Sets and their comprehension

Enhancing the Quality of Knowing through Integration of East-West metaphors (Part #10)

In the shift from information to knowledge the key is in the organization or ordering of the information. The emphasis in the West is placed on "lists" as most typically seen in menus on websites. These have the advantage of avoiding the challenges of introducing coherence, other than through hierarchical nesting. Much more interesting is the transition to coherent sets of elements of knowledge -- as exemplified by the periodic table of chemical elements. Here there are a variety of relationships along the various dimensions of the table -- there is a notion of complementarity. The set structure provides a scaffolding that protects elements that might otherwise be neglected or marginalized because they are little known or otherwise considered insignificant. Coherent sets might be considered as conserving conceptual diversity.

A list structure challenges through raising the question whether additional elements of knowledge should simply be added -- but there is little sense of "completeness", only of whether the list is "too long" (and therefore requires some form of nesting). The challenge of set structure emphasizes to a greater extent where additional items should be added within that structure -- consistent with patterns of relationship across the set. It is the reinforcement of these patterns that increases the integrative significance of the resultant knowledge complex. It is through these structures that knowledge is "packaged" and subject to "packing". This is increasingly recognized through major investments in unusual forms of information visualization (see http://www.cybergeography.org/atlas/atlas.html)

Science, western style, has tended to be less interested in the emergence of larger knowledge complexes -- other than within specific domains, such as chemistry (the periodic table) or fundamental physics (relationships between fundamental particles). The exception might be the pursuit of a Theory of Everything -- which however treats as derivative everything not directly related to the fundamentals of matter and energy. In particular science has been unable to provide meaningful bridges between the disciplines to ensure the emergence of any inherently interdisciplinary insight. In part this is due to the special challenges to comprehension of integrating what are effectively incommensurables. In particular western scientific methodology has provided little knowledge integration between the hard and soft sciences, or between the more objectively oriented sciences and the more subjectively oriented sciences.

The pursuit of knowledge in eastern and indigenous cultures has tended to emphasize the coherence that encompasses incommensurables between domains -- even if it is a challenge to comprehension and characterized by uncertainties.

Western-style science has tended to sideline the significance of its cultural heritage for the organization of knowledge. In fact western-style science might even see its emergence as a victory over inappropriate forms of coherence characteristic of the pre-scientific period -- notably in the form of Greek and Roman pantheons, or the angelic hierarchies of the monotheistic religions that succeeded them, or the 'correspondences' of the late Renaissance. The kind of "unity" that has now resulted may prove to be narrower and more simplistic than is appropriate for the future.

The issue for the future may well be how coherence is meaningfully carried in a turbulent information society in which everyone suffers from information overload -- and in which much relevant insight is underused. This is already especially problematic for young people in determining what to learn and where to find frameworks of meaning capable of sustaining individual or collective identity.

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Sets and their comprehension