Risk taxonomy: Difference between revisions

Any [[taxonomy]] is a [[narrative]]. Like any hierarchical organising system, a [[taxonomy]] commits you to ''one'' way of looking at the world, ''at the expense of all others''. Now this a necessary evil when it comes to concrete, physical things, like books. The curator of a collection of physical objects, like a library — libraries: remember them? — must settle on a single taxonomy and, for better or worse, stick to it, even if there is another way of feasibly organising the collection. The [[Dewey decimal system]] is such a single hierarchy. It is, by necessity, a ''[[narrative]]'': it does not carve nature at its joints, and leads to odd discontinuities<ref>“Logic” is nowhere near “mathematics”, for example.</ref> but it is better than nothing: the same book can’t be in two places at once, and you have to put it ''somewhere''. Over time, the worldwide community of physical librarians came by some kind of astral momentum to the settled consensus that the [[Dewey decimal system]] was the best way to organise books, and so, by dint of that pragmatic consensus it was — the very predictability across libraries that the consensus gave was itself a powerful enough design feature to defeat any logical criticisms of Dewey’s particular schema.