell, and he thought Russell was one of the best examples of the scientific ethos in philosophy, but one of his few and persistent criticisms of Russell is essentially what I'm pointing to here. Here are some relevant quotes.
The idea in this last quote that problems come in packages or systems is well illustrated in Hars (2001), cited in a previous comment above, where Bunge's conceptual model of science is one of the models that Hars consults and discusses before synthesizing his own model.
You already listed them above, though the most relevant is the logical one, truth preservation, as Russell was above all a logician.
True, but if one is worried about such elements as "atomic facts" or "basic building blocks of knowledge", etc., then one is probably doing Wissenschaftliche work, perhaps not science but something in the neighborhood of it.
I'd say the scope of atomic propositions is more restricted than what Sascha calls knowledge building blocks. In other words, atomic propositions are (roughly) only one type of knowledge building block. But what Sascha and the advocates of atomic propositions share is the analytical method of identifying fundamental elements of knowledge.
@Andy: The term "epistemological individualism" was new to me. Bunge's argument helps me better understand the difference between Christian's and Sascha's definition of atomicity.
Christian's initial definition explicitly referenced "separation of concerns". The term was coined by Edsger W. Dijkstra to explain a "technique for effective ordering of one's thoughts": "focussing one's attention upon some aspect" "does not mean ignoring the other aspects, it is just doing justice to the fact that from this aspect's point of view, the other is irrelevant. It is being one- and multiple-track minded simultaneously." Dijkstra doesn't deal with complex problems by tackling one problem at a time, but by consciously switching between "viewpoints". For Dijkstra it is a "characteristic for all intelligent thinking" "that one is willing to study in depth an aspect of one's subject matter in isolation for the sake of its own consistency, all the time knowing that one is occupying oneself only with one of the aspects". Separation of concerns accepts complexity.
However, Sascha's more recent definition of atomicity starts by postulating the existence of discrete knowledge building blocks and the concept of "atomic ideas", "idea atoms" or "knowledge atoms". He claims:
I don't know if my research tools delivered a correct answer, but apparently Sascha's atomicity does have characteristics of epistemological individualism:
I can see Sascha's approach in the individualistic tradition of Descartes and Locke. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's article about Social Epistemology says (emphasis added):
I'm comparing this with Sascha saying:
and:
and:
Thinking of Sascha's atomicity as epistemological individualism makes it easier for me to compare it with other forms of approaching knowledge, eg systemic thinking or science as a collaborative process.
@harr: That's all interesting. Nice connection to Dijkstra.
Don't forget Sascha's "Upgrade Atomic Thinking to Holistic Thinking" (2023).
Without taking time to look at Bunge's books to verify this, I guess that Bunge would suggest that you need a model with levels or layers here. (Is something like that idea in Dijkstra too?) There's (at least) a super-individual level, an individual level, and a sub-individual level. They are all systemic and important. Bunge wouldn't deny the importance of the individual thinker; he was against, for example, a vulgar Marxist view that would say that the super-individual (social) level is the only real one and that individual people can't think for themselves but are only puppets of their social-class interest.
So atomicity and systematicity in knowledge applies to both individual and group work, it's just that Christian and Sascha's focus on this website, their specialization, seems to be individual work. That will highlight individual epistemic issues. But it's always in a super-individual context.
That's a tough one. I don't like how the post oversimplifies cognitive science. However, I find this sentence interesting:
Reading it, my brain immediately wonders:
What is this stuff called "knowledge"—according to Sascha?
I think that my previous post explored a potential answer: for Sascha knowledge is the result of individualist epistemology. Knowledge is the product of individuals processing information. It doesn't matter where an idea originated. What matters is that the individual processes ideas according to what Sascha calls the principle of atomicity.
I agree with Bunge. But for the purpose of this thread here, I'm trying to focus on Sascha's concept of atomicity in order to provide OP with potentially interesting leads for literature research.
As far as I can tell, Sascha's concept of atomicity is purely individualistic. At least that's my current hypothesis. :-)
Do you have a reference where Sascha or Christian define atomicity for group work?
If you're not talking about their respective definitions of atomicity, which one do you have in mind?
