Mortimer J. Adler's Syntopicon: a topically arranged collaborative slipbox

chrisaldrich

Robert Hutchins, former dean of Yale Law School (1927–1929), president (1929–1945) and chancellor (1945–1951) of the University of Chicago, closes his preface to his grand project with Mortimer J. Adler by giving pride of place to Adler's Syntopicon. It touches on the unreasonable value of building and maintaining a zettelkasten:

But I would do less than justice to Mr. Adler's achievement if I left the matter there. The Syntopicon is, in addition to all this, and in addition to being a monument to the industry, devotion, and intelligence of Mr. Adler and his staff, a step forward in the thought of the West. It indicates where we are: where the agreements and disagreements lie; where the problems are; where the work has to be done. It thus helps to keep us from wasting our time through misunderstanding and points to the issues that must be attacked. When the history of the intellectual life of this century is written, the Syntopicon will be regarded as one of the landmarks in it.
—Robert M. Hutchins, p xxvi The Great Conversation: The Substance of a Liberal Education. 1952.

Adler's Syntopicon has been briefly discussed in the forum.zettelkasten.de space before. However it isn't just an index compiled into two books which were volumes 2 and 3 of The Great Books of the Western World, it's physically a topically indexed card index or a grand zettelkasten surveying Western culture. Its value to readers and users is immeasurable and it stands as a fascinating example of what a well-constructed card index might allow one to do even when they don't have their own yet. For those who have only seen the Syntopicon in book form, you might better appreciate pictures of it in slipbox form prior to being published as two books covering 2,428 pages:

Two page spread of Life Magazine article with the title "The 102 Great Ideas" featuring a photo of 26 people behind 102 card index boxes with categorized topical labels from "Angel" to "Will".

Mortimer J. Adler holding a pipe in his left hand and mouth posing in front of dozens of boxes of index cards with topic headwords including "law", "love", "life", "sin", "art", "democracy", "citizen", "fate", etc.

Adler spoke of practicing syntopical reading, but anyone who compiles their own card index (in either analog or digital form) will realize the ultimate value in creating their own syntopical writing or what Robert Hutchins calls participating in "The Great Conversation" across twenty-five centuries of documented human communication. Adler's version may not have had the internal structure of Luhmann's zettelkasten, but it definitely served similar sorts of purposes for those who worked on it and published from it.

References

• LIFE. “The 102 Great Ideas: Scholars Complete a Monumental Catalog.” January 26, 1948. https://books.google.com/books?id=p0gEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA92&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=2#v=onepage&q&f=false. Google Books.
• Hutchins, Robert M. The Great Conversation: The Substance of a Liberal Education. Edited by Robert M. Hutchins and Mortimer J. Adler. 1st ed. Vol. 1. 54 vols. Great Books of the Western World. Chicago, IL: Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1952.

ZettelDistraction

@chrisaldrich My late uncle Bob introduced me to Adler and the Great Books when I was a boy. Thank you for reminding me: Mortimer J. Adler & Charles L. van Doren edited a version of the Syntopicon organized as a book of extended quotations from the Great Books, titled "A Great Treasury of Western Thought" (ISBN 0-8352-0833-8). I will quote a revised version of my Amazon Review. The Amazon picture was from 2002 when I had hair, but the revised text below reflects my aerodynamic noggin.

The Great Treasury follows the Syntopicon of the Britannica Great Books of the Western world. The Syntopicon is an index of basic, central terms in the Great Books (the so-called "great ideas"), arranged alphabetically from Angel to World. The Great Treasury places the great ideas under twenty chapters, each beginning with an introductory essay, followed by an outline of topics that includes the text of relevant passages from the Great Books. A subject and proper name index at the end of the book contains the great ideas and topics of the Syntopicon. In contrast, the Syntopicon includes an introductory essay on each of the one-hundred-two great ideas and an outline of topics with citations within the Great Books but does not include the extended excerpts of the Great Treasury.

