Template:Dewey decimal system: Difference between revisions

The [[Dewey decimal system]] divides the universe, known and unknown<ref>[[001.9]], [[as any fule kno]].</ref> into a subdivisions of 1,000. In its way, it offers infinite particularity, but only by subdivision of ten major categories: General reference, Philosophy, Religion, Social Sciences, Language, Natural Science, Applied Science, Arts & Recreation, Literature and History.

As with all [[Taxonomy|taxonomies]], these major categories carve nature in an idiosyncratic way — not to get all post-structuralist on you, but a way that is inevitably rooted in the western intellectual tradition in which Dewey, universities and their libraries operate. They produce arbitrary ''dis''-juxtapositions: Why is Logic (part of {{tag|Philosophy}}) nowhere near Mathematics (a part of Natural Science) or even Language? And so on. But we have to physically arrange our libraries ''somehow'', and that forced Dewey into an intellectual commitment to ''some'' kind of order, privileged over all the others. But in our crazy, sugar-coated post-modern world, that’s not really how we see things any more. To [[Taxonomy|taxonomise]] is to [[Narrative|narratise]], is to commit to a certain ''[[paradigm]]''. To narratise is, arbitrarily, to prefer one story over all others, with no logical grounds for doing so.<ref>[[Paradigm]]s are incommensurable, in other words: you cannot judge one in terms of another, and nor are there naturally-occurring “neutral” criteria independent of both by which they may be compared: all criteria for any judgment are a product of some paradigm or other.</ref>