Crazy Idea: Everything Should be a Tree

Attention Tree! by Philipp Klinger (Off to Ville de Québec) on flickr, cc-by-nc-nd

That is, every set of information and logic should be organized into a data structure, such as a tree.

I came up with this idea while I was taking a course called Technology and Power, which was basically a philosophy course. We read Heidegger, and I decided that I hated philosophy (we later read some other philosophers who convinced me that I didn’t _actually_ hate philosophy, such as Foucault). But I just kept thinking, “there’s got to be a better way to get these ideas across.” We happened to be working with file structures in a computer science course that I was taking at the time.

As I was reading all of this philosophy, I quickly became skeptical that the authors were descending into poetry and losing track of the logical flow of their arguments. This is something that I do _not_ appreciate. I like poetry and I like logical arguments, but mixing of the two does both a disservice. A statement that sounds profound and important and interesting and just ooey-gooey-delicious is no substitute for a statement that is supported by logic.

Basically, these logic trees would allow us to call “bull shit” on philosophers. If they are forced to present the order of their claims, with no holes in between (think mathematical proof), then we can get through the poetic bullshit and actually take a look at what they are saying (again, I love poetry, but “sounding smart” isn’t enough). We wouldp be able to look at which claims are taken as granted (“postulates”?). A claim that “sounds right” seems much less convincing may seem much less convincing when you can easily trace it back to the premises that its based on, and how many statements need to be accepted without proof along the way.

Furthermore, once a philosophical argument is organized into a tree, you can do interesting things with it. Certainly it would be a lot to ask for each philosopher to start from square one in each work–thus a philosopher could add in a whole tree from another work, perhaps by another philosopher altogether. For example, if one logic tree made a compelling claim for the existance of the universe, perhaps that could be incorporated into a larger tree that used that applied said argument in order to prove that individual people exist, which would then in turn be used to prove that people have free will, etc etc. The trees could be collapsible, so that you could first look at the argument for the existance of individual people with the existence of the universe taken as a given, then simply “expand” the argument for the existence of the universe if you decide you’re skeptical.

One could also manipulate the tree herself in order to grapple with the concepts, as could other philosophers. For example, one might decide that the argument for the existence of the universe really isn’t compelling (perhaps there’s a blatant logical flaw). She could remove that argument, and attempt to apply a new one of her own development, or someone else’s. She could also encounter a convincing argument for why it is false, remove the assertion from the tree, and see what is left. Perhaps the original argument for the existence of original people depends on the existence of the universe only to prove that people are individuals, but not to prove that they exist (okay, these examples aren’t great, but hopefully you get the idea).

Heck, even a flowchart would be hugely valuable for a lot of logical arguments. That way, at least the reader could clearly step through the argument bit by bit, and discover the weak points. If bits of evidence were tied to nodes in the argument tree, it would be much easier to see how strong a claim is (how many bits of evidence it has). Also, again, if a bit of evidence turned out to be false, or a whle set of data turned out to be garbage, it could be plucked from the tree, and one could quickly and easily examine the extent to which the argument still holds. Again, bits of evidence could be collapsed, so that only the important details are visible, or expanded, so that one could examine a whole data set and see how it was obtained, so that it can be treated with a healthy dose of criticism. Plenty of people have talked about the recurring weirness of Gladwell’s arguments, both in terms of potential logical flaws as well as simply unbelievable data sets. A carefully organized flowchart would make these weak points more transparent.

Imagine the beauty of such a consolidation of argumentation. Imagine how its organization could be crowdsourced, ala wikipedia, so that with little to no cost, all great works of philosophy and even bits of argumentation were arranged in a bunch of intertwining trees that could be easily traversed with mouse clicks. Imagine parsing arguments by religious apologetics into such trees (note: this is the other case where I get frustrated by a mix of argumentation and poetry), to see where the larger argumentational leaps are, and just how much scripture needs to be taken on its word. Arguments could be constructed with clear holes, so that others can fill them in later (“I suspect that we can get from this claim to this claim, in fact, the relationship may be obvious on some level, but I can’t come up with a compelling reason why”).

Imagine how this could re-shape our discourse. When I started organizing sldeshow presentations with a loose format that enclosed sections in html-style tags, I came up with much more logical and easy-to-follow presentations. If people were forced to simultaneously present their argument as a tree or flowchart, their arguments would be much clearer and less full of BS.

Note that I’m not necessarily advocating that these flowcharts _replace_ formal arguments–they might serve better as a supplement. These trees would have enormous advantages, as I’ve described, but I’m very willing to accept the claim that “something is lost” when a piece of philosophical writing becomes an argument tree. I suspect that most (and perhaps even all) of the potential losses in terms of important aspects of the argumentation could be avoided through very careful (and perhaps complex) tree design. It would be great to come up with a system so fool-proof that we could comfortably declare that if a work could not be parsed into a convincing logic tree, it is not a convincing argument (we blame the argument, not the tree structure).

I’m sure there’s already some scholarship on this, and I’m sure that this idea needs to be fleshed out further. In particular, I want to start applying it to real-world examples. Perhaps I could try to parse a chapter of gladwell into a flowchart? Please comment, email me, or strike up a conversation about this in person. To be continued.

Editor’s note: i’m posting this early, but I’m hopefully going to proofread and edit it tomorrow. Please excuse the errors and lack of styling and links.