Andy

By happy coincidence, I just happened to read an amusing anecdote about Mortimer Adler in "The Situation of Philosophy in the United States" in Rudolf Carnap's intellectual autobiography (The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap, 1963, page 42):

I was depressed to see that certain philosophical views which seemed to me long superseded by the development of critical thought and in some cases completely devoid of cognitive content, were either still maintained or at least treated as deserving serious consideration. One of the most striking examples of this cultural lag in contemporary philosophy seemed to me a lecture given by Mortimer Adler as a visitor in the Department Seminar. He declared that he could demonstrate on the basis of purely metaphysical principles the impossibility of of man's descent from "brute", i.e., subhuman forms of animals. I had of course no objection to someone's challenging a widely accepted scientific theory. What I found startling was rather the kind of arguments used. They were claimed to provide with complete certainty an answer to the question of the validity or invalidity of a biological theory, without making this answer dependent upon those observable facts in biology and paleontology, which are regarded by scientists as relevant and decisive for the theory in question.

Assuming that Carnap's encounter with Adler did not occur before the compilation of the Syntopicon, it suggests that having a massive collaborative Zettelkasten does not automatically transform a person into a critical thinker.

Carnap continued:

In some philosophical discussion meetings I had the weird feeling that I was sitting among a group of medieval learned men with long beards and solemn robes. This feeling was perhaps further strengthened when I looked out of the window at the other university buildings with their medieval Gothic style. I would perhaps dream that one of my colleagues raised the famous question of how many angels could dance on the point of a needle. Or I might imagine that the colleagues who were sitting around me were not philosophers but astronomers and that one of them proposed to discuss the astrological problem whether it was more favorable for the character and fate of a person if the planet Mars stood in Taurus or in Virgo at the hour of his birth. I heard myself expressing a humble doubt whether this problem fitted well into the twentieth century. But then I heard the imaginary astronomical colleagues declaring that we must be open-minded and never exclude by personal prejudice any question from the discussion.

ZettelDistraction

@Andy quotes Rudolph Carnap:

One of the most striking examples of this cultural lag in contemporary philosophy seemed to me a lecture given by Mortimer Adler as a visitor in the Department Seminar. He declared that he could demonstrate on the basis of purely metaphysical principles the impossibility of man's descent from "brute", i.e., subhuman forms of animals.

Peculiar indeed! The Great Books, and the Great Treasury of Western Thought which came after and both of which Adler edited, quote Darwin at length:

The great break in the organic chain between man and his nearest allies, which cannot be bridged over by any extinct or living species, has often been advanced as a grave objection to the belief that man is descended from some lower form; but this objection will not appear of much weight to those who, from general reasons, believe in the general principle of evolution.
Darwin, Descent of Man I, 6.

Perhaps Adler was skeptical of Darwin's theory. He certainly knew about it!

Assuming that Carnap's encounter with Adler did not occur before the compilation of the Syntopicon, it suggests that having a massive collaborative Zettelkasten does not automatically transform a person into a critical thinker.

Adler worked in the Aristotelian and Thomist traditions and was considered a lightweight and a crank by many professional philosophers. So, unfortunately, yes. An Adler-sized Zettelkasten offers little or no protection against motivated reasoning.

Andy

Carnap said:

I would perhaps dream that one of my colleagues raised the famous question of how many angels could dance on the point of a needle.

@ZettelDistraction said:

Adler worked in the Aristotelian and Thomist traditions and was considered a lightweight and a crank by many professional philosophers. So, unfortunately, yes. An Adler-sized Zettelkasten offers little or no protection against motivated reasoning.

