In which the forms of uniqueness are connected to the elements of knowledge.

It is upon this foundation, I believe, that we will be building the knowledge of the new period. These are our singular artifacts; they are unique. Like the "central" objects, the "first" principles, and the "natural" environments, the "unique" artifacts will be the key elements in the knowledges we will be constructing. The great explosion of new knowledge - the thrilling revolutions in the disciplines that we expect to occur over the next few years will all be constructed of unique artifacts. And these fundamental elements - difference, sameness, and matching - will be the forms upon which we build a new theory of knowledge.

Entity Artifacts

The elements that hold experience

The first step in constructing a physical artifact is to cut it out of a substrate. The first step in constructing knowledge is the same, cutting out a portion of experience by giving it a label, a name, a definition. When we make a conceptual artifact, we are naming a piece of experience, differentiating it from all others. Each name is thus an artifact that has been created by difference, each "sets apart," separates that experience from everything else. These separate pieces of experience we can call entity artifacts, because they have the form of the fundamental entity - the unique entity - the tool from each period that were used to construct all of its entity artifacts. The unique entities - symbols, universals, objects, environments, and now artifacts, are the most fundamental of all artifacts because they are the tools by which we cut up - differentiate and name -experience.
 

Site Artifacts

The collectors of entities

The second step in fashioning physical artifacts is to collect them, to bundle and package together those that are the same or similar. This, too, is the second step in our construction of knowledge. We use sameness to gather artifacts together, to group and collect entity artifacts. This is what we do when we build classes, groups, and categories. We construct containers or frameworks that bundle together "like" artifacts, making them the same or representing attributes that are the same. I like the name sites to describe these artifacts that are our collections and categories, the places where we put common entities. When we build knowledge, we first separate and name experience, then we collect those names that have commonality. We first make entities and then we collect them into sites. We may create a hierarchy of sites, as sites within sites, but that is not all we do.
 

Fastening Artifacts

The links between sites

The last step in constructing physical artifacts is actually to join the separate pieces or collections together. We do the same with conceptual artifacts by using matching to join disparate sites together. These are our theories, explanations; what we often call our concepts. To make such an artifact we invent a site artifact that takes on special characteristics linking other sites together by matching or mating them. These new artifacts are no longer sites, they now become the glue that joins sites. I like to call these kinds of artifacts fasteners, because, as the name implies, they fasten sites together. The fasteners are very special artifacts; they are much rarer than sites which, naturally, are much rarer than entities. We pay great attention to fasteners for they unify our knowledge, connecting classes and thus bringing unity to our world. They are the most unique of all artifacts, the rarest.

Entities, sites, and fasteners are the elements that form the Pattern of Knowledge as well as the elements of thought.

These are the three elements of knowledge - entities, sites, and fasteners - based on the three forms of uniqueness - difference, sameness, matching. The entities separate experience, cutting it up; the sites collect the entities, in essence connecting similar experiences; and the fasteners tie all of these sites together bringing a fundamental unity to our world. I would argue that we do this on all levels, from the simplest day-to-day knowledge building to the great theory constructions. We start making pieces of experience by naming them. When we have a number of pieces, we collect them together into groups by finding or giving them a sameness. And lastly, we join these collections together. We do this all of the time. It is particularly noticeable when we learn something for the first time; for example, when we go to a new country and learn the names of the plant life. We first name them, which allows us to pick them out from the background of "weeds." Then we classify them into types, which allows us to collect and hold more names. And finally, we try to explain the classes, make links between them and the climate, the geography, the type of gardening, ... which puts the classes into a theoretical framework.

The great knowledge builders work in exactly the same way. Linnaeus took collections of named plants and animals and constructed a hierarchy of categories based on principles of sameness. His most important category type was the species, defined as a group whose members could interbreed, but could not breed with outsiders. Darwin took the Linnaean categories which had a certain degree of artificiality, as all categories will, and linked them together with his Theory of Natural Selection, explaining their origins and existence and thus enabling us to go past the definition by fiat and give the sites rationale.

We can now describe both processes of thinking in the simple language of uniqueness. We first use difference to separate our experiences into unique entities. Then we use sameness to construct unique sites to collect those entities. And finally, we use matching to fashion the fastening artifact, joining sites and producing our unified vision.

Here we complete the logic of unique artifacts and find all of the forms of the elements of knowledge.

If unique artifacts (entities, sites, and fasteners) are so important to the development of knowledge, then we should find them to be fundamental to languages as well. It would be an enormous waste of effort if languages were constructed with a completely different set of tools than knowledge, and thus were used only for communication and not for knowledge building. And I would argue that if languages are fashioned for conceptualization, then they must be built out of these same forms of uniqueness.

Nouns and Entities

Certainly words are artifacts - they are human constructions. And nouns are the primary artifacts of language - they name our experiences. Naming differentiates; it separates that experience from everything else. This "label" makes what is named distinct and unified. Thus nouns serve the same function in language that entities serve in knowledge. We can say that nouns are the entities of our "natural" languages. To name experience we have to separate and differentiate it from the rest of our perceptions. That is the fundamental act of knowledge building, and it is exactly what we do when we create a new word or just use a word. Even the most obvious pieces of experience: a rainbow, a shadow, or a tree are things that we learn to see, that we construct and define. To define is to see the edges, and to construct an entity is to differentiate it from the rest of experience; they are the same thing. The building of a name, a noun, is thus analogous to fashioning any physical artifact; outlining it, shaping it, detailing it. When we fashion an entity in a language, we create a noun, and as we shape that entity we build its meaning. Nouns, of course, are not our only conceptual entities. We can build entities in other languages like mathematics, and we can build visual and physical entities as well.