It took me a while to appreciate the influence of Christian's 2013 post. It's difficult to find mentions of atomiticy in publicly accessible media, where we can rule out any influence of Christian's definition. (Do you know any sources published before 2012 that use the exact words atomicity or atomic note with a comparable meaning in the context of knowledge-management?) As someone who's interested in history, I find it fascinating to study how the term atomicity spread in the PKMS community and how people use it.
It also took me a while to appreciate the difference between Christian's initial concept and Sascha's more recent concept of atomicity. Christian's concept is derived from software engineering (object-oriented programming, code re-usability, separation of concerns). Sascha's concept is derived from a philosophical belief about the nature of knowledge.
For the philosophical aspect I find Mario Bunge insightful. Thanks for mentioning him! I appreciate that Bunge also describes a legitimate use of "atoms" in The Myth of Simplicity (1963) (emphasis added):
Bunge talks about scientific knowledge and discourse, not about personal knowledge and thinking. I think that these rationales work well for collaborative processes. Having well defined "unites of discourse" makes it simpler to talks about them and reference them.
I think that Christian's initial definition of atomicity intuitively addresses these rationales. Find clear units that can be easily connected.
I think that Christian's definition is compatible with groupwork, because the references to coding practices and re-usability also imply some kind of communicability. In order for code to be re-usable, it needs to be understandable for other people as well.
However, I think that Sascha values the individual person more than group work and the individual idea atom more than systemicity. He says in The Principle of Atomicity:
When I read that sentence, questions pop up:
I don't want to walk into this philosophical quagmire too deeply. :-)
For now I work with the hypothesis that Sascha's atomicity is individualistic. It is mainly concerned with the processor's processing process and the processor's internal processes while processing.
@harr said:
Whenever one evaluates human information source quality, one is thinking through an important social epistemic issue. Sascha evaluates source quality. (There may be a better example than that link; I just found that in a search for "source quality".) Therefore, Sascha thinks through an important social epistemic issue. Given this fact, it seems pretty obviously false that it doesn't matter to Sascha where an idea originated, so the quoted argument for imputing an "individualist epistemology" to him fails!
More generally, I know you're just exploring ideas here, but I think Bunge's term epistemological individualism launched you on a train of thought that is taking you a bit far away from what Bunge meant. Individualism in Bunge's context is a synonym for atomism and is an abstract concept that is opposed to holism, not to social or group. Bunge's concept is about methodology of analysis, not about the difference between individual epistemology and social epistemology. When Bunge's concept is applied to analysis of social activity, it overlaps with the issues of individual versus social epistemology, but Bunge's concept is more abstract.
The conflation of these two distinctions also occurs in your previous comment where you associate breaking down knowledge into atoms with an act of individual understanding, and you impute this association to Sascha. I doubt that he would make this mistake. He's speaking to an individual reader of his writings, so it may sound as if he is only concerned about individuals, but the thinking (e.g. analysis) skills that he's talking about are abstract and, as such, could be used by an individual, by a group of people sitting around a conference table, or by a sufficiently intelligent machine, even if Sascha doesn't explicitly address these other applications.
I first read your previous comment quickly, and I didn't notice until I reread it now that you said "I don't know if my research tools delivered a correct answer, but..." This sounds as if your method of analysis here was to ask a chatbot something like: "Does Sascha's atomicity have characteristics of epistemological individualism?" If so, perhaps you can see now why that was not the best analytical method: your chatbot didn't know the distinction that I've been trying to elucidate in these last paragraphs, and you basically fell for the kind of AI hallucination that elsewhere in this forum you said you are wary of. Am I right?
My previous paragraphs explained why I think your hypothesis is false!
Given what I've said in previous paragraphs, you should be able to anticipate my answer to this: They don't need to "define atomicity for group work", because atomicity is an abstract concept that can apply to either individual or group work. There is a lot of literature that applies the concept (or something like it) to group work; papers by Joel Chan, which you know, cite this literature.
"Atomic node" was often used in the hypertext research literature (Google Scholar search). "Atomic chunk" was also, though rarely, used (Google Scholar search). Therefore it's no surprise that a 2024 paper by Joel Chan and colleagues defined hypertext as "a technological medium that emphasizes a) curating/developing atomic chunks of information, and b) linking and composing these atomic chunks into larger information structures".1 As I suggested in a previous comment, terms like "atomic sentence" can be found (Google Scholar search).
