My good friend Geof Huth has challenged me to demonstrate why taxonomization is of value. At first, I was somewhat dumbfounded by his belief that it was, if not useless, not of major importance. Able occasionally to illuminate but not able to do so well enough for one to make a life-long project of, as I have. I have always taken it as a given that an effective taxonomy is of value–of crucial value–in all fields. Linnaeus’s Taxonomy, Mendeleyev’s Periodic Table of Elements, Euclid’s Geometry . . . I termed it “the basis of the conceptual appreciation of art” (in a slightly different arrangement of those words), in the introductory defense of it in my A Preliminary Taxonomy of Poetry. I also mentioned “the clarification of discussion that an effective taxonomy can accomplish.” Later, I may have gone off the lyrico-mystical deep end when I said, “At their best, taxonomies (and analysis in general) reveal ever-smaller mysteries, and ever-vaster interconnections to discover down or up to–while allowing us a vocabulary greater than ‘oooh’ and ‘ahhh’ with which to share our pleasure with others.” Granted, the idea that without taxonomy’s help, our vocabulary would be limited to ooohs and ahhhs is absurdly exaggerated. Still, as I hope to show, only a taxonomy-based vocabulary is of maximal usefulness in the search for significant truths.
I soon admitted that I had not done much more than assert the worth of taxonomy, although it still seems to me that anyone who has done serious work in any kind of verosophy (i.e., field of significant material knowledge) would find plenty of support in his experiences for those assertions. Ergo, I now must present a detailed case for taxonomy. Not easy, for that requires a discussion of knowledge, a main contention of mine being that taxonomies are either necessary or hard to do without in all attempts significantly to understand a discipline. Here I ought to stop, for the possibility that I could convince anyone that my understanding of what knowledge is, and how we acquire and use it is valid is less than point oh one percent. Nevertheless, I’ll try. If I can figure out how to.
Warning: I’m now going to think out loud. I will be hard to follow as I will probably jump around. My logic will at times be very lax, and I’ll use coinages of mine unfamiliar to all but me. Don’t expect too much in the way of articulateness, either.
I’m going to start with the knowleplex. That’s what I call the complex of knowlecules (bits of knowledge) that a person’s brain forms when learning his way around a portion of reality containing interrelated matter–one’s neighborhood, for instance, or marine biology, or the study of the photon. There are many kinds of knowleplexes. The most effective, for verosophers, is the verosoplex. That’s because it is systematically organized. Not perfectly, but always aiming for maximal systemization.
I would claim that one reason many plenty dislike taxonomy (and reductive thinking and everything else having to do with science and related fields) is that they are incapable of forming verosoplexes. Some whom I call “milyoops, tend because of their innate temperaments, mainly to form sloppy clumps of knowlecules some of which interrelate with some of the others in the knowleplex but few of which interrelate to all or even a majority of the others in it. The milyooplexes, as I call these, lack a unifying principle, something that makes a big picture possible. An effective taxonomy is the ultimate such unifying principle.
It’s just like a city: an ideal system of streets will get you with maximal efficiency wherever you want to go; streets designed merely to connect one building to one or two others, will be worthless outside a give neighborhood. Similarly, a city with an effective system of streets will tend to fill up with building at eay to find and get-to locations. A really well-organized city (impossible because Nature must make it so) would have a center from which the whole of the center would be in view.
Another kind of knowleplex is the rigidniplex. It’s formed by people I term rigidniks whose innate temperament compels them to create unsound unifying principles–conceptual skeletons, so to speak–that are too inflexible to form a unifying basis for sufficient knowledge to provide a rational understanding of a field. They over-unify too little data.
Milyoops are satisfied by their milyooplexes because they allow pleasurable short-term connections–the pleasure of vaudeville versus the pleasure of a well-written full-length play. Or pop songs versus classical symph0nies. They can’t experience long-term pleasure or be other than bored by anything aimed to provide that, so they oppose it. They love to learn small facts, but avoid systematic knowledge. Another way of putting it is that a milyoop lacks much of an attention span–a pop song’s immediate variation on its initial theme will give them pleasure, but forget a second movement of a symphony’s providing a (probably more complicated) variation on a (probably more complicated) theme played ten minutes previously. They can’t use a taxonomy, which does, basically, what a fine symphony does, so they reject it.
The whole idea is that a small understanding of some small portion of a knowleplex will give pleasure, but if one also can connect it to some other portion of the knowleplex, one can enjoy the second portion at the same time, and if one can also–do to one or more such connections, intuite something of the way everything in the knowleplex interrelate, one can enjoy a truly superior pleasure. Indeed, such an understanding can suggest the sense of the oneness of all things that religions hype as the ultimate happiness–and which I believe all verosophers experience in their best moments, and have spoken of. Artists, too–although not by means of a verosoplex, but by means of (this is a new idea of mine) an intuiplex–a knowleplex whose unifying principle is protoceptual rather than reducticeptual. Or sensual rather than conceptual.
This is a good moment for me. Due to the taxonomical thinking I always do when working with my theory of psychology. I classify artistic temperaments as different from scientific temperaments on the basis of their brain make-up, which I won’t go into here. And suddenly perceived how I could be nice to artists with this intuiplex, which I genuinely see can be a route to large truths equal to the verosoplex. But also what causes the two cultures C. P. Snow wrote about, and which I fully accept.
The intuiplex much more than the verosoplex aids the pursuit of beauty, which I hold to be as important as the search for truth, but probably hinders the latter–except when used by someone who also is capable of verosoplexes. Similarly, verosoplexes tend to get in the way of the pursuit and appreciation of beauty.
Again, I yield to the temptation of using my present reasoning to support the value of taxonomy. Only because of taxonomy have I been able on the spur of the moment to hypothesize an intuiplex–because it is based on the knowleplex, which is only a taxonomical level one step above it, and the verosoplex, which it is recognizably identical to (to me) except for one thing, its being an arrangement of primarily protoceptual knowlecules (think of the somatic knowledge that some highly unintellectual highly effective athletes have) instead of reducticeptual knowlecules–which, by the way, is taxonomically very similar, and in the same taxon as protoceptual knowlecules, differing from them only in that their ultimate source is the data conveyed to the brain more or less directly from the senses rather than extracted from the senses pre-cerebralling and converted to reducticepts (or conceptual knowledge, like words, numbers or geometrical shapes).
An important point to recognize is that the validity of my theory of psychology is irrelevant so far as the value of its taxonomy is concerned: its taxonomy greatly facilitates my navigation of it, and ability to understand it–and find gaps worth trying to fill I’d never find without it,
I really think I know what I’m talking about, however little it may seem so. I hope someone somewhere in time and space gets something out of this installment of my adventure in Advanced Thought. More, I hope, tomorrow.