Re: [Phpwiki-talk] mind mapping tool

[Whit B. <wh...@tr...>]

On Sun, Jul 11, 2004 at 11:06:37AM +0200, Reini Urban wrote:

> PS: I strongly dislike the names "mindmap" and "freemind". It's too 
> esoteric, anti-rational.

Me, I like the names better than the products. For "freemind," look at John
Searle's _Rationality in Action_ - his argument is that what is rational in
ourselves is precisely where we are free, that compelled action (for
example, addiction) is neither free nor rational. For "mindmap," there's a
great deal of recent research in the importance of spacial thinking and
mapping for human reason, for example see Stephen C. Levinson's _Space in
Language and Cognition_ or Gilles Fauconnier's _Mappings in Thought and
Language_.

So the names are good - justified by current cutting-edge research in
linguistics and philosophy. Where I'd take issue is with the products.
Freemind for instance is just a visualization of heirarchy; and much of the
value in spatial conceptualization doesn't fit with heirarchical
categorization (see, on this, George Lakoff's _Women, Fire and Dangerous
Things_). These programs are aids to visuo-spatial thinking, but only the
narrow aspect of it that shoehorns into their schemes, which are often
ill-fitting to reality (as the examples given with freemind show, it seems
to me). A wiki, being more freeform, is more open to representing at least
implicitly the sort of spatial relations within and among concepts that are
being increasingly revealed as crucial aspects of human cognition.

Excuse the digression here, but the wiki I'm putting together will be to
serve the field of consciousness studies, so looking at why a wiki in
particular - or something else - can serve this well is important to me. I
much like, Reini, your idea of adding structural views to PhpWiki at some
point down the road, but suggest the heirarchical abstract of the structure
may not be the most useful or revealing instance of these to bring out.

Whit