Mortimer Adler – alphabetization and “inherent… inner connections”

1. What are your thoughts on Mortimer Adler’s stance against alphabetization? What do you think he means by “inherent in all things to be learned we should be able to find inner connections”?

Which order is correct?

A: 雞牛豬
B: 雞豬牛
C: 豬牛雞
D: 豬雞牛
E: 牛雞豬
F: 牛豬雞

Would it help if you knew the pronunciation?

雞=ㄐㄧ

牛=ㄋㄧㄡ

豬=ㄓㄨ

How about if we romanize the Chinese pronunciation?

雞=ji

牛=niu

豬=zhu

But what if we use a different (and yet perfectly valid) romanization scheme?

雞=ji

牛=niou

豬=jhu

What if we use the English translations of these characters?

雞=chicken

牛=beef

豬=pork

The concept of alphabetization in Chinese is nonsense. It simply doesn’t exist. But what about dictionaries? Chinese dictionaries could be ordered in a few different ways. Probably the most common order is based on a fundamental part of every character called a radical plus the number of strokes it takes to write the part of the character that is not the radical.

Clearly alphabetization has a number of practical uses but as multilingual library cataloging and metadata and cooperative cataloging increase, librarians will see many limitations. The example I gave with the Chinese characters shows that alphabetization is simply not the answer to organizing the world’s information.

I think robust machine readable metadata is a key to organization. Alphabetization can be a *part* of such schemes, but we should also look beyond it.

I suspected that Weinberger clipped the quote so I searched for the phrase in question and found a quote that provided a little better context. Here’s a screencap from Logic and the Organization of Information by Martin Frické at Google Book.

I doubt very much (but don’t know for sure) that Adler found alphabetization to be useless. Rather, I think he was hoping to help encourage the classification of knowledge based on inherent connections, patterns, and relationships. Interestingly… these are some of the very words used to describe the principles and usage of FRBR.