On the order of things

Two years ago I was working on a semantic web application for digital libraries, and while researching the then-current state of the art I ran across a presentation by Eric Miller containing the following great quotation:

"These ambiguities, redundancies, and deficiencies recall those attributed by Dr. Franz Kuhn to a certain Chinese encyclopedia entitled Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. On those remote pages it is written that animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the Emperor, (b) embalmed ones, (c) those that are trained, (d) suckling pigs, (e) mermaids, (f) fabulous ones, (g) stray dogs, (h) those that are included in this classification, (i) those that tremble as if they were mad, (j) innumerable ones, (k) those drawn with a very fine camel's hair brush, (l) others, (m) those that have just broken a flower vase, (n) those that resemble flies from a distance." -- The Analytical Language of John Wilkins, in La Nación February 1942

That passage caught my attention because I had recently invested a good amount of time working with some colleagues to draft an ontology for education reform. If you've never had to formally chart out a knowledge domain as part of a committee, then let me inform you that it's a fascinating exercise. The exercise itself isn't exactly fascinating, but comparing the myriad classification schemes proposed by the members of your cohort can be enlightening. It often serves to demonstrate the futility of trying to reach consensus on an ontology, within even a small group.

Anyway, I tracked down the source of the quotation to The Analytical Language of John Wilkins by Jorge Luis Borges, and proceeded to add the quotation to the homepage of that semantic web application, as a reminder to my team members of what we were dealing with.

Hey, you should pause here to go read the full essay by Borges. It's short, and it's good for you.

After that I moved on to other projects, and the fantastic "Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge" retreated from my thoughts.

Then, two years later, I stumbled upon the same quotation on Mark Pilgrim's blog, and sure enough pretty soon everyone was blogging it. It would seem that Borges' Chinese encyclopdia was taking over the zeitgeist.

Let me say here that "zeitgeist" is one of those words that annoys the hell out of me. I swear that there were practically zero speakers of English using the word zeitgeist before Google released their usage statistics with the moniker. Now I could swear that everybody uses zeitgeist, particularly when trying to sound intelligent. Well, I'm just one of everybody, so here I am using the word too.

I could've dismissed it as a passing thing, a trend if you will, were it not for the fact that I'm reading Neal Stephenson's new book Quicksilver. One prominent character in the book is John Wilkins, whose Analytic Language it was that Borges compared to the ancient Chinese encyclopedia. Stephenson presents a compelling portrait of Wilkins and the historical context in which he worked, so I've become interested in learning what became of Wilkins' language.

It's best to start with what you know, so I started with Borges' review of Wilkins language. The first question that I wanted to answer was regarding the existence of the Chinese encyclopedia that Borges refers to. I had looked for other references to the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge two years ago when I originally discovered it, but having found none I assumed that there really was no such thing. However, much of my recent exposure to quotations of the Borges essay seem to assume that there really was such a Chinese encyclopedia.

Jeremy C. Ahouse seemed to have pursued the same line of inquiry some time ago

When this list started in 1993 there was some discussion of a taxonomy from a Borges essay. I recently came across the classification again in a friend's signature file offered as an actual Chinese taxonomy.

Similar sentiments were expressed by Laszlo Cseresnyesi:

I found the humor of this classification very elaborate (cf. h or l, for example). First, I assumed that this must have been a Borgesian joke, as we (i.e. my Chinese colleagues and myself) had been unable to find any encyclopedia whose title may have been rendered in English as the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. However, Borges referred to Franz Kuhn (1884-1961), whose work I have been familiar with. Franz Kuhn was a renowned translator and scholar of Chinese literature. Bernard Miall's English version of the early 17th century erotic novel, Jin (= Chin) Ping Mei, i.e. Chin Ping Mei: the Adventurous History of Hsi Men and his Six Wives (New York: Putnam, 1947) was based on Kuhn's (sensitively condensed) German translation of the original (Kin Ping Meh, oder die abenteuerliche Geschichte von Hsi Men und seinen sechs Frauen, Leipzig: Insel Verlag). Since I knew that Franz Kuhn was real, I felt I should assume that the Chinese encyclopedia was also genuine.

However, each concluded that there was in fact probably no such Chinese encyclopedia. Cseresnyesi continued "this was an absolutely wrong assumption, as Borges enjoyed making up pseudo-learned references mixing facts and fiction" and Ahouse wrote "Margaret Winters and Bob O'Hara offered that this taxonomy was one of Borges' wonderful inventions".

With that taken care of, I set out to learn more about what Borges was really saying in his critique of Wilkins' language. It's easy to get distracted from this, as John Stathatos points out:

Most commentators are content to recycle this account as a mildly pedantic academic witticism at the expense of unworldly Confucian intellectuals; few bother to turn to the subsequent pages of the essay, in which Borges concludes that this system is not necessarily any less arbitrary than others, since "there is obviously no classification of the universe that is not arbitrary and conjectural. The reason is very simple: we do not know what the universe is".