Suddenly one notices that Chapter One of the Synopticon is "ANGEL":

The human appearance suggests that angels, like men, are persons; that they are most essentially characterized by their intelligence. [...] The illumination which has been and can be derived from the idea of angels as a special kind of being or nature is in no way affected by doubts or denials of their existence. Whether such beings exist or not, the fact that they are conceivable has significance for theory and analysis. [...] It would be misleading to suppose that the idea of angels is primarily a construction of the philosophers—a fiction invented for their analytical purposes; or that it is simply their conception of a supra-mundane reality, concerning the existence and nature of which they dispute. [...] The primary fact about the angelic nature is immateriality. An angel is immaterial both in its substantial being and in its characteristic activity which, says Aquinas, is "an altogether immaterial mode of operation." Being immaterial, they are also incorruptible. [...] Although they are imperishable in being and have immortal life, the angels are not, like God, truly eternal. "That heaven of heavens which Thou createdst in the beginning is some intellectual creature," Augustine writes, but it is in "no ways coeternal unto Thee." As created, the angels have a beginning. Yet, while not eternal, neither are they temporal creatures in continual flux [...] It is for this reason that the angels are spoken of as "aeviternal." The familiar question concerning the number of angels able to stand on a needle's point—if it was ever asked by mediaeval theologians—merely poses the problem of how an incorporeal substance occupies space. [...] Angels are also said to go from one place to another without traversing the intervening space and without the lapse of time. Considering their immateriality, such action is less remarkable for angels to perform than is the action of electrons which, according to modern quantum mechanics, jump from outer to inner orbits of the atom without taking time or passing through orbital space. The immateriality of angels has other consequences which throw comparative light on the conditions of corporeal existence. [...] The theory of angels raises many questions regarding the similarity and difference between them and disembodied souls. But for comparison with men, perhaps the most striking consequences of the theory of angels as bodiless intelligences concern the manner of their knowledge and government. [...] Such a society, governed by knowledge and love, has no need for the application of coercive force, for angels are ordered to one another in such a way that no misunderstandings or disagreements can occur among them. [...] The characteristic skepticism of our age has been directed against the belief in angels generally. It casts doubt by satire or denies by argument the existence of spirits both good and evil. Yet, all arguments considered, it may be wondered whether the existence of angels—or, in philosophical terms, the existence of pure intelligences—is or is not still a genuine issue. Or are there two issues here, one philosophical and the other theological, one to be resolved or left unresolved on the level of argument, the other to be answered dogmatically by the declarations of a religious faith?

The article is followed by ten pages of small-print cross-references to angels in the Great Books.

Carnap again:

I heard myself expressing a humble doubt whether this problem fitted well into the twentieth century. But then I heard the imaginary astronomical colleagues declaring that we must be open-minded and never exclude by personal prejudice any question from the discussion.

The Wikipedia article tells us about the Synopticon:

Before it even came time to print, the budget had topped a million dollars and there was not even “a penny for paper” left.

Andy

I see that in my previous comment I twice misspelled Syntopicon as "Synopticon", a Freudian slip due to fusing the word with panopticon in my mind, perhaps due to the aspiration to omniscience shared by the Syntopicon and panopticon—an aspiration that we will more perfectly achieve the more we emulate the angels.

ZettelDistraction

Is it possible to set aside the business of angels and minds without bodies, and enjoy the rest? The criticism that the Great Books can be reduced to argument reminds me of certain approaches to Zettelkasten. From the Wikipedia article on the Syntopicon.

At the time of its release, The New York Times Book Review declared: “Its defects are on the surface. One is the implication that great books are concerned only with ideas which can be logically analyzed—whereas many masterpieces of literature live in realms partially or wholly outside the realm of logic. Another is the conception that the chief purpose of reading a book is to crack its shell and reach its kernel—the form itself being unimportant decoration.”

My uncle Bob had a similar attitude: he preferred to read the philosophers and avoided imaginative literature.

Andy

@ZettelDistraction said:

Is it possible to set aside the business of angels and minds without bodies, and enjoy the rest?

It's possible for some people, perhaps. As for me, Adler already lost me in Chapter One. Since he wrote all the other chapters, and since I have a backlog of thousands of other things to read, I will pass on a detailed study of the Syntopicon. No thanks!

The criticism that the Great Books can be reduced to argument reminds me of certain approaches to Zettelkasten.

I don't know to which criticism this sentence refers. The criticism is certainly not mine, since I don't even believe in "Great Books" (that is, although I think some books are great, I've never seen a list of Great Books that I agreed with). But Adler's supervisor Robert M. Hutchins, in a passage in the original post above, claimed that the Syntopicon is

a step forward in the thought of the West. It indicates where we are: where the agreements and disagreements lie; where the problems are; where the work has to be done. It thus helps to keep us from wasting our time through misunderstanding and points to the issues that must be attacked.

