Last night I woke up after four hours of sleep — which was odd because I had been on a sleepless red-eye flight the night before — and had an idea for the talk I gave at Reboot yesterday. The idea connected three points.

1. I had been planning on beginning by talking briefly about Aristotle’s discovery of the shape of knowledge: To know this robin is to see its place in a hierarchy of similarities (it’s like other birds) and differences (it’s different from other birds), an incredibly efficient way to organize complex systems.

2. I had been planning on ending by talking about knowledge as a property of conversations.

3. Last year, when writing about why blogs are not (generally) echo chambers, I had talked about conversation as the iterating of differences on a shared ground.

So, in the middle of last night it occurred to me that conversations, as the iteration of differences on the basis of similarity, are formally like Aristotle’s description of knowledge as the placing of the known in a system of differences and similarities.

This makes for a neat line of patter: Knowledge going from static, pre-existing content the same for everyone to an emergent social process embedded in unique-yet-shared cultural and personal contexts.

My hunch is that there is something true about this, but that there is also a good deal of hollowness. Everything in the universe can be described in terms of similarity and difference, so showing that A and B both can be characterized that way is a bit like saying that crocodiles and hair balls are formally the same because they can both be used as the subject of sentences. But I’m too tired to actually think about this. [Technorati tags: Aristotle conversation philosophy]

Categories: Uncategorized dw