Throughout history, there have been many attempts to collect and organize knowledge in a comprehensive manner. Pliny the Elder's Natural History is considered the first encyclopedia, published in the 1st century AD. In the 1200s, Ramon Llull developed a philosophical system for discourse with Muslim debaters. Later, in the 1600s, Petrus Ramus created Ramism, a method of organizing knowledge based on logic and dialectics. During the French Enlightenment, the Encyclopedist movement sought to compile and disseminate knowledge to the public. Over 100 years later, the futurist H.G. Wells advocated for a World Encyclopaedia:
[W]hat I am saying ... is this, that without a World Encyclopaedia to hold men's minds together in something like a common interpretation of reality, there is no hope whatever of anything but an accidental and transitory alleviation of any of our world troubles.
Lecture to Royal Institution of Great Britain, Weekly Evening Meeting, Friday, 20 November 1936.
He made an attempt at such a compilation in his The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind. He not only worked as an invidiual, he also participated in institutional attempts, such as the World Congress of Universal Documentation, have also been made towards unifying knowledge.
Late twentieth cenutry witnessed many such attempts, too many to number here. I'll just mention James Grier Miller, who proposed a living systems theory that would integrate all knowledge, from physical to social sciences, on his Living Systems website. And 1996 Brian R Gaines's essay on how the World Wide Web fulfills that dream - Convergence to the Information Highway .
These predecessors demonstrate a long-standing desire to collect, organize, and share knowledge for the betterment of society. The Lully project builds on this legacy, offering an innovative platform for collaborative discourse that will continue to advance our understanding of the world.
The liberal tradition is rooted in the paradigm of a free market of ideas, where the best ideas are forged in a dialectic, open debate by a pluralistic set of participants. Free speech proponents such as Hobbes, Rousseau, and Rawls, Mill argued that their social propositions can be viewed as attempts to imagine ‘what would be rational to think’ in a hypothetical situation upon deliberation. They believed that if everyone were in that situation, all would choose their solution.
There are two parts of this system - extraction of opinions and deliberation. Latent knowledge of the Will of the People is supposed to be the final result of this process. Under the Western Liberal Democracy extraction is through representatives in the parliament, and deliberation through debates on legislation and public consulation.
In the 19th century, stock exchanges were characterized by slow transactions, limited information flow, and indirect communication between traders. This changed with the advent of modern high-frequency trading, which is faster, more direct, and enables agents to respond more accurately. Similarly, Lully can be seen as an advancement in the marketplace of ideas compared to traditional debates. It provides a more direct and efficient means of exchanging ideas, enabling a wider range of participants to engage in debates, and offering a platform for discussion that is not limited by geographic location. This is similar to the way modern high-frequency trading has revolutionized the stock market by making transactions faster, more direct, and more accurate.
Habermas’ ‘ideal speech situation’ is another example from the liberal tradition, with the following rules and assumptions:
1 Every subject with the competence to speak and act is allowed to take part in a discourse.
2a Everyone is allowed to question any assertion whatever.
2b Everyone is allowed to introduce any assertion whatever into the discourse.
2c Everyone is allowed to express their attitudes, desires and needs without any hesitation.
3 No speaker may be prevented, by internal or external coercion, from exercising his rights as laid down in (1) and (2)
from Habermas, Jurgen. "Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of Philosophical Justification." Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action. Trans. Christian Lenhart and Shierry Weber Nicholson. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990, pp. 43-115.
PROS
CONS
The 'ideal speech situation' sets out the conditions for a fair and productive dialogue, promoting equality and free expression.
Scott Alexander’s Varieties of argumentative experience have this key passage:
High-level generators of disagreement are what remains when everyone understands exactly what’s being argued, and agrees on what all the evidence says, but have vague and hard-to-define reasons for disagreeing anyway. In retrospect, these are probably why the disagreement arose in the first place, with a lot of the more specific points being downstream of them and kind of made-up justifications. These are almost impossible to resolve even in principle.
Bryan Caplan defines Ideological Turing Test as being able to explain someone's - possibly opposing, position.
If someone can correctly explain a position but continue to disagree with it, that position is less likely to be correct. And if ability to correctly explain a position leads almost automatically to agreement with it, that position is more likely to be correct.
In contemporary times, various practical efforts have been made in the computational tradition.
The Global Ethics initiative, launched in 1993, aimed to foster the development of a shared ethical framework for global society. Its focus was on promoting universal principles such as respect for human dignity, freedom, justice, and peace. The initiative was grounded in the liberal tradition, which emphasizes the importance of individual rights and freedoms.
