"Thought" definition
Without any will of revisiting awesome ZK Forum posts about categorization, I wonder if some of you have a clear definition of what a "Thought" might be within the ZK framework?
Out of the ZK filter, I like these two definitions:
a) Thought is a mental event or experience that is subjectively reported by an individual.
b) Thought is a phenomenon that is observed through self-report and cannot be directly measured or observed by others.
From both, I find myself having these "thoughts" that go beyond the scope of a sparky "fleeting note".
Should we take them as a resource until we identify some "zettels" among them?
David Delgado Vendrell
www.daviddelgado.cat
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The concise answer is "yes". Our zettels end up being full of our "thoughts", often compared or contrasted to the thoughts or ideas of others, and regularly massaged until they say exactly what we mean
@GeoEng51 Thanks!
Curious relationship:
I like the idea of "distilling" thoughts into a Zettel. You can identify part of your thought in a Zettel, but not the complete one.
On the contrary, I don't know if you can find the same behaviour with the inverse workflow, since the Zettel seems to be atomic or indivisible.
David Delgado Vendrell
www.daviddelgado.cat
The idea of an atomic Zettel can be debated endlessly - what does "atomic" really mean? I'm not sure "indivisible" is a synonym, from the perspective that you can always divide a Zettel up into individual words or even letters (to be absurd). My concept of "atomic" is that if you removed anything from the Zettel, it would lose it's coherence. In some cases, that might be a few tens or hundreds of words, or perhaps even 1000+ words (which I've encountered when trying to succinctly tell a family history story). But I do think a Zettel could have more than one thought.
This is a highly personal matter - everyone is going to determine an appropriate size for each zettel in their ZK.
I treat this pragmatically:
Can I "draw a boundary" around something and give it a name of sorts? Then that can be "a thing" in my system.
Where one piece starts and another one ends is purely denoted by the boundaries between them. That's not a very useful encyclopaedic definition, but I find this to be tremendously liberating. It also gels really well with @Will's notion of "malleability" because boundaries can change over time (as sections of notes are moved between notes, for example; or as you extract a new note from existing ones to give it a new address).
This is compatible with (Luhmann's) theory of autopoietic systems -- to some superficial extent. But that's coincidence: my personal journey to this "treat it like clay" approach to note-taking is informed by programming, where naming things (and thus delineating name-able things from others) is a daily task.
That's my idea of "thought" as in "capturing a thought". It has nothing to do with "thought" in the context of cognition, because that's not what goes into my Zettelkasten. Notes do
Author at Zettelkasten.de • https://christiantietze.de/
@daviddelven
There is a linguistic difference (in English) between the above two definitions. The first should really have an indefinite article before it (i.e. "A thought") as it is a countable item (one thought, two thoughts, etc.). The second cannot have an article, nor can it have a plural, as it is a process or activity, not a countable item. In other words, it is about the same as using the word "thinking". Compare it with "rumination" or "contemplation".
Didn't quite understand some comments said earlier but then again I'm new here and need to follow everyone's thoughts more (chuckling). Back to why I was attracted to the exploration of "thought". What is a thought? Where does it come from? Are there different types? Is there ever an original thought? I have so many questions floating around in my thoughts. (chuckling). Are thoughts controllable, if so, when, where, how? Where do thoughts originate? I guess this requires research into how the brain works (hmm, a rabbit hole I'm not interested).
Within the Zettelkasten framework: I consider a thought everything that I can capture with some confidence that I can capture it all.
I consider an argument a thought because if I capture its logical form, its premises and its conclusion, I captured the complete argument.
In practice, it is not that cut and dry. But within the realm of working with knowledge, a functional hypothesis that allows you to move forward is what you need, and not something that adheres to the ivory tower of abstract thinking. (though the latter is fun)
I am a Zettler
Like this, thank you.
Here is a unit of "thought"--assuming it rises to that level--from my own ZK.
The example illustrates the usefulness of the ZK in forum comments. As for anything sustained or substantive, I'll get back to you.
GitHub. Erdős #2. Problems worthy of attack / prove their worth by hitting back. -- Piet Hein. Alter ego: Erel Dogg (not the first). CC BY-SA 4.0.
@ZettelDistraction said:
Just wait until the ISO hears this.
Until we get an ISO standard, I will put each of my thoughts on a separate line with semantic linefeeds.
@Andy Thank you for the link to the article on semantic line feeds. I'm stuck at one point, though. Writing individual clauses on separate lines facilitates word and document processing, but the thoughts refuse to identify with clauses.
GitHub. Erdős #2. Problems worthy of attack / prove their worth by hitting back. -- Piet Hein. Alter ego: Erel Dogg (not the first). CC BY-SA 4.0.
@ZettelDistraction, yes, my whole previous comment should be read as a joke. Due to the unspecified "length" of a thought, using semantic linefeeds could lead to absurd conclusions mentioned earlier by @GeoEng51:
One thing I think is true: If I divide thoughts per line with semantic linefeeds, it wouldn't be wise to define a thought as an argument (premises + conclusion) as @Sascha did above, since that would hinder analysis. A proposition is the "longest" one would want a thought to be.
