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 aRb. 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 xRy. 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:
... Similarly, a reduction of propositions is performed whenever complex or molecular sentences are shown to be composed of simple or atomic sentences. The constitution or logical construction of concepts has largely succeeded in mathematics through the set-theoretical foundation of mathematical theories. But constitution does not seem as promising in the factual sciences which, far from enjoying the freedom of mathematics, have to account for a world existing on its own, organized in qualitatively different levels and having, to all appearances, no ultimate basement built out of irreducible bricks. In science the disclosure of relations and connections has proved more fruitful than the search for primary, irreducible units. The unity of science lies in its method rather than in a handful of all-purpose concepts.... A definitely undesirable rationale sustaining the cult of simplicity is of a metaphysical nature: namely, the wish to attain the ultimate atoms of experience and/or reality (e.g., the "atomic facts")....
I think that it is worthwhile to trace logical atomism in literature.
Sascha's concept of atomicity is based on this claim (emphasis added):
My claim is that knowledge is organised in discrete building blocks that serve a specific function.
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:
Atomicity refers to the idea that knowledge is made up of discrete building blocks.
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)."
@Andy said: @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.
Those criticisms might be of interest here. Can you recommend literature?
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.
This kind of comparison might be of interest here. What characteristics do they share?
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.
As far as I know, Sascha doesn't claim to do "scientific work". He talks about "knowledge work".
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.
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".
@Andy said: @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.
Those criticisms might be of interest here. Can you recommend literature?
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.
Russell was of course right in claiming that, upon decreasing the number of hypothesized entities, one decreases the possibility of error. He might as well have taken this point to its logical consequence, namely that the risk of error is altogether eliminated upon keeping quiet. But then this is not the goal of science but rather an aim of mystics. Scientists multiply hypotheses and complicate them, even at the risk of error, because they are after the truth—and experience has taught them that truth is usually complex rather than simple. Russell, the philosopher of science, knows this and is eager to exploit every new scientific complication; Russell, the rationalist, dislikes complexity in science even though he himself has contributed to increasing the complexity (the richness) of mathematics. (Mario Bunge (1973), "Bertrand Russell's regulae philosophandi", in The Methodological Unity of Science, Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, p. 9)
The weird metaphysics of negative and general facts is avoided if, contrary to the early Wittgenstein and the Russell of logical atomism, one drops the assumption that propositions and facts stand in a 1–1 correspondence. (Mario Bunge (1979), Ontology I: The Furniture of the World, Dordrecht: Reidel, p. 268)
Even the great Russell, during his logical atomism period, proposed to eliminate what he called 'inferred entities' (i.e. hypothesized objects) in favor of constructions out of certified, in particular perceptible, entities. He proposed the rule "Whenever possible substitute constructions out of known entities for inferences to unknown entities" (Russell, 1914). And he applied this maxim to the analysis of matter, which he dissolved into phenomena.... Fortunately scientists did not follow up this anthropocentric program—except of course during their occasional forays into philosophy. They went on framing and checking increasingly sophisticated hypotheses about hypothesized (but supposedly real) entities such as fields and subatomic particles, extinct organisms and societies, the interior of stars and of brains, and so on. (Mario Bunge (1983), Epistemology & Methodology I: Exploring the World, Dordrecht: Reidel, p. 321)
Epistemological holism is the view that, since everything hangs together, to get to know any particular we must first know the whole universe. Blaise Pascal rightly stigmatized this view as unviable four centuries ago. The dual of epistemological holism is epistemological individualism. This is the thesis that, to get to know the world, it is necessary and sufficient to know the elementary or atomic facts—whence the name 'logical atomism' that Russell and Wittgenstein gave this doctrine. Any complex epistemic item would then be just a conjunction or disjunction of two or more atomic propositions, each describing (or even identical to) an atomic fact. This view may hold for the knowledge of everyday facts recorded in such sentences as 'The cat is on the mat'—a favourite with linguistic philosophers. But it fails for the most interesting scientific statements.... A norm of epistemological individualism is that all problems should be tackled one at a time. But this is not how one actually proceeds in research. Indeed, posing any problem presupposes knowing the solution to logically previous problems. In turn, the solution to any interesting problem raises further problems. In short, problems come in packages or systems. The same holds for issues, or practical problems. (Mario Bunge (2003), Emergence and Convergence: Qualitative Novelty and the Unity of Knowledge, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, pp. 91–92)
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.
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.
This kind of comparison might be of interest here. What characteristics do they share?
You already listed them above, though the most relevant is the logical one, truth preservation, as Russell was above all a logician.
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.