Similarly, the World Values Survey, which has been conducted since 1981, aims to understand how people's values and beliefs change over time and across cultures. It is also grounded in the liberal tradition, as it seeks to measure the extent to which people hold values such as individualism, tolerance, and support for democracy.
TED conferences are focused on sharing ideas through short and engaging talks, while Edge-org gathers experts from various fields to discuss topics. iDebate provides a platform for debates and discussions on a range of topics, with a focus on education and social issues, while iSideWith Polls allows people to express their opinions and preferences on political issues through polls and surveys. iDebate is less politically oriented and more focused on education and social issues, whereas iSideWith Polls is more politically focused, allowing people to express their opinions on a range of political issues.
The liberal tradition emphasizes the importance of a free market of ideas and seeks to establish an environment that fosters open debate, pluralism, and the free exchange of ideas. Habermas’ ‘ideal speech situation’ and Mill’s marketplace of ideas are two important examples of the liberal tradition, and various contemporary efforts are being made to realize them more fully.
The two traditions above tried to help people understand each other better through shared knowledge base or debate and sociocultural changes. The linguistic tradition tries the same but through a construction of a novel language.
Constructed languages as a category appears first in Hildegard of Bingen's Lingua ignota in 12th century. But it was more of a secret language, a notation not interpersonal communication device.
This Venn diagram presents different varieties of languages World language is any language that is lingua franca so that many people learn it as a second language.
Then we have the most important category here, that is the philosophical languages
In 1668 John Wilkins, an English scholar, created one of the first proofs of concept for the idea, but it is a couple of decades later that the most well known attempt was made. Leibniz 's Characteristica universalis was not a success.
The constructed languages Volapük, Esperanto, Ido, Latino sine flexione, Interlingua, and AUI emerged during the period between the 1870s and the 1950s. These languages were created in a time when logical positivism was popular, which certainly influenced their development.
Volapük, invented in 1880, was one of the first constructed languages. Its creator, Johann Schleyer, intended it to be a universal language for international communication. However, it had many grammatical complexities that made it difficult to learn. Esperanto, on the other hand, was created in 1887 by Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof. It was designed to be easy to learn and used by people from all over the world. It quickly gained popularity and has remained the most successful constructed language to this day. Ido was developed in 1907 as a reform of Esperanto, with the goal of making it even simpler and more regular. Latino sine flexione was developed by Giuseppe Peano in 1903 as a simplified version of Latin. It was intended to be easier to learn than Latin and to be used as an international auxiliary language. Interlingua was developed in 1951 by the International Auxiliary Language Association. It was designed to be easily understood by speakers of Romance languages and to be a bridge between them. AUI, created in the 1950s by Dr. W. John Weilgart, was a more mathematical language that attempted to create a one-to-one relationship between symbols and meaning.
Overall, these constructed languages were attempts to create a universal language that could be used for international communication. While they were not successful in achieving this goal, they did pave the way for future developments in the field of linguistics and continue to be studied by scholars today.
All of the above languages were textual, using mostly Latin alphabet. A different type of languages are those changing that. If a language tries to have one symbol for each concept, it belongs to Ideogram based universal languages. That strategy is called Pasigraphy. Blissymbols , made in 1949 was one of the first modern attempts at this. Of the successors a notable one is pictographic IConji , made in 2010.
World Wide Web, itself built on some new languages (HTML and Javascript most notably), and the possible-language-space was explored by multiple people, connecting to one another over the Wired. 2004 saw the unspeakable Ithkuil But on WWW everyone speaks English, so the focus moved more to making understanding of ideas in English scale better. That's how we get to the linguistic tradition.
Computational tradition is also Lully, Leibniz as decribed above. Below I'll described those that happened since the 50s, on computers.
The concepts of symbolic convergence theory, semantic network, and formal concept analysis all deal with the organization and classification of information. symbolic convergence theory describes how shared symbols and meanings can create a sense of community among people.
Semantic network are graphical representations of concepts and their interrelationships, often used in natural language processing and artificial intelligence.
Formal concept analysis is a mathematical technique for analyzing and classifying concepts based on their properties and relationships.
Another related theory is Conceptual dependency theory, which proposes a model of knowledge representation based on the relationship between actions and their components.
In the context of logic programming languages, these concepts provide a foundation for the development of systems that can reason about and manipulate complex knowledge structures. These concepts are closely related to Ontology language, which are used for representing and organizing knowledge in a formal and structured way.