Again, I think you're conflating different concepts here as I described above, and there's no good justification for calling Sascha's conception of atomicity "individualistic".
In your list of questions, "We" is the writer and reader, or in general anyone "engaging with atomicity as a principle" as Sascha suggests; "What is an 'essence' of something?" is metaphysics/ontology; "By what process do we 'get' there?" is methodology; and the last two questions are epistemology.
Siyi Zhu, Rob Haisfield, Brendan Langen, & Joel Chan (2024). "Patterns of hypertext-augmented sensemaking". In: Yao, L., Goel, M., Ion, A., & Lopes, P. (eds.), UIST '24: Proceedings of the 37th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, October 13--16, 2024, Pittsburgh, PA, USA, New York, 2024 (pp. 1–17). New York: Association for Computing Machinery. ↩︎
@Andy: I hope we can agree that the terms atomicity, atomic and atom mean different things to different people in different contexts at different points in time.
Timeline
It's quite interesting to see how Christian's and Sascha's thinking evolved over time. For our purposes here, I'd like to focus on the changes in August/September 2025.
One of the tools I use to make sense of historical developments is a timeline. When I created a timeline in my non-atomic definition note "Atomicity (Tietze Fast)", I added the "threshold date" August 12, 2025. Why is that date a threshold? Because Sascha said so:
My Zettelkasten includes source notes, so I can add sources to the timeline. Here's a (tiny) timeline with four posts on zettelkasten.de, that I find relevant for our conversation:
In the threshold post Sascha compares atomic notes to Wittgenstein's beetle in the box. He suggests that no good definition of an knowledge atom had existed up to that point:
In the threshold post, Sascha asks rhetorically: "What is this atom, then?" He answers with a statement presented as a premise:
The threshold post marks also a "change of perspective" from "Atomicity as the input type" to "Atomicity as the desired outcome". Sascha explains the relevance (emphasis added):
From this point on, Sascha defines atoms as knowledge building blocks and atomicity as the principle that leads to the creation of such blocks.
Sascha also expands atomicity to a more philosophical principle:
Whereas in 2013 Christian described the principle of atomicity much simpler as:
In the same article Christian emphasized that "Atomicity of concepts is key here." I think that Christian's atomicity helps achieve similar goals as Bunge's "conceptual atoms" that I mentioned before: clarity and cohesiveness.
Sascha's current concept of atomicity is different from earlier concepts published by himself, Christian and others.
When we talk about atomicity the timeline matters.
Social epistemology
Have you read the linked thread from the beginning? Sascha was looking for demo material (emphasis added):
Note the timeline. Sascha wrote the request after the threshold post. And note how Sascha uses the word "idea".
In the comment you linked, Sascha doesn't reject the source because of its quality, but because it wouldn't serve the purpose of the planned demo video. :-)
The example is bad, but I find your argument interesting.
The 2022 post about the "The ZKM Evidence Scale (ZES)" might be more relevant. It describes a trust score that includes heuristics like "you can’t trust the so-called journalist" or "diligent studying of primary literature and meta-analysis" is valuable or "something that proved itself in the test of time means it proved itself for the future". ZES could support the hypothesis that Sascha also relies on social epistemology. To which degree and with what intention is a different question.
I don't know how the concept trust from 2022 relates to the concept truth in the threshold and inventory posts from 2025.
You could also look at the 2019 post about "Three Layers of Evidence". I found this part interesting:
I'm curious how you read that post. As a proof that Sascha relies on social epistemology? Or as the opposite, that he relies only on his own judgement, as an epistemic individualist would do?