We use the structure of language to provide experiential grounding and to establish the intimate sameness of thought and language.

This connection between language and knowledge can help us to learn more about knowledge. For example, in all languages nouns come in two basic forms - singular and plural. These are the same words we used to describe the two basic periods of knowledge. A singular noun is a singular entity - separate and different. A plural noun is a plural entity, a collection, a group in which all things are the same. Singular and plural are thus another form by which nouns as well as all other artifacts can be different or the same. If the entity or the noun is defined by difference then it will be singular. Being different, it will be separate from all other artifacts and outside of them. It is a thing in itself; a ball that stands alone. If the entity is defined by sameness then it will be plural, integral, similar in all things, and inside of them. In this case, we talk about balls as a group in which the most important artifacts are plural, the constituents of things, and the qualities of that groupness are the key.
 

Entities

Singular

Plural

Nouns

Singular

Plural

When we build knowledge of singular entities; we place them on a pedestal; we make them central, the source for all things and all actions, ideals, fashioned to be truly different. We find ideals in logic, not in experience; we find them outside of ourselves in constructions that are independent of us or our perspective. Plural entities are inside, the same, common to all, and interacting. To construct them we have to look at experience, to be realistic, to search within experience to find knowledge, to take the proper perspective and see the common elements. The distinction between artifacts in singular and plural periods is simply whether we construct entities based on difference or on sameness.

Here we complete the logic of unique artifacts and find all of the forms of the elements of knowledge.

Site artifacts must be nouns as well: for they are still names, but these names represent classes.  When we look at all languages we again find a variety of common ways to specify such collections or categories.  We distinguish common nouns, proper nouns, and mass nouns.  Proper nouns are entities for they name single thing.  Common nouns are generally sites for they name collections.  And mass nouns, too, are always sites, representing collections.  But it is not just the kind of noun that defines it as a site: noun phrases produced with articles and descriptors – principally adjectives – turn any noun into a site.  We can use articles to make the distinction:  “the” for an entity, “a” for a site.  Adjectives specify not only a member of a class but clarify that the noun itself represents a collection.   In the noun phrase, the red ball – “ball” becomes a site and red refers to a specific entity in that site.

Parts

Wholes

Site nouns, like entity nouns, come in both singular and plural forms, suggesting that we will find site artifacts in singular and plural forms. And we do find two large phases of knowledge within each singular and plural period that I call parts and wholes, based on the two kinds of site artifacts. Max Wertheimer beautifully expresses the difference in the knowledge constructed during each of these two phases in his major work on gestalt psychology.

We can clearly see how these three types of verbs connect to knowledge by turning again to physical artifacts, in this case, the fastening tools in a woodworker’s toolbox. There are three distinct varieties that match the three kinds of verbs. In the toolbox the simplest and most obvious fasteners are the glues that stick things together forming a connection. They stay on the surface and make a simple bond between pieces. Then there are the "jointers," the screws and things that make joints like: threads, dowels, and dovetails. Joints or relations fit one piece into another and fittings of all sorts form a tighter bond in which a portion of each piece is shaped to fit on or into the other. Lastly, the "melting" fasteners actually change the pieces; disintegrating and reconstituting them, dissolving them, welding two together, changing one into another, these are the transformations. They typical woodworker's toolbox is full of glues and jointers, but lacks melters. The plumber's toolbox generally lacks the weaker glues and is full of the stronger fasteners - jointers and melters. If we could go through all of the toolboxes used in the physical world, we will find that all the fasteners of physical artifacts are one of these three kinds - connections, relations, or transformations.

Connections maintain the differences between artifacts. Relations match artifacts. And transformations make two artifacts the same, changing two into one. We will find these three fastening artifacts - connections, relations, transformations - repeated as the phases of knowledge during each period. There are three fastening artifacts and three kinds of verbs, because there are three forms of uniqueness and thus three ways to fasten anything.

The connection between language and knowledge, touched on so lightly here, has significant ramifications in the ongoing controversy between language and thought. Does knowledge create language or does language create knowledge? This battle dates back centuries and recently the debate has turned particularly lively. Though the history is fascinating, we must, as we rush to conclusion, jump to the modern view that the elements of language - in particular the deep structures of the grammar - are pre-wired in our brains, coded in our DNA. There is good reason for some of our most prominent linguists, like Noam Chomsky, to argue for this "grammar organ" in the brain. The essential elements of grammar are present in every human language, and groups of children who are exposed to "words" without grammar (deaf children and children whose parents speak Pidgin languages) will construct grammars that exhibit the same fundamental properties as those of established languages.

It is uniqueness and not grammar.

From the point of view of unique artifacts, I would argue that it is not grammar that is inborn, but rather the capacity to recognize uniqueness. And, further, it is uniqueness that gives us the primary elements of our languages as well as the primary elements of our knowledges. It is uniqueness that gives us an understanding of why we use nouns and verbs, why single words are so powerful, and why we make the peculiar combinations of these words that we call sentences.