This seems to imply that angels are an important "problem", an "issue that must be attacked". I'll be frank: I don't agree. I will decide for myself where the problems are and where the work has to be done; I don't need Mortimer Adler's direction.

Andy

If I stop thinking about its content and focus only on the form of the Syntopicon—its structure, design, and typography—I can enjoy and take inspiration from its form. I find its form beautiful and worth studying: it's a beautiful material artifact. But its content and methodology strike me as very problematic.

Nido

Someone who is considering starting a Zettelkasten today would benefit more from a critical study of Adler's book, titled How to Read a Book(Kindle, 326-7), than his Syntopicon, Propaedia. or Six Great Ideas.

How to Read a Book tells you how to take notes. The highest level is syntopical note-taking.

Here are the steps:

1. Skim relevant books "to find the most relevant passages."
2. "Establish a set of neutral propositions for all of the authors by framing a set of questions to which all or most of the authors can be interpreted as giving answers, whether they actually treat the questions explicitly or not."
3. "Define the issues, both major and minor ones, by ranging the opposing answers of authors to various questions on one side of an issue or another."

You should read multiple books syntopically only after you've learned how to read one book analytically. You read analytically by stating a book's propositions and critically evaluating the reasons the author gives to support those propositions.

The Syntopicon was a critical, financial, and intellectual failure. But you can apply aspects of Adler's method to great effect in the construction of a Zettelkasten. If you follow Adler's tenets, and look for the reasons the author gives to support the book's central ideas, you'll be well on the path to creating a well-connected Zettelkasten.

Sascha

@chrisaldrich said:
Adler's version may not have had the internal structure of Luhmann's zettelkasten, but it definitely served similar sorts of purposes for those who worked on it and published from it.

The internal structure is what made Luhmann's Zettelkasten special. It isn't just a minor aspect that makes his Zettelkasten a version of Zettelkastens. The internal structure made his Zettelkasten [Amber].

If the purpose is just to collect for publication, then yes. But Luhmann didn't collect, he integrated ideas. And his goal was something very different from a collection of ideas. He aimed to develop a true super theory, a theory that is so complete that it incorporates itself. (His theory laid even out how the mechanism of self-incorporation of itself was)

Not everything that is a Zettelkasten (German) is a Zettelkasten (English).

Andy

@Sascha said:

@chrisaldrich said:
Adler's version may not have had the internal structure of Luhmann's zettelkasten, but it definitely served similar sorts of purposes for those who worked on it and published from it.

The internal structure is what made Luhmann's Zettelkasten special. It isn't just a minor aspect [...] Luhmann didn't collect, he integrated ideas. And his goal was something very different from a collection of ideas. He aimed to develop a true super theory, a theory that is so complete that it incorporates itself. (His theory laid even out how the mechanism of self-incorporation of itself was)

Not everything that is a Zettelkasten (German) is a Zettelkasten (English).

This is exactly why I talk about a "note system" or "knowledge base system" instead of a Zettelkasten: because these alternative terms emphasize the systematic aspect, how notes are systematized or how a knowledge base is systematized. The word Zettelkasten or slip box does not express the systematic aspect: as @chrisaldrich has claimed elsewhere, it is even a "Zettelkasten" when Eminem throws a bunch of random paper slips into a box.

As I mentioned last month in a comment on "What is the problem situation of the Zettelkasten Method?", there is something like a paradigm shift in the level of systematicity of a note system: "Before the shift, one doesn't think of one's notes or one's knowledge as a system. After the shift, one realizes that systematicity is intrinsic to one's definition of notes and knowledge." Philosopher Nicholas Rescher called this shift "the Hegelian inversion". Luhmann is an example of someone who had a highly systematic conception of knowledge, but today's work on knowledge graphs in computer science and knowledge organization (for which the work of Rudolf Carnap, whom I mentioned above, was an important precursor) provides perhaps even better examples than Luhmann.