I find "pretty obviously false" a bit harsh. :-) I'm not saying that Sascha doesn't evaluate sources. He does. I'm saying that Sascha doesn't care where ideas are from. In Sascha's own words:
The keyword here is "idea". A lot of Sascha's thinking hinges on the concept of an "idea". I have to admit, that I'm still trying to figure out, what exactly he has in mind, when he talks about "ideas". :-)
Yeah, the exploration went a bit astray. :-) The term epistemological individualism sounded interesting, so I looked it up and ran with it. I looked at other sources. The connection to social epistomology came from the Stanford article. The connection to Descartes and Locke was so interesting, that I continued on that path, ignoring Bunge. :-)
Defining atomicity
Let me address your criticism with open-ended questions:
I challenge you to write an atomic note according to Sascha's post-threshold-day rules that defines the concept "atomicity". I'm referring to this knowledge building block:
If you accept the challenge, your atomic note has to draw a clear boundary between "this is atomicity" and "this is not atomicity". Otherwise it wouldn't match that block and therefore wouldn't be atomic. :-)
l'm curious how the experiment works out:
As far as I understand Sascha's thinking, you can't have one without the other. Understanding and atomicity are two sides of the same coin. At least that's who I read the threshold and inventory posts.
Good catch. I did start with a chatbot. :-) But I didn't stop there. I ventured on to Google and looked up stuff in its original context, found interesting articles and forgot about Bunge's definition. It might not have worked as "analytical method", but I'm quite happy with the result of the exploration. I discovered a missing link for the analysis.
You might not like the "conflation", but I think that the conflation is at the core of Sascha's current flavor of the Zettelkasten method. Inventory post:
When you say "atomicity is an abstract concept", what definition of "atomicity" do you have in mind? How do you know that "something like it" is in fact something like it? What "it" are you comparing that "something" to? How do you determine the similarity? Where do you draw the line and say: this is nothing like it?
I'd like to avoid the beetle-in-the-box problem. :-)
Atomic nodes
Thanks for the queries! I picked at random a paper from 1993 from the search results that says (emphasis added):
This is a technical definition of a data model. I can see a connection to Christian's and Sascha's earlier descriptions of atomic note or atomicity: break composites down into atomic nodes, use inter-nodal links to cluster atoms. In my Zettelkasten I would add this as a research question:
To what extent do Christian and Sascha conceptualize a Zettelkasten as hypertext with atomic notesnodes?
I think that papers about atomic nodes in hypertext are relevant to OP's request. I don't think that we need Joel Chan to make the connection. If I remember correctly, Christian and Sascha themselves have mentioned hypertext repeatedly over the years.
Atomic sentences and atomic facts
Thanks for the query! How would you connect those atomic sentences to Sascha's atomicity?
The knowledge building block argument comes to mind. Inventory post:
Threshold post:
Are these statements the same as atomic sentences?
I'm also wondering about this block:
Does it say that a hypothesis should be expressed as an atomic sentence?
And circling back to logical atomism, how does this block compare to atomic facts?
I find it noteworthy that the threshold post mentions analytical philosophy as influence.
I think that some sources mentioning "atomic sentences" are relevant for OP's request, but the connection still needs to be elaborated.
Deep and skillful thinking
Regarding individualistic epistemology as opposed to social epistemology, I notice how the inventory post describes the goal of atomicity. The reader can learn the "craftsmanship of knowledge" and become a "deep and skillful thinker". So what is "thinking" (emphasis added)?
I read "with our thinking" in the last sentence as an "by thinking with our own heads. :-)
@harr said:
I wouldn't overemphasize the distinction between social and individual epistemology. I think it's best to view epistemology or theory of knowledge as unified, and "social epistemology" merely as a research program that addresses issues that some philosophers saw as neglected, or at best implicit, in epistemology. I interpret Sascha's pledge that "I would never rely on someone else's interpretation of phenomena" as an expression of skepticism, which is the engine of epistemology. If we just trusted all information, there would be no epistemology. In this case, Sascha is skeptical of other people as sources, which is a social epistemic issue. If he were expressing skepticism of his own perceptions or thinking, that would be an individual epistemic issue. But he's not saying that he always trusts his own perceptions and thinking!
I am like Sascha in this way, as I understand him here. I think of my note system as being governed by something like the Mertonian norm of communism (in science). As I have said it before: "I do not indicate, as an attribute of the note, that it is mine or someone else's: the note ontology is completely communistic in that respect."
I can't speak for Sascha, but in my view, it may help to think of an idea as a thought, but abstracted from any particular thinker: a thought without a thinker, or a thought that anyone could think. It is a vague fiction that spawns the perennial question: "How big is a single idea?" (Or: "How big is a single thought?") The best answer to that question will include a theory of types of ideas or of knowledge elements or of "knowledge building blocks" in Sascha's terms.
