Plato understood personal knowledge management

Plato has something to say about Personal knowledge management. In Sophist, the Visitor pulls out 5–6 ways to describe a sophist. Each starts with the selection of a category, and splits it further and further until a final Distinction can be made. The resultant list is:

• A hired hunter of young rich men [as people to influence]
• A wholesaler of learning about the soul
• A retailer of learning about the soul
• A seller of his own learning
• An athlete in verbal combat, distinguished by expertise in debating
• A cleanser of the soul’s beliefs that interfere with learning

Plato, Sophist, 231d-e

If I apply a Personal knowledge management lens across this, it shows the futility of trying to categorise a piece of knowledge into a single branch of a taxonomy. Life is more complex than that. The most basic of knowledge management systems—storing files in a folder hierarchy—forces a single place. The Johnny.Decimal system fails in the same way. It wants a single place to store information. I’ve already had to bend that rule a couple of times to fit my own filing needs.

“In fact, my friend, it’s inept to try to separate everything from everything else. It’s the sign of a completely unmusical and unphilosophical [e] person.” Plato, Sophist, 259d

Tools such as Obsidian and Zotero can overlay a simple file structure and provide more options to “store” information. Ultimately I still want a single source of truth¹ and both tools allow me have a single piece of information accessed multiple ways. In Zotero a file can be added to many categories and Obsidian has hierarchies of tags, where multiple tags can be applied. Even then it’s difficult and some kind of standard bears adhering to. Is it:

• retailer\soul and wholesaler\soul, or
• soul\retailer and soul\wholesaler, or
• the combination of options because we have fallen into the same inept trap with a bit more detail.

Rather that the clumsy list approach, I’m inclined to craft a Map of Content for each access route specific to the lens I’m looking through at the time.

When a tool is too restrictive on categorisation, it begins to restrict knowledge and learning.

The solution is to invoke a just-in-time approach and only build what’s necessary when you need it. Iteration and refinement are to be expected. While they take future time, they save time now and may never be necessary in the future.

Footnotes

1. The aim of every philosopher 🤣 ↩