ZettelDistraction

@Andy said:
@ZettelDistraction said:

Is it possible to set aside the business of angels and minds without bodies and enjoy the rest?

It's possible for some people, perhaps. As for me, Adler already lost me in Chapter One. Since he wrote all the other chapters and I have a backlog of thousands of other things to read, I will pass on a detailed study of the Syntopicon. No thanks!

I get that, and I appreciate that professional philosophers will likely find Adler's Thomist metaphysics and his "curation" off-putting, but I wasn't suggesting a detailed study of the Syntopicon. I was reminded of Adler and van Doren's Great Treasury of Western Thought, which I find a helpful book of extended excerpts from the Great Books, whatever you might think of Adler's addled methodology. (I couldn't give a rat's asshole about Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, Dominions, Virtues, Powers, Principalities, Archangels, and Angels.) Also, Adler does not begin with an essay on angels in the first chapter of the Treasury, which begins with a brief essay on Man. The chapter titled Religion is the last of twenty, and there is no essay or chapter devoted to "minds without bodies." Perhaps, when the Great Treasury of Western Thought was published, material considerations overwhelmed Adler's better angels.

The criticism that the Great Books can be reduced to argument reminds me of specific approaches to Zettelkasten.

I don't know to which criticism this sentence refers.

To the blockquote from the New York Times Review, which I repeat here:

At the time of its release, The New York Times Book Review declared: "Its defects are on the surface. One is the implication that great books are concerned only with ideas which can be logically analyzed—whereas many masterpieces of literature live in realms partially or wholly outside the realm of logic.

Also, see @Nido's post above for a related view of reading (one formulates a book's propositions--this seems to assume that a book is concerned with ideas that can be logically analyzed) and of the content and organization of a Zettelkasten (Zettels should have the statement of those propositions formulated in your own words; interconnection among Zettels should follow the evidence and argument an author provides for the propositions stated).

I will ask ChatGPT4 to weigh in since I am intellectually outgunned and suffer from acute mental lassitude and inanition. In the interest of transparency, this is my prompt:

The New York Times once criticized Mortimer J. Adler's Great Books of the Western World. This was as follows: "At the time of its release, The New York Times Book Review declared: "Its defects are on the surface. One is the implication that great books are concerned only with ideas which can be logically analyzed—whereas many masterpieces of literature live in realms partially or wholly outside the realm of logic." I would like you to relate this to a certain view of Zettelkasten, namely that the content and organization of a Zettelkasten should concern books that state propositions and that offer evidence and argument for those propositions and that the structure of the Zettelkasten should reflect the statement of propositions formulated in your own words, organized by logical argument and the evidence adduced in support of them.

This is ChatGPT4's reply:

The criticism by The New York Times of Mortimer J. Adler's Great Books of the Western World seems to hinge on the idea that great literature is not purely logical or propositional, but also involves other dimensions such as emotional, symbolic, imaginative, and cultural elements that may not be fully captured in a strict logical analysis.

The view of the Zettelkasten method you describe is very similar to Adler's approach in that it focuses primarily on capturing and organizing ideas that are presented in a logical, propositional format. Zettelkasten is a method of note-taking and knowledge management that is known for its ability to capture complex networks of ideas and their interconnections, and it works best when the content can be boiled down to clear statements or propositions that can be logically linked to one another.

If we strictly adhere to this logical, propositional view of the Zettelkasten method, then we might run into similar criticisms as those made against Adler's approach. Just like great literature, knowledge and understanding are not purely logical or propositional. They also involve other dimensions such as intuition, emotion, personal experience, cultural context, and so on.

There are certain types of knowledge and understanding that might be difficult to capture in a Zettelkasten if we limit ourselves to logical propositions and arguments. For example, the beauty of a poem, the moral complexity of a novel, or the personal significance of a historical event might not be fully captured in a series of logically connected propositions.

