The benefits of disorder
The benefits of disorder
In Chapter 6 of Everything is Miscellaneous, David Weinberger argues that messiness is virtuous. Not only is order morally inferior to messiness, it conflicts with the way humans naturally think and make sense of the world. Aristotle’s clear-cut rationality is antithetical to the natural disorder of the world.
It isn’t that we don’t naturally categorize things and ideas. We do and we need categories and systems of order. Weinberger’s point is that, contrary to Aristotle, we naturally think about categories as prototypes (pg. 87). Prototypes are “basic level concepts” about a category of things that share common characteristics—like members of a family who resemble to one another.
Weinberger cites the research of Eleanor Rosch to argue that we form prototypes from the example up. The features that things have in common define the prototype. We know something is a member of a category if it has enough of the common features to satisfy the criteria for that prototype. What’s interesting is that not all things are equally good examples. Some examples can have fewer of the prototypical features. Nonetheless, we still recognize the inferior examples as members of the same category. “We can know what something means even if its can’t be clearly defined and even if it’s boundaries can’t be sharply drawn (pg. 185).”
If it looks like a dog, smells like a dog, feels like a dog, and barks like a dog, it probably is a dog. In real life, that’s good enough for most of us.
This is the opposite of what Aristotle said. He believed in a top-down, static, pre-existing order of “pure essences” that define all things. In Aristotle’s system, something belongs to a category if it satisfies the definition and all examples must be equally good examples (pg. 183).
Following the trajectory of Aristotle’s philosophy leads to problems pretty quickly. How do we categorize exceptions or those things that sort of fit a category? There’s so many things like that! His system isn’t practical.
In contrast, prototype theory is very practical. Roch’s research suggests that by knowing something has the features of a prototype, we know more about the object. Prototypes enable us to predict properties about members of a particular category. In Weinberger’s view, the predictability factor makes prototypes biologically and evolutionarily efficient for us (pg. 186).
The blurry edges of prototypes mirror the social networks we inhabit at work and in our personal lives. It also mirrors wisdom. A sophisticated understanding includes ambiguity and complexity. Insisting on simplicity, uniformity and explicit categorization leads to the opaque white space of the modern organizational chart that hide the actual goings-on of daily life. As Weinberger says, knowing is to swim in the complex (pg. 198).
Weinberger is wise to point out the differences between prototypes and folksonommies. Folksonommic categories happen even when they include fish and bicycles. They have the properties of prototypes without there having been a prototype (pg. 194). What are we to make of these? Arbitrary associations aren’t very useful even though they might be creative.
It’s a relief to know that messiness has virtue. I just wish the 3rd order of messiness applied to the physical world. If it did, there would be no good reason to straighten up the riot of clothes in my bedroom, chaos of shoes in my closet or the mail spilling out of the in-box. I would simply apply metadata to every shoe and t-shirt and leave them be.
Sara