Here is Bunge's definition of "idea" in his Philosophical Dictionary (2nd enlarged edition, 2003):
I may have said it better elsewhere, but my spontaneous definition of atomicity would be the degree to which, in a set of notes, the notes are atomic, an atomic note being a note that contains exactly one knowledge building block, in Sascha's terms. This could be expressed as a percentage: what percent of your notes are atomic notes? The answer is the quantified atomicity of your notes. (This doesn't conform to Sascha's quoted definition of a concept building block, but that's no problem for me because, as I've said before, I don't take Sascha's building blocks as canonical. If you have concept notes in your note system, you could define the concept building block differently than Sascha does.)
Yes, you can write atomic note if you don't understand what an atomic note is, but you merely got lucky, as in a Gettier case. If you want to write atomic notes but don't want to rely on luck, it's better to understand what an atomic note is.
I defined atomicity above, but given that definition of atomicity, I would change "atomicity" in my passage that you just quoted to "atomic notes", as I was referring to that and not to the sense of atomicity that I gave above. I take the knowledge models, schemas, or ontologies referenced by Joel Chan et al. to be similar to Sascha's knowledge building blocks because both are sets of types of fundamental knowledge elements, generally based on a theory of knowledge. Any model that didn't specify a set of types of fundamental knowledge elements wouldn't be similar. For example, if you define hypertext, as Joel Chan et al. did in the paper cited above, as "a technological medium that emphasizes a) curating/developing atomic chunks of information, and b) linking and composing these atomic chunks into larger information structures", but you don't have a set of types of fundamental knowledge elements, then that definition of hypertext is not similar, in the way I'm indicating here, to atomic notes as defined by Sascha.
Thüring et al. 1991 that I cited in my first comment above (where I said "It seems that it was also around 1990 that some hypertext software designers started using the term atomic nodes") makes the same or similar distinction as Østerbye 1992 that you cite here.
See also the quote in my first comment from Manfred Kuehn's 2007 essay on his history of note-taking where he describes the revolutionary effect of his personal discovery of digital hypertext in the form of wiki software in 2002. The proprietors of zettelkasten.de interacted with Kuehn, as I recall; for example, I remember that Christian commented on Kuehn's blog Taking Note, and Kuehn may have commented on the zettelkasten.de blog in the early years.
Digital hypertext is generally the first level in Sascha's atomicity guide, "linked note-taking": "Creating a personal wiki is another effective way to take notes. Here, you don't [necessarily] care about atomicity at all." Some hypertext data models, like the ones we cited from the early 1990s, may come somewhat closer to Sascha's sense of atomicity, but a typical wiki is quite free-form and Sascha rightly puts it at his level one.
Yes. See the Wikipedia article on atomic sentences, for example.
There is a lot that could be said about this. All of these elements could be better defined within a more explicit theory of knowledge.
For example, here is Bunge's definition of "hypothesis" in his Philosophical Dictionary (2nd enlarged edition, 2003):
@harr said:
By the way, I know that the concept of atomicity that I spontaneously created here is not what Christian & Sascha call the "principle of atomicity", which Christian stated in 2016 as "one note equals one piece of knowledge" (not to mention Sascha's more recent explication of that). Something led me to formulate the concept of atomicity as a measure of the atomic notes in a note system. This might be called the "measure of atomicity" as opposed to the "principle of atomicity". I guess a "concept" seemed to me more like a measure than like a principle. This is not a thoroughly evaluated position on my part, just a spontaneous answer that may be a somewhat interesting distinction.
I found an influential paper on hypertext, that seemed to be missing in our collection:
Frank Halasz, Mayer Schwartz, Kaj Grønbæk, and Randall H. Trigg. 1994. The Dexter hypertext reference model. Commun. ACM 37, 2 (Feb. 1994), 30–39. https://doi.org/10.1145/175235.175237
The model defines atomic components:
Random find. Luhmann mentions atomicity in his Zettelkasten. Search for "Atomismus" or "atomistisch".
Ha! Good old FORTH! I encountered it around 1985, running it in a 64k CP/M machine to control a digital waveform digitizer (basically an oscilloscope without a display). To display and work with the waveforms it captured, I wrote a Reverse Polish Notation calculator-like program that operated on waveforms instead of numbers. That program is in its 5th generation now, no longer in FORTH.