Planner , created in 1969 for forward and backward chaining of statements to prove some goal from the database. Prolog followed in the 70s, with a more general approach. Here are listed some of the variants
These platforms attempt to create an offline encyclopedia through ontology languages. The Protégé, created in 1987, is an open-source ontology editor and framework for building intelligent systems. It has been used for a variety of projects, including biomedical ontologies and the Semantic Web. The Web Ontology Language (OWL) is a semantic markup language for publishing and sharing ontologies on the web. OWL was standardized by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and is used in a variety of applications, including biomedical informatics, government data, and cultural heritage.
The Mizar System , developed in 1973, is a formal language for expressing mathematical definitions, theorems, and proofs. It has been used to create a large body of formalized mathematical knowledge, including a complete proof of the Four Color Theorem. Isabelle (Proof Assistant) is a generic proof assistant that can be used for formal verification of mathematical proofs, software, and hardware systems. It has been used for a variety of applications, including the formal verification of security protocols and the formalization of mathematical proofs.
Doodle Owl is an open-source framework for building applications that use the Web Ontology Language (OWL) for knowledge representation and reasoning. It provides a simple and intuitive API for working with OWL ontologies and reasoning engines, and supports a wide range of OWL features, including class and property hierarchies, disjointness, equivalence, and constraints. It is written in Java, last commits from 2019/2020.
IBM's Project Debater is a platform for debating with humans that uses natural language processing, machine learning, and knowledge representation technologies. It has been used to debate a variety of topics, including whether to subsidize preschool education and whether to increase government investment in space exploration. Cyc is a project aimed at capturing common sense knowledge using ontologies. It is an AI system that integrates formal logic and natural language processing to represent and reason about a broad range of knowledge, including knowledge about the physical world, social norms, and everyday human experiences.
In the 1960s, the hypertext concept emerged, leading to the development of projects like ENQUIRE, a forerunner to the World Wide Web for sharing scientific data. Project Xanadu aimed to create a universal, distributed hypertext system. The Semantic Web is a more recent effort to add structured data to the web to make it more machine-readable and intelligent.
Belief Revision systems represent the next step in the development of knowledge systems, as they focus on the dynamic nature of knowledge more than ontology-based systems. Some notable examples of belief revision systems include SATEN, an object-oriented web-based revision and extraction engine developed by Williams and Sims in 2000, BReLLS system by Paolo Liberatore and Marco Schaerf in 2000, and Immortal by Timothy S C Chou and Marianne Winslett in 1991. The ADS-SAT solver solver-based belief revision system, proposed by Benferhat, Kaci, Le Berre, and Williams in 2004, weakens conflicting information for iterated revision and knowledge integration. Cyc, the common sense knowledge system mentioned earlier, is also an example of a belief revision system.
The Deepro App is a unique mobile app quiz and self-reflection tool developed by French philosopher Vincent Cespedes in 2017. Unlike most knowledge-based systems, Deepro is not an open platform where users can create their own content. Instead, it relies on pre-defined knowledge and questions that prompt users to reflect on their personal values, beliefs, and experiences. The app is closed source, meaning that the code is not publicly available for review or modification.
Other projects have focused on personal data organization systems, such as reorg.el, which is a system for organizing and navigating through personal files in Emacs.
Automatic ontology generation is another area of interest, and in 2020, a bachelor thesis paper was developed by Jose Ariel Romero Costa. The project proposes a method for generating ontologies automatically from text data.
CaLiGraph is a large semantic knowledge graph from Wikipedia categories and listings that uses the OWL ontology language. It is a semantic system, not an argumentational one, and is written in Python and Jupyter notebook.
The rise of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 saw the emergence of the common-pages project, which aimed to collate information related to the pandemic from various sources. Are.na is another project that allows users to collect and organize information and ideas from various sources.
Flancia is a digital garden; is a collection of notes, essays, and resources on various topics including philosophy, psychology, and meditation. The site is built on a custom CMS and encourages the exploration and interconnectedness of ideas through its web of hyperlinked pages. It also features a unique tagging system for organizing and navigating content. There ideas can grow and evolve over time, and Flancia has to potential to become a valuable resource for those seeking to deepen their understanding of various topics.
Kelpie is a tool that helps explain how an artificial intelligence model makes predictions about relationships in a database (called a Knowledge Graph). When Kelpie is used to explain a prediction, it shows which facts in the database the model used to make the prediction. For example, if the model is predicting a relationship between two things, Kelpie will show which previous relationships the model used to make its prediction. This helps people understand how the model works and why it made a particular prediction.
Gellish, natural language independent formal language for engineering systems specifications. Gellish Gellish.net
Are.na Describes itself as:
Are.na is a platform for connecting ideas and building knowledge. Are.na is: 1 online software for saving and organizing the content that is important to you 2 a toolkit for assembling new worlds from the scraps of the old
Finally, reasonablepy is a project that adds F-logic to Python. Although the project is still unstable, it is an interesting development in the field of knowledge systems and logic programming.
