Luhmann writes in his Communications with Zettelkastens:
Knowledge theory has given up the assumption of “privileged concepts” that function as axiomatic foundations to control the logical value of other concepts or propositions. Similarly, you must give up the assumption that there are privileged places, notes of special and knowledge-ensuring quality.
Luhmann cites Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature as an example of philosophers abandoning "priviliged concepts". What does this even mean?
Rorty on "Priviliged Concepts"
If we peruse Rorty's book, we find he is attacking Plato's analysis of knowledge as "true, justified belief".
What does Plato mean by this? Well, suppose I have a coin which has one side say "yes" and the other side say "no". I ask a question, flip this coin, and it will always answer truthfully.
Do I gain knowledge by using my magic coin? Plato says no, because the process is entirely unjustifiable. Rorty attacks Plato's idea of justification as ambiguous and vague (and Rorty does make a few good points).
Why does it matter? Well, Neoplatonists believed we could figure out some set of axioms, and then deduce everything in the world. If only we could determine those axioms! But these axioms would have some privilged position, from which all truth flowed. This is, more or less, what Aristotle argued in his Metaphysics book Gamma, Posterior Analytics on the problem of regression, etc.
Rorty takes a nuanced position, which I'm not sure I fully appreciate. I think Rorty argues that we develop some ersatz "first principles" which are tentative (in the sense that we may revise them, under appropriate circumstances). But they are not divine, they are not immutable, they are not universal, they are not innate knowledge. Instead, these "principles" are built out of experience and learning. As we educate ourselves, they become reinforcing or else we amend them.
Analogy with "Position"
Some people have interpreted Luhmann as saying that organizing your Zettels into clusters is bad, and you should just sequentially number them based on position "at the time of incorporation". This fails to appreciate Luhmann's analogy with "privilged concepts" in the analysis of knowledge.
Scott Scheper suggests using a "skeleton" zettelkasten to get started, with some pre-determined slips based off of Wikipedia's outline of knowledge (or some other analogous source). It's curious, because — as Jillian M. Hess observes in her book How Romantics and Victorians Organized Knowledge, page 24 — Melville Dewey began his catalogue system as a remedy to the commonplace method's ambiguity. In other words, Scheper reinvents Dewey's method. This is precisely what Luhmann warns against in his (already cited) essay:
The result of working with this technique for a long time is a kind of second memory, an alter ego with which you can always communicate. It has, similar to our own memory, no pre-planned comprehensive order, no hierarchy, and surely no linear structure like a book. And by that very fact, it is alive independently of its author. The entire note collection can only be described as a mess, but at least it is a mess with a non-arbitrary internal structure.
[Emphasis mine]
Christian Tietze argues the opposite extreme, namely that any use of categories is bad. Instead we should use tags.
When I read 17th and 18th century European philosophy, everyone disagrees with each other because they use the same technical terms but attribute different definitions to them. I mention this because I feel in a similar situation when discussing "tags" versus "categories", and this makes me hesitate to criticize Christian too much — it feels quite likely we are using different terminology for the same concepts.
I think the crucial difference between "tags" and "categories" is that one item may have zero or more tags, but at most one category. In a filing cabinet, I file a piece of paper in exactly one folder, and the analogy would be with one item in a category.
Here I confess I never found tags useful on blogs, and it is even less useful on paper Zettelkasten. I suspect strongly that "register slips" and "the index" are the analogous quantities to "tags", and everyone agrees these are "killer features" to paper Zettelkasten.
