A Thought, Part 1

Today it occurred to me that one of the primary purposes of classification is to help us find things. This might seem obvious, but it bears some thought. If you have a library where every book has its place in a logical scheme, it's much easier to find something than if you have a room full of books in no order whatsoever. So classifying things is not only a way of mapping out the structure of reality, but, like any other map, it is also a guide to help you get to a certain article of knowledge.

This brings up some interesting questions. Librarians, like philosophers, don't make it their business to know everything. They focus instead on the big picture, and on attempting to understand the interrelationships among different things and to make out the grand structure of reality. So librarians classify books on the basis of some kind of general understanding of how different topics are related. But the problem is that having this general understanding requires at least some degree of knowledge about the subjects themselves. Think about it. If you know nothing about a given field of knowledge, how can you possibly know how to map out its contents? For that matter, if you know nothing about a given topic, how can you be qualified to say how it relates to other topics?

The upshot of all this is that there seems to be a sort of uncertainty principle at work here. The more you know about a certain field of knowledge, the better you are able to classify its contents. But the more you know about the field, the less you can know about all other fields (since time and mind are finite). Therefore, the more specific a system gets, the less general it can be, and the more general (or universal) the system gets, the less specific it can be. Which brings us back to the old conundrum of having to choose between specialization and generalization. You can't have it both ways.

So how is an ideal (by which I don't mean perfect, but simply the best possible) classification system to be constructed? No single person can know everything, so a single person can't know how all subjects relate to each other. Conclusion: it is impossible for a single person (or two, or any small number) to create an adequate classification of all knowledge. No wonder I was feeling overwhelmed. No wonder I think Mr. Phillips is crazy. Forget about perfect. Adequate isn't even possible... at least not with a small number of people.

But what about a large team of experts? The problem here is that if everyone is an expert (and, for the sake of argument, let's just say that everyone is, since no single person can possibly master all of human knowledge), then no one is qualified to say definitively and authoritatively how all the various fields of knowledge relate to each other. This would be an almost God-like perspective.

The heart of the matter is that the overarching structure, the grand scheme, of reality must in some way forever remain hidden from us. All classification systems are guesses.