The Notetaking Cold War

On one side of the debate, roughly are people who believe that there is a world out there, that it is universal, objective, and accessible by the human intellect.

We’ll call these people essentialists. (Philosophers like Plato, Kant, and Descartes all fit under this label — though their philosophical stances vary widely)

Essentialists think about truth in a very specific way. They think that a statement is true when it reflects something essential about the way reality is organized. They think truth is defined as a relationship between a statement and a state of the world.

One the other side of the debate are people who choose not to answer that question directly. They believe, roughly, that there is no objective place from which to decide what is true. They believe that there are many different ways to represent and organize reality.

We’ll call these people pragmatists. (Philosophers like James, Wittgenstein, and Rorty — though their philosophical stances vary widely.)

Should the book note go into the notebook that tracks all book notes? Or should it go into the project that I’m currently working on that relates to it? Or should it go into a notebook that tracks all of the authors I’m reading? Or, because it’s about software design, should it go into the software design folder?

I might want to use the note in so many different contexts and places, it’s very hard to know the one precise place it should be filed. Many organizational structures might work, and it’s hard to know which one to pick.

What we learned earlier is that the less you can predict how you’ll use information the more flexible the system you’ll need to organize it. The more you can predict how you’ll use information the less flexible the system you’ll need.