Carolus Linnaeus (1707 – 1778) invented our double-barreled scientific naming (and shocked his contemporaries with his scandalous way of classifying plants: “Who would have thought that bluebells and lillies and onions could be up to such immorality?”).
Linnaeus was Swedish, but for varied odd reasons, detailed by
David Weinberger, his collection of specimens and the 3×5 cards classifying them ended up in London. Go read David’s entire post–it’s remarkable and loaded with intriguing photos–but here is my favorite theory-of-knowledge lightning bolt:
Linnaeus’ classification resulted from the nature of paper. Because you only have one card for each species, your order will give each species one and only one place. You will organize them by putting cards near cards like them, naturally producing an ordered series or a set of clusters.
As you lay out your cards, like next to like, you are drawing a map of knowledge. The largest units are kingdoms, not because Animals, Vegetables and Minerals somehow lord it over the particular creatures they contain but because kingdoms are the most inclusive territories on political maps. Knowledge thus derives its nature from the paper that expresses it: Bounded, unchanging, the same for all, two-dimensional and thus difficult to represent exceptions and complex overlaps, and all laid out in a glance with no dark corners.
[Tag: technology]