The act of mapping can be seen as a way of making things explicit, whether it's ideas, principles or even one's life path. Intellectual history is a similar idea, which explores the evolution of ideas, their expression, preservation, and change over time. This area of study was founded by Arthur Oncken Lovejoy and continued by scholars such as Isaiah Berlin and Michel Foucault.
Having explicit principles in life is a topic that has been discussed extensively, with many arguing that it is essential for personal growth and development. The act of mapping out one's principles, values and beliefs can help make them more explicit, allowing for greater clarity and a deeper understanding of oneself.
Mapping is not limited to personal principles and ideas, but can also be applied to various other fields. For instance, the use of maps in geography and cartography has helped us understand and navigate our physical world more effectively. In computer science, mapping is used to represent data and relationships between them, making them more explicit and easier to analyze.
In conclusion, the act of mapping is about making things explicit, whether it's personal principles, ideas, or data. This helps to bring clarity and understanding, allowing for more effective navigation and analysis. The study of intellectual history has shown that the mapping of ideas has been essential in preserving and understanding the evolution of human thought over time.
Reasoning visualization tools are essential for visual and critical thinking. Reasoning Lab is a website that offers various tools for critical thinking with an emphasis on the structure of reasoning. Reasoninglab argument mapping is a website that provides an argument mapping tool, where all arguments are accessible for review. mindup is a free online tool for creating mind maps, which can be useful for organizing and visualizing complex ideas. hivemind is a project that aims to make human knowledge machine-readable, and it offers various visualization tools to achieve this goal.
Microsoft's Smart Art, most often used for infographics creation, was used by Tim Van Gelder for an exercise in arugment mapping in a post on his blog in 2016. He says it is a useful tool, but it has an upper limit and cannot represent complex reasoning.
argunet is an open-source project that provides an argument mapping tool, with the first version funded by the Free University of Berlin and released in 2007. It has been downloaded over 50,000 times and can provide detailed argument analysis. The source code for argunet, and it is a desktop tool for tree manipulation. Lattice Miner is a formal concept analysis tool that enables users to visualize complex data structures, but its last activity was in 2017.
In summary, reasoning visualization tools are essential for critical thinking, and there are many resources available, both online and offline. These tools help users to organize, analyze, and visually represent complex ideas and arguments, allowing for more effective communication and decision-making.
Institutions for promoting philosophy have turned to the internet to create resources for scholars and enthusiasts alike. Internet Philosophy Ontology Project is one such attempt, providing a model of philosophy as an online resource. By analyzing over 37 million words of philosophical content, InPhO website allows for searching and navigating via relations among philosophical ideas, scholars, and works. However, InPhO is not comprehensive and does not cover statements.
Other projects attempt to create maps of philosophy, such as Philosophy Basics, which offers a clickable map of Western philosophy from the Presocratics to modern times. Similarly, Daily Nous offers a taxonomic map of philosophy, and Open Culture offers a map consisting of value theory, epistemology, metaphysics, history and traditions, with methods and logic in the middle. However, creators of these maps admit to their biases, and their maps may not be comprehensive.
Maps of individual thinkers and their ideas also exist. These include:
To create these maps, some projects have used data mining, statistical hypotheses, expert values, and machine response. Others have analyzed the taxonomy of Wikipedia and SEO links to create a dynamic ontology. Despite their limitations, these projects provide a glimpse into the vast and diverse world of philosophy and offer a starting point for further exploration.
humanreligions.infoDespite the noble aims of the linguistic traditions outlined above, they ultimately failed to deliver on their promise of fostering a truly global and inclusive language. The reasons for the failure of these linguistic traditions were manifold, including the high cost of acquisition, low prospective benefits, lack of speakers, a limited scope, and the tendency to be overshadowed by natural languages.
Lully recognizes this and rejects the approach of attempting to build a language from the top-down, based on a predetermined set of rules and principles. Instead, Lully believes in the power of the free exchange of ideas, and the ability of individuals to collaboratively construct meaning through open dialogue and discourse. This rejection of top-down linguistic models is at the heart of Lully's vision for a more democratic and inclusive language.
Lully stands at the crossroads of three grand traditions, each with its own distinct flavor. It draws upon the computational clarity of proof assistants and formal systems, the liberal ethos of free speech and the marketplace of ideas, and the vast expanse of knowledge inherent in the mapping and encyclopedic tradition. Lully is a rare being, fusing these disparate traditions into a harmonious whole, paving the way for new possibilities and unforeseen horizons.