[snip]
I actually don't agree that "atomicity" is desirable for zettels ("z-card"). The Topic Maps model (TM) (ISO 13250), which was originally developed to model back-of-the-book indexes in computers, has as its core component the topic. A topic represents a subject of discourse, which is to say something that can be discussed. Topics can be related to other topics by Associations, which are themselves topics because they too can be discussed.
I think that the topic is a better fit for thinking about the contents of a z-card. Of course, it depends on one's definition of "atomicity". The ultimate in atomicity is built into the Resource Description Framework (RDF), where everything is broken down into "triples": threesomes of subject-predicate-object. That degree of breakdown leads to loss of the location of natural boundaries, a loss of the shape of things, and no one triple means much in itself.
I like to call RDF triples "atoms of meaning" and TM's topics "molecules" of meaning. The physical world that we real with is built with molecules not atoms, and I think the same should be so for z-cards.
@tomp Yes, "topic" is a good way to think about it, although that term probably has as many ambiguities as does "atom".
Can you recommend literature that explains the TMDM in simple terms? The Wikipedia article "Topic Maps" is a bit over my head. :-)
This thread looks for literature related to atomicity, regardless of our personal opinions about the term or the concept.
Can you clarify the relationship between atomicity and topic?
Yes. What definition do you have in mind?
I did a quick search. The Wikipedia article "Semantic triple" does mention "atomic":
RDF triples look like a very relevant addition to this thread. Nice!
The Medium article "RDF Triples: Smallest Atom of Meaning, Largest Scope of Use" also makes me curious to learn more about RDF triples.
"Atoms vs. molecules" sounds like an interesting topic for a separate thread.
You could look at the Topic Maps chapter in my book "Explorer's Guide To The Semantic Web", but it's not available on line. See if this page works for you:
https://techquila.com/tech/topic-maps-intro/
I prefer to think of the "subject", in Library Science terms, which seems to me to be pretty similar to the Topic Maps idea of a "Topic". The subject is what the document (or z-card) is "about". Of course that is subjective too. Let me illustrate the difference in terms what I would like to see in a z-card.
You mentioned a triple like "Bob's age is 35". That is an atomic statement, assuming we all know what the terms mean. It's hard for me to know why I would want to create a z-card for this triple. Presumable the card would be "about" that particular atomic fact.
I would probably want my z-card to be about Bob, not a single triple about his age:
Bob-born-1991
Bob-born_in-Chicago-IL
Bob-known_as-author
Bob-alias-Booby
Bob-lives_in-Atlanta_GA
... and so on
The topic is Bob - a subject for discourse. Or maybe I want the card to be only about Bob's vital statistics. Or about his children, or his food preferences. You get the picture, right? Each of these is a fit topic for a z-card but none of them can be isolated down to a single triple.
You could say that any of these is "atomic". But I say they are compound, "molecular". If that is just a matter of definition, I'm good with it but for me, compound is what I want on cards. Of course, there's got to be some boundary or the card will be too complicated to be useful. This is partly a matter of experience, but try to think of the subject you want to talk about and that will probably be a good fit for a card.
Thanks. I read:
I can't make the connection yet. How is this relevant to personal knowledge management and OP's request for sources about "atomicity"?
Don't focus on the idea of mark-up. The markup is a way to interchange information about the topic map. The data model is separate from the markup. The basic idea is that there are Topics, which are subjects for discourse, something one can "talk" about. A topic is a proxy for the actual subject because, of course, we aren't going to have the actual person "John Smith" in the computer or on our index cards.
Topics can be related to other topics by Associations, which are themselves topics because any given association can be discussed in its own right. Things which can be said about a topic are called Occurrences, and are typically hyperlinked but that's only an implementation detail. Topics normally have a type (e.g., "person")(but it could be left as a generic type of "thing") but always have an ID of some kind. They also have a name or names.
To illustrate, John Smith and Mary Doe are two topics representing two people. They are married, and the marriage is represented by an association of its own. Each of them plays a Role in that association. In this case, the role could be Spouse. Note that the role itself can be considered to be a topic because it can be talked about on its own.