As far as I know, Sascha doesn't claim to do "scientific work". He talks about "knowledge work".
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'm wondering how comparable these ubiquitous elements are to Sascha's knowledge building blocks and other aspects of his concept of "atomicity".
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:
Understanding Atomicity will make you a better thinker. The atomic idea is the destination that you want to arrive at in your thinking journey. The concept of the idea atom gives you a goal post, an orientation for your thinking. Atomicity is a concept that brings you into contact with the material of thinking, since we are talking about the atomicity of ideas. I define thinking as the process; thoughts are frozen processes, and ideas are the result of thinking.
I don't know if my research tools delivered a correct answer, but apparently Sascha's atomicity does have characteristics of epistemological individualism:
The belief that we can break down knowledge into atoms is built a) on the a belief that there is an act of individual understanding that can find such atoms and b) that the isolation of such building blocks shows that you have genuinely understood the idea. (Sascha says: "Figuring out the components of the idea and getting to its essence is what we call “understanding”.")
This process trains the individual to evaluate knowledge in this personal way. (Sascha says: "Atomicity connects directly to thinking skills because it trains you to work with the fundamental building blocks of knowledge.")
Sascha's flavor of the Zettelkasten Method is personal. A Zettelkasten has only one user. It is a personal thinking tool. (Sascha says: "The Zettelkasten Method is a system of principles and best practices to transform your note-taking habits into a constant improvement of your thinking and your personal integrated thinking environment.")
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):
The most influential tradition in (Western) epistemology, best exemplified by René Descartes (1637), has focused almost exclusively on how individual epistemic agents, using their own cognitive faculties, can soundly pursue truth. Descartes contended that the most promising way to do so is by use of one’s own reasoning, as applied to one’s own “clear and distinct” ideas. The central challenge for this approach is to show how one can discern what is true using only this restricted basis. Even early empiricists such as John Locke (1690) also insisted that knowledge be acquired through intellectual self-reliance. As Locke put it, “other men’s opinions floating in one’s brain” do not constitute genuine knowledge.
The separation of own and other peoples ideas is pretty artificial and rather theory-driven. In practice, there is no other difference than the reference that you place for other people's ideas.
The actual processing step (…) is done in the minds of people. Surely, communication, collaboration etc. can and is utilised to facilitate or exploit (not in the negative sense) the processing.
But the actual locus of transformation of information and knowledge into knowledge is done in the mind of us. Yes, we have aids like thinking tools (e.g. paper, computer, abacus). Yes, we have collaborators. Yes, we need to collaborate and distribute the processing to be able to reach certain heights of knowledge. Yes, we benefit from certain contexts.
The fact that many processors are needed to accomplish a task doesn't negate the fact that the processors are doing the processing.
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.
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:
If you don’t understand the basic stuff called “knowledge”, no method that provides the tools to work on that basic stuff will help.
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.
@Andy said:
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.
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. :-)
@Andy said:
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.
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):
A first legitimate rationale of simplicism is the wish to disclose the primary units of discourse, the conceptual atoms in every field of thought—atoms which, of course, are simpler than the bodies of knowledge they constitute. This drive is legitimate because it is coincident with that of analysis, the chief aim of which is clarification. A second rationale, also of a logical nature, is the desire to increase the cohesiveness or systemicity of discourse: the fewer the initial concepts and premises, the more numerous will have to be the links among them in order to get a system; this, too, is a legitimate motive because systemicity is a basic trait of scientific knowledge.
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:
At the greatest depth, we realise that atomicity means that we aim to get to the essence of an idea.
When I read that sentence, questions pop up:
Who is "we"?
What is an "idea"?
What is an "essence" of something?
By what process do we "get" there?
How do we know that our process leads us towards the essence and not away of it?
How do know that we "realise" something?
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.
That's a tough one. I don't like how the post oversimplifies cognitive science. However, I find this sentence interesting:
If you don’t understand the basic stuff called “knowledge”, no method that provides the tools to work on that basic stuff will help.
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.
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?
@Andy said:
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.
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. :-)
My previous paragraphs explained why I think your hypothesis is false!
@Andy said:
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.
Do you have a reference where Sascha or Christian define atomicity for group work?
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.
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 atomicity 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.
"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).
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:
At the greatest depth, we realise that atomicity means that we aim to get to the essence of an idea.
When I read that sentence, questions pop up:
Who is "we"?
What is an "idea"?
What is an "essence" of something?
By what process do we "get" there?
How do we know that our process leads us towards the essence and not away of it?
How do know that we "realise" something?
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.
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. ↩︎
Comments
@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. ↩︎