@ZettelDistraction: Of course, as I just remembered, Obsidian has another name for "lines"—blocks—and one can reference (link to) individual blocks. So one-thought-per-line especially makes sense in Obsidian, although one can use the idea in other software. I'm not a mathematician, but this vaguely reminds me of equation numbers (is that what they're called?) in mathematics texts.
Perhaps, another way to think about what thought is: A unity that you can make sense of. In German, there is a semantic connection between sense and meaning that seems to be tighter than in English. So, what I mean by that:
A thought is a unit that you can understand as a unit. The emphasis is on understanding, as in having rational reasons to consider the sense making of the thought to be finished.
I am a Zettler
I just experimented with blocks in Obsidian (I don't use Obsidian for my note system; I only play with the app occasionally to know what I'm missing) and I see that its block-level referencing is not ideal for one-thought-per-block writing, since only paragraphs and list items and a few other divisions can be blocks but not sub-paragraph lines.
I use Scrivener for my longer writing projects, and I do try to put proposition-sized thoughts in Scrivener's equivalent of blocks, which works well because I have configured it so that when I compile a Scrivener project to Markdown output, the blocks do not form separate paragraphs except where I have indicated paragraph breaks with two line breaks in the text.
Andy - can you expand on this. I use Scrivener on an almost daily basis and would like to know more about what you are describing here. We could take this to a separate thread, if that makes sense.
@GeoEng51 said:
Let me try to respond in a way that is relevant to the discussion, insofar as it is one example of someone doing the work of defining a unit of discursive thought for a practical purpose. (But this particular example is only for a relatively argumentative mode. A narrative mode would require different, and perhaps longer, units of discursive thought.)
A Scrivener project consists of many items that are somewhat misleadingly called "documents". For many users, "document" may be the most understandable term, but I will call them "items" here because the content of the items can be as short as you wish or can have no content at all. These are the items that I said, in my previous comment, are equivalent to Obsidian's blocks. (Technically that is not true, as you know if you're familiar with the data models of both Obsidian and Scrivener; I should have called it a rough analogy instead of a equivalence.)
Scrivener allows you to create templates for new items. Each template can have its own icon and as much custom metadata you wish. I have a standard set of templates that together constitute a semantic schema similar to IBIS. I also use this schema in my note system to some degree (as I mentioned most recently in the discussion: Discourse graph and Zettelkasten), although most of my note system is less schematized, since I try to capture important but subtle thoughts in my note system that may not fit in a predetermined schema, whereas when writing in Scrivener for publication everything that is said should have a purpose in the structure of the project.
Most of the items that I create in a Scrivener project are assigned one of these item types, and I try to make these items proposition-sized, functioning as a minimal unit of discursive thought, although I wouldn't have thought to call it a "minimal unit of discursive thought" before participating in this discussion. (I also have item types for other things such as figures.) This allows me to see the discursive structure of the project at a glance in the binder and outline views. If you use Scrivener's defaults without specifying custom item types, you only see generic document and folder icons in the binder and outline views (and elsewhere), whereas I see a rainbow of differently colored icons indicating the discursive function of each item.
I configure Scrivener's "compile" settings so that it does not output a blank line between these items when compiling, so that they are not separate paragraphs. This is important because the items may not be complete sentences, much less complete paragraphs.
Thanks for the lengthy and helpful reply. I'll read up more on IBIS, but I get what you are saying about Scrivener and using "documents" as coherent thoughts or items. I do something similar, although each of my documents, so far, tends to be longer than a single thought or even a zettel, and trending more to paragraphs or sections of a report I am writing. You have given me some ideas for experimentation. I have often brought material from my ZK into a project I am working in Scrivener, but haven't really thought about Scrivener as a knowledge management tool.
I have used linking in Scrivener - to create links to other "documents" in the same file. When you click on such a link Scrivener opens it up in a second (split) screen, which is helpful. I see, though, that the links can only be to other "documents", and not to phrases within a document. Hence using the method you suggest of treating each document as a short "item" (perhaps a zettel or even a sub-zettel in size) would give you finer control in the hyperlinking process.
I missed this topic in the past, apparently :-)
I try.
My definition of thought (for Zettelkasten) is a snapshot that my mind takes of a single aspect of the physical or metaphysical world, emerged during one of my cognitive activities (could be reflect, image, observe, experience, reason, ideate, study and so on)
I think I'm inline with @daviddelven
As time goes on, however, I am preferring the use of the term "point" instead of "thought".
Thought in my language translates in a problematic way ("pensiero"). "Idea" is even worse. I like point better.
The other advantage of points is that they can easily make the zettelkasten "broader", the point is closer to the "thing" or similar cited above. In my model of zettelkasten, for example, I consider "thought points" and "knowledge points". Very often in practice a point is something in "the middle", so using the term "point" alone solves every friction and makes things simpler when practicing a real Zettelkasten on the road.
I think that the most suitable term remains... Zettel.
Each of us knows what it is and knows how to write it, none of us knows how it is actually defined :-), continuing to take notes without need of formal definitions.