Now just replace each instance of "topic" with "z-card". You have a collection of cards that may be associated with other cards with a possibly typed association and that may contain information (usually text blocks) about the topic. Each card is about one subject. You have just described the entire Zettelkasten card collection.
The Topic Maps data model is a very close fit to a Zettelkasten. You need to overlay some kind of indexing and navigation on top, and that too could (if anyone wanted to) be described as associations between topics.
I don't mean that all those details (and there are more I'm skipping because they would just add clutter) have to be formally expressed or even be in the user's mind at all times. But the model is a strikingly good fit.
Hmm. The reference point for "atomicity" in this forum are Christian's and Sascha's definitions. I don't see how "subject" relates to their definitions.
As far as I know, it's "atomic" in the sense of being the "smallest irreducible unit of knowledge representation" of RDF (https://bryon.io/rdf-triples-smallest-atom-of-meaning-largest-scope-of-use-339b1e5f3661)
It's hard, because we don't know the purpose of your zettelkasten.
This doesn't answer, why you want to write a zettel about this particular atomic fact.
The atomic unit in RDF is the triple. When I care only about a part of that triple, we're not talking RDF anymore. (At least that's my very limited current understanding.)
I don't see how this improves on terms mentioned earlier in this thread like claim, atomic sentence or atomic proposition.
The term "atomicity" as it is used by Christian and Sascha refers to the content of a note. It doesn't rule out inner complexity of the note. It's about a level of granularity where one wouldn't want to break down the note into smaller parts.
The debate is about the criteria of that atomicity. In comment 22012 @ctietze wrote:
Paradoxically, the entity "Bob" would be much too small to make sense as an atomic idea. (However "Bob" would make sense as an atomic node in hypertext. It's complicated…)
The challenge is to find definitions of atomicity that are useful for personal note-making with index cards and/or hypertext systems.
@tomp I don't get where you're coming from exactly, or where you're going to
You start with "atomicity" as a property for notes is not desirable. Instead you want the content of a note to be one of topic(s). Some mental leap you're making is missing; sounds like apples and pears to me.
(The use of "atomicity" as an attribute works with "topic" just as well as it works with "idea" or "thought" -- to make sense of your remark that "topic" would be better, I would have to assume that you want to actually exchange 'atom' for 'topic'; but we're not talking much about the "atomicity of atoms", and you're not talking about "topicality of notes" I guess?)
Author at Zettelkasten.de • https://christiantietze.de/
I'm mostly interesting in moving away from paying too much attention to whether a note is "sufficiently atomic" and thinking instead of what the note is supposed to be for, and crafting it so that it promotes that purpose in a helpful way.
There are some things known from cognitive science (and by experience). For example, a note that is too complicated is hard to get into one's mind and hard to retain. Content is more easily grasped and kept in mind if it is structured into smaller chunks, not too many (~ half a dozen for many people). There is a subliterature on "Retrieval Cues" or "Retrieval Clustering" that is worth cruising through a bit, and it includes chunking. The chunks themselves can have structure. This aspect is largely about populating working memory without overloading it.
If each part of a note is about a different subject then it will be hard to grasp what it is intended to convey. If it contains too much then the user may get lost in the detail. If a note contains too little then it will be harder to build up a pattern of the meaning because parts of the pattern will be spread over several notes.
Obviously there are tradeoffs to be made. Creating a good card can be looked on as a craft, and it takes practice and experience to get good at it. And the way to do it is also going to vary depending on the nature of the card. I call this skill "cardcraft". Myself, I'm very much still learning.
I think the focus should be on cardcraft and not atomicity. Realizing that a card is usually best when it is about one subject is part of cardcraft; but it's only one part.
Interesting topic. Would you mind starting a new thread, so that we can chime in?
Here's another book for the collection. It combines structured writing with hypertext.
The book doesn't mention atomicity, but it addresses questions that atomicity tries to answer, for example on pages 40 and 41:
How comparable are hypertext and paper? The list of "paper metaphors for hypertext linkages" on pages 30 and 31 mentions library card catalogs, footnotes, cross-references, sticky notes, commentaries, indexes, quotes and anthologies.
I find this book so interesting, because it predates the WWW. Some of the futuristic visions have become everyday experiences, like browsing a global network of text and media by clicking on "buttons". Others still look futuristic, like 3D models.