However, this does not mean that the Zettelkasten method is not useful or that it should be abandoned. It merely suggests that we should be aware of its limitations and be open to complementing it with other methods or approaches that are better suited to capturing the full richness of human knowledge and understanding. In particular, we might consider ways to incorporate more qualitative, subjective, or experiential elements into our Zettelkasten, or to use it in conjunction with other methods that are more conducive to capturing these elements.

Andy

@ZettelDistraction said:

I get that, and I appreciate that professional philosophers will likely find Adler's Thomist metaphysics and his "curation" off-putting, but I wasn't suggesting a detailed study of the Syntopicon. I was reminded of Adler and van Doren's Great Treasury of Western Thought, which I find a helpful book of extended excerpts from the Great Books, whatever you might think of Adler's addled methodology. (I couldn't give a rat's asshole about angels, dominions, powers, cherubs, and principalities myself.) Also, Adler does not begin with an essay on angels in the first chapter of the Treasury, which begins with a brief essay on Man. The chapter titled Religion is at the last of twenty, and there is no essay or chapter devoted to "minds without bodies." Perhaps by the time of the publication of the Great Treasury of Western Thought, material considerations overwhelmed his better angels.

I just looked at the Great Treasury of Western Thought, which I don't think I had seen before, and I see that it has the good sense to begin with "MAN" instead of "ANGEL"! It looks like Dr. Adler learned something in the intervening decades! I've seen other anthologies of quotations like this, and they can be helpful. The Great Treasury categorizes the quotations in a taxonomy. It has a better overall organization than the Syntopicon and has the advantage of providing direct access to excerpts from the source texts, unlike the Syntopicon, but has the disadvantage of taking the quotations out of context. Today in a well-designed knowledge-base system such a disadvantage could be eliminated by transcluding the text fragment in the taxonomic document while providing a hyperlink to the text fragment in the context of the source text. Digital hypertext is such a better solution to the kinds of knowledge-organization problems that people like Adler were trying to solve in the mid-20th century.

When thinking meta-systematically about knowledge organization systems, it's helpful to keep in mind the kind of rubric provided in several figures in Maria Teresa Biagetti's article "Ontologies as knowledge organization systems" (in Knowledge Organization, 48(2), 2021, 152–176, and in the Encyclopedia of Knowledge Organization), for example:

• Figure 4: Levels of ontological "precision" (Guarino 2006): Catalog, Glossary, Taxonomy, Thesaurus, DB/OO scheme, Axiomatic theory
• Figure 5: An overview of the structures and functions of KOSs (Zeng 2008): Term lists, Metadata-like models, Classification & categorization, Relationship models

The scientific ideal of someone like Carnap is the level of axiomatic theory. But as Figure 5 above nicely shows, the requisite level of organization of a knowledge system corresponds to its function or purpose. The purpose of Adler & Van Doren's Great Treasury is to provide excerpts from existing literature that provide entry points to that literature, for which a taxonomy is a sufficient level of organization.

This is ChatGPT4's reply: "[...] However, this does not mean that the Zettelkasten method is not useful or that it should be abandoned. It merely suggests that we should be aware of its limitations and be open to complementing it with other methods or approaches that are better suited to capturing the full richness of human knowledge and understanding. In particular, we might consider ways to incorporate more qualitative, subjective, or experiential elements into our Zettelkasten, or to use it in conjunction with other methods that are more conducive to capturing these elements."

Here again a matrix of options such as Figure 4 and Figure 5 above can be helpful: one's methodology and knowledge organization system (and its level of precision) should correspond to one's purposes. There are some kinds of knowledge that can be captured in language but not in an argumentation scheme, much less in an axiomatic theory. And there are some kinds of knowledge that are not well captured in language at all, and are better captured in video and/or animated diagrams. There are a range of qualitative research and visual research methods that should be considered.

