Mortimer Adler was the person behind the Great Books, the Encyclopedia Britannica’s Propaedia, and other attempts to synthesize all knowledge. In 1986, he wrote A Guidebook to Learning about how to organize knowledge. After surveying a couple of thousand years of attempts to organize knowledge, he ends Section Three with these words:

If any light can be thrown on the problem of how to organize knowledge in the twentieth century—how to order and relate its parts of branches—it must come from philosophy; and it must do so in a manner that accords to some extent with the cultural pluralism and intellectual heterodoxy of the present age. (p. 104)

The easy slam is right, but too easy: We don’t need old white men to tell us how knowledge is organized. We can find whatever we need by searching and folksonomies. Yeah yeah, it’s true. But there still is value in having thoughtful people point out the inner relationships of knowledge. Some of the most important questions are exactly about this — is religion really a branch of psychology? is science really a branch of faith? is psychology a branch of chemistry? — and it’s important to have learned people in the discussion.

But why think of this as a question about how knowledge is organized? Adler thinks of the organization of knowledge as a map, but does that metaphor hold any more? Why think knowledge has to fit together? Why think it’s a thing or a landscape? Why think it has to have an overview?

Now that we we don’t have to organize the physical containers of knowledge, putting books on bookshelves, the term “organization” doesn’t really apply. Findability counts. So do arguments about how to understand our world — e.g., is thought really just neuroscience? But neither of these require the organization of knowledge.

And if times we do need a map of knowledge, either to help us understand our world or to help us find information, we should assume that it’s a map without a geography to which it refers. [Technorati tags: EverythingIsMiscellaneous MortimerAdler taxonomy]

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