The few commentators that did manage to turn the the subsequent pages generally also took pause to point out that Michel Foucault's The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences was the cause for much of the fame enjoyed by Borges' essay.

One would think that I'd already be familiar with this text, as I went to a liberal arts college where I studied (at least to some extent) the history and philosophy of science. Alas I seemed to have missed Foucault, which is a shame because the preface to The Order of Things is quite wonderful:

This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought - our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography - breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. This passage quotes a `certain Chinese encyclopedia' in which it is written that `animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (1) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies'. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that.

But what is it impossible to think, and what kind of impossibility are we faced with here? Each of these strange categories can be assigned a precise meaning and a demonstrable content; some of them do certainly involve fantastic entities - fabulous animals or sirens - but, precisely because it puts them into categories of their own, the Chinese encyclopaedia localizes their powers of contagion; it distinguishes carefully between the very real animals (those that are frenzied or have just broken the water pitcher) and those that reside solely in the realm of imagination. The possibility of dangerous mixtures has been exorcized, heraldry and fable have been relegated to their own exalted peaks: no inconceivable amphibious maidens, no clawed wings, no disgusting, squamous epidermis, none of those polymorphous and demoniacal faces, no creatures breathing fire. The quality of monstrosity here does not affect any real body, nor does it produce modifications of any kind in the bestiary of the imagination; it does not lurk in the depths of any strange power. It would not even be present at all in this classification had it not insinuated itself into the empty space, 'the interstitial blanks separating all these entities from one another. It is not the `fabulous' animals that are impossible, since they are designated as such, but the narrowness of the distance separating them from (and juxtaposing them to) the stray dogs, or the animals that from a long way off look like flies. What transgresses the boundaries of all imagination, of all possible thought, is simply that alphabetical series (a, b, c, d) which links each of those categories to all the others.

"What transgresses the boundaries of all imagination, of all possible thought, is simply that alphabetical series (a, b, c, d) which links each of those categories to all the others." Instead of disecting the Chinese encyclopedia's "ambiguities, redundancies and deficiencies" that Borges would point out, Foucault turns the problem on it's head by questioning our perception of those categories. I found this to be a very refreshing way of looking at the issue. Ambiguious, redundant and deficient taxonomies are a very real problem in the sciences, particularly information science, and it seems to me that most thought on the subject comes from a top-down "fix the taxonomy" perspective. I suspect that much progress could be made by rethinking the problem from Foucault's perspective.

Lest you start to think that I'm thinking too much about some silly taxonomy invented by Borges to make a point, consider this real world example discussed by George Lakoff in Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things:

Borges of course, deals with the fantastic. These not only are not natural human cateogires -- they could not be natural human categories. But part of what makes this passage art, rather than mere fantasy, is that it comes close to the impression a Western reader gets when reading descriptions of nonwestern languages and cultures. The fact is that people around the world categorize things in ways that both boggle the Western mind and stump Western linguists and antropologists.

An excellent example is the classification of things in the world that occurs in traditional Dyirbal, an aboriginal language of Australia. The classification is built into the language, as is common in the world's languages. Whenever a Dyirbal speaker uses a noun in a sentence, the noun must be preceded by a variant of one of four words: bayi, balan, balam, bala. These words classify all objects in the Dyirbal universe, and to speak Dyirbal correctly one must use the right classifier before each noun. Here is a brief version of the Dyirbal classifcation of objects in the universe, as described by R.M.W. Dixon (1982):

• Bayi: men, kangaroos, possums, bats, most snakes, most fishes, some birds, most insects, the moon, storms, rainbows, boomerangs, some spears, etc.
• Balan: women, anything connected with water or fire, bandicoots, dogs, platypus, echidna, some snakes, some fishes, most birds, fireflies, scorpions, crickets, the stars, shields, some spears, some trees, etc.
• Balam: all edible fruit and the plants that bear them, tubers, ferns, honey, cigarettes, wine, cake.
• Bala: parts of the body, meat, bees, wind, yamsticks, some spears, most trees, grass, mud, stones, noises, language, etc.

It is a list that any Borges fan would take delight in.

Having finally established what the crux of the problem is, as well as it's practical relevance, I feel that I'm ready to tackle "where we've been" with this issue before. I.e. I'm ready to see where Wilkins went, and where he was taken, by finally diving into his Essay Toward a Real Character and a Philosophical Language. It turns out that Amazon will sell me a copy for $295. Thankfully the full text is available online:

I was so pleased to find the full text (including illustrations) online that I redesigned my blog in homage to it.

This web site contains the full text and original page images of a remarkable book written by Bishop John Wilkins in the 1600's. It contains a large ontology, a written and spoken language derived from the ontology, and a dictionary that maps terms in the ontology to English. Examples that relate hundreds of other human languages to the ontology are included. While many areas of the ontology are only of historical interest, there are numerous insights into issues of ontology and knowledge representation that should be of interest to the modern reader. The scope and scholarship of the work are impressive.

Before I start with that, however, I think I'll finish Quicksilver.