Andy

@Andy said:

When thinking meta-systematically about knowledge organization systems, it's helpful to keep in mind the kind of rubric provided in several figures in Maria Teresa Biagetti's article "Ontologies as knowledge organization systems" (in Knowledge Organization, 48(2), 2021, 152–176, and in the Encyclopedia of Knowledge Organization), for example:

• Figure 4: Levels of ontological "precision" (Guarino 2006): Catalog, Glossary, Taxonomy, Thesaurus, DB/OO scheme, Axiomatic theory
• Figure 5: An overview of the structures and functions of KOSs (Zeng 2008): Term lists, Metadata-like models, Classification & categorization, Relationship models

The scientific ideal of someone like Carnap is the level of axiomatic theory. But as Figure 5 above nicely shows, the requisite level of organization of a knowledge system corresponds to its function or purpose. The purpose of Adler & Van Doren's Great Treasury is to provide excerpts from existing literature that provide entry points to that literature, for which a taxonomy is a sufficient level of organization.

I was just wondering: Could we extend Figure 4 to higher levels, such as a multi-agent system? That level would be far beyond our humble individual note systems, but considering that real life is already an organic multi-agent system, it may be worth thinking about how that level relates to our note systems. I already think of my note system as an element in a larger multi-agent system—the distributed cognitive system that we're already living.

Andy

@Andy said:

Today in a well-designed knowledge-base system such a disadvantage could be eliminated by transcluding the text fragment in the taxonomic document while providing a hyperlink to the text fragment in the context of the source text. Digital hypertext is such a better solution to the kinds of knowledge-organization problems that people like Adler were trying to solve in the mid-20th century.

This is also one function of qualitative data analysis software (QDAS), which is why people use QDAS to do literature reviews.

ZettelDistraction

@Andy said:

Thank you for your remarks on QDAS--I was unaware of this software. BTW I think we are being unfair to @chrisaldrich. I agree with him that the cross-referenced card system Adler et al. set up for the great books series did serve at least one of the functions that Luhmann's Zettelkasten served--publication. I don't think we're guilty of abstracting away essential differences by saying so.

Andy

@ZettelDistraction said:

I think we are being unfair to @chrisaldrich. I agree with him that the cross-referenced card system Adler et al. set up for the great books series did serve at least one of the functions that Luhmann's Zettelkasten served--publication. I don't think we're guilty of abstracting away essential differences by saying so.

Agreed. I wasn't trying to put down @chrisaldrich's contribution, but to add some additional thought to it, in a meandering conversational way. Adler and colleagues did produce publications (the Syntopicon etc.) using their massive collaborative index card file, but what they were doing was closer to what is done by librarians (who index and categorize literature) than to what is done by those writers (I'll call them philosophers for lack of a better term) who produce articles or monographs with an argument or theory that evaluates the grounds for and against presumed knowledge. (Or, better: Adler at al. were aiming for a middle way between librarian and philosopher—an idea I'll revisit in a moment with reference to Tim Lacy.)

This librarian-versus-philosopher distinction seems to me to correspond roughly to the lower end and the higher end of the scale in Figure 4: Levels of ontological "precision" (Guarino 2006) mentioned above. "Lower" and "higher" here refer only to conceptual systematicity, not to value: both ends of the scale are valuable. The virtue of the low end of the scale is democratic inclusiveness, and the virtue of the high end is epistemic precision and systematicity (or such, at least, is the hope of the philosophers and scientists who aim for the high end). The middle of the scale combines the librarian and the philosopher, because taxonomy is cataloging but requires some philosophical analysis (in contrast to mere enumeration or alphabetization, for example).

I was googling to find critical essays related to the Syntopicon, and I discovered that Tim Lacy has written several works that emphasize the democratic inclusiveness of the Syntopicon project, beginning with his dissertation (Making a democratic culture: the great books idea, Mortimer J. Adler, and twentieth-century America, Loyola University Chicago, 2006). Here are relevant passages from his article "The Lovejovian roots of Adler's philosophy of history: authority, democracy, irony, and paradox in Britannica's Great Books of the Western World" (Journal of the History of Ideas, 71(1), 2010, 113–137):

The key for Adler and his cohort was the creation of a thinking citizenry. As such, they supported several forward-looking, liberal causes: world government; nuclear disarmament; free speech; and racial and economic equality. Ultimately they sought the redistribution of cultural capital for a more democratized culture, not the total reification of an old, inflexible order. To understand Adler and his community's intentions, we need to explore the conception, production, and reception of Britannica's Great Books project. [...]

