I’ve been using a quote from Umberto Eco about there being many ways to carve a cow, but you won’t find many cuts that have the snout and tail attached. This is a direct reference to Plato saying that a wise person knows how to carve nature at its joints. But I’m keynoting the combined KMWorld and Taxonomy Bootcamp conferences this morning and realized that I’m not very happy with what I’ve been saying. Eco is right that not every way of carving the cow works, but there are so many ways of carving it that the old structures of knowledge and authority—once required because of the limitations on how we preserved, communicated and presented knowledge—lose their right to be the sole hands guiding the knife. Nature is just about all joints. How we carve depends on our interests, intentions and culture.

It doesn’t depend entirely on us – Eco talks about nature having a “grain,” which I don’t find a very helpful metaphor – but the fact that there are ways we can go wrong does not mean that there’s only one way we can go right.[Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous umberto_eco plato taxonomy kmworld]

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