Introducing the Antinet Zettelkasten
Introducing the Antinet Zettelkasten
My goal is twofold: (1) I hope to motivate those who prefer paper-based thinking systems, and (2) I hope to present an alternative perspective for those who use digital Zettelkasten systems. I hope my perspective will add one or two valuable insights you can add to your Zettelkasten workflow (even a digital one).
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I see in the photo of Scott's own Antinet that all of his card-boxes have lock-and-key mechanisms to protect against card pilfering of the kind that Mario Bunge described! Well done, Scott, well done!
Thanks! Honestly haven't used the lock and key mechanism often. Maybe I'll start to now!
Also this part is fascinating
Scott P. Scheper
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@scottscheper said:
By the way, that quotation indicates one thing that Mario Bunge thinks knowledge is not: namely, knowledge is not what @ctietze has called the collector's fallacy. If you want to know what Bunge thinks knowledge is, I recommend his Epistemology & Methodology I–III, which are volumes 5–7 of Bunge's 8-volume Treatise on Basic Philosophy (in fact, it's 9 books since the third volume of Epistemology & Methodology is two books: parts I and II). See, e.g., Figure 7.3: "A scientific research cycle", on page 252 of Epistemology & Methodology I, Chapter 7, Part 2: "From intuition to method", and subsequent sections.
Another part that stuck out to me was his use of the term dataism. Yuval Noah Harari writes of this in Homo deus but with a different interpretation of the term. His view is that all data wants to be free and dataism will serve as a new technoreligion of the future.
Scott P. Scheper
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@scottscheper said:
Bunge definitely used the term dataism before Harari:
"It would be a waste of time to accumulate more data of the known kinds without first refining the available hypotheses or conceiving radically new ones. And this is no exception in science: much too often stalemates are produced by want of strong hypotheses rather than by scarcity of evidence. And a wrong philosophy of science – Dataism – contributes to such a stagnation." (Mario Bunge, "Hypothesis", Chapter 5 in Scientific Research I: The Search for System, Berlin; New York: Springer-Verlag, 1967, p. 234)
"The emphasis on state descriptions is just a relic from the pretheoretical stage of science, when the aim of research seemed to be the accumulation of observation reports that solved no problems and were accounted for by no theories. This shopkeeper philosophy has become obsolete even in management science, where full-fledged mathematical theories of inventories are built.
"We may call dataism the belief that every piece of scientific knowledge is a set of data. Dataism is the companion of dadaism, the doctrine that theories are to be the simplest (most economical) systematizations of data: if there is no knowledge other than empirical knowledge and this consists of a set of data, then it is foolish to organize data in complex ways. Dataism and dadaism are the hard core of strict empiricism, a philosophy incongruously held by many theoreticians and underlying much research planning. It encourages the blind accumulation of superficial information that leads nowhere because it comes from nowhere and takes place in a vacuum of ideas. This kind of industrious groping in the dark is exemplified by the professor who fed dogs with everything he could find in the grocery, not excluding detergents of various makes, and carefully measured the volume of gastric juice he collected through fistules. Aimless work of this kind can consume as much manpower and equipment as a genuine piece of research sparked off by an interesting problem occurring in a body of ideas and aiming at probing some of them. It can even become an expensive fraud and, what is worse, it can mislead countless gifted men into believing that scientific research consists in observing for the sake of observing rather than in asking, thinking and checking – both empirically and theoretically – in order to discover general patterns....
"Dataism and dadaism are also behind the preference for what is called Big Science, consisting of vast research projects employing large masses of scientific workers and equipment and aiming at gathering huge piles of data. No doubt 'big' (i.e., expensive) science is necessary and even admirable : who can help admire those vast and disciplined masses painstakingly and patiently taking and processing myriads of data hoping that these data will eventually be understood by some theoretician? 'Big' science is necessary as long as it does not overshadow 'little' science, which supplies the former with problems and theories, and into which the data must be fed back if they are eventually to make any sense at all. 'Big' science is small science compared with 'little' science, whence it would be dreadful if 'big' science ended up by swallowing its parent and teacher. To prevent this catastrophe from occurring it is necessary to elaborate a philosophy of science avoiding the two extremes of apriorism and aposteriorism and putting observation in its right place – Ch. 12." (Mario Bunge, "Observation", Chapter 12 in Scientific Research II: The Search for Truth, Berlin; New York: Springer-Verlag, 1967, pp. 188–189)
I expect Bunge is playing off the preexisting term dadaism here.