Particularly important in the Great Books' conception and production was the set's intellectual command center, the Syntopicon. A neologism derived from two Greek words signifying "a collection of topics," the Syntopicon embodied both the effort to democratize culture and contradictions inherent in that effort. The two volumes consisted of 102 carefully chosen "Great Ideas" (topics), each beginning with an "Introduction" and followed by an "Outline of Topics," "References," and "Additional Readings." By identifying the genre of these essays, it becomes clear that a key weakness in Britannica's execution of the great books idea, via the Great Books' Syntopicon volumes, lies in Adler's somewhat paradoxical philosophy of history. His philosophy at once celebrated Western tradition and shortchanged the nature of history and the history profession. Another weakness, by extension, existed in the tension of constructing the set from either inductive (a posteriori) or deductive (a priori) criteria. Would the Great Books and the ideas the set celebrated, as consistently discussed topics in Western history (i.e. the Great Conversation), arise inductively from a circle of very good and great books themselves? Or would the set and the Syntopicon's discursive nodes deductively result from the particular ideas of a relatively small community of discourse (i.e. Adler and his colleagues) about what constitutes excellence and the liberal arts? Could a balance be achieved? Could notions of a democratized culture and cultural greatness coexist?

The democratic impulse of Adler and colleagues, however much it may have been compromised, is very similar to the mission of public librarians. Here's how François Matarasso expressed that mission in "The meaning of leadership in a cultural democracy: rethinking public library values" (LOGOS: The Journal of the World Book Community, 11(1), 2000, 38–44):

The public library is the most optimistic cultural institution to have been forged in the Victorian era. On the face of it, it is an extraordinary idea: a building in which the best, and much of the rest, that has been written over the centuries is made freely available to anyone who wants it—freely not just in the sense of not having to pay for it but, just as important, through the freedom of personal exploration offered by open shelves. Unlike its great twin, the town museum, the primary purpose of the public library was not to express a detailed narrative of human progress and social order through cultural value. There are simply too many books and too many conflicting voices in libraries to permit such a didactic mission. As the American librarian Vartan Gregorian has put it: "... a library is the only tolerant institution in the world's history. Because that's where you have the mistakes, the wrongs and the rights, the accomplishments and the failures of human endeavour" (Quoted by Bernard Levin LOGOS 2/4).

This vision of human beings is very grown up. The public library does not want to tell people what to think, but to trust them to find their own direction through the accumulated information, experience and wisdom it can make available. It is optimistic, as were the Victorians themselves, in that it assumes that we all share a desire for knowledge, an impulse to self-improvement; it is tolerant in that it (mostly) resists the temptation to tell us how to fulfil it.

I've been motivated to write all this because I can feel the librarian-versus-philosopher tension in my own thinking: there's a part of me that wants to embrace ALL THE BOOKS (like the democratic impulse in Adler), and there's a part of me that wants to formulate the most precise and systematic philosophy that is possible for me (like the scientistic impulse in Carnap).

ZettelDistraction

@Andy, I am impressed with your research on this and @chrisaldrich's research on the history of Zettelkasten. I should point out that there is a level below the lowest level in the scale of ontological precision, namely, my random effluvium, indicated in the revised scale below.

Sascha

@ZettelDistraction said:
I think we are being unfair to @chrisaldrich. I agree with him that the cross-referenced card system Adler et al. set up for the great books series did serve at least one of the functions that Luhmann's Zettelkasten served--publication. I don't think we're guilty of abstracting away essential differences by saying so.

@Andy said:
Agreed. I wasn't trying to put down @chrisaldrich's contribution, but to add some additional thought to it, in a meandering conversational way.

I second that. In my mental map of the new note-taker land of the internet, @chrisaldrich is The Archivist. The place to seek if the adventurer needs long forgotten knowledge.

If somebody likes to use RPG-Maker to create a game inspired by the landscape of the new note-taking, I offer me as a free consultant.