Last modified: Sun 3/16/97 1415 PST
The Waldzell Canon is being developed for the training, certification and continuing education of comprehensive polymaths. A comprehensive polymath, in this context, is a person who has attained proessional stature in broad areas of knowledge and expertise in a way that enables the polymath to apply knowledge across any traditional discipline boundaries in reaching an objective (the pursuit of new knowledge, the synthesis of new ways of doing things or the solution of problems).
In the training of comprehensive polymaths, emphasis is placed on an overall understanding of the dimensions of human knowledge, its acquisition, synthesis and application. It is all-important for a polymath to know where to find the knowledge needed for a task and to be able to acquire that knowledge when needed. The entire Canon infrastructure is designed to provide polymaths with this ability and to allow them to hone these meta-epistemic skills and keep them up-to-date.
It is hoped that the activities at Waldzell will cause disjunct communities of comprehensivists to recognize themselves and each other, and that the worldwide community of comprehensive polymaths will grow in size at an exponential rate in this author's lifetime. It is further hoped that the role of the comprehensive polymath will be recognized by the current power brokers in our societies, and that the employment of competent comprehensivists for hitherto virtually intractable tasks will become standard procedure in business, government and academia.
The Waldzell Canon represents, in theory if not yet in fact, the body of useful human knowledge that a comprehensive polymath might at some time wish to draw upon in her pursuits. It can be understood as a library, as an archive or as a database, but its purpose is to support working polymaths and polymaths-in-training with a coherent meta-source for the diverse fields of knowledge they may need to acquire.
There have been many attempts, some larger and some smaller, to compile an exhaustive representation of human knowledge. It is obvious that, in the strict sense, it cannot be done. The emphasis must be placed on the uses to which the compilation is to be put. The needs of working comprehensivists drive the priorities underlying the development of this particular compilation, the Waldzell Canon.
In order to make these priorities explicit and to enable the unification of knowledge from a wide variety of sources on a wide variety of topics, the representation of knowledge in the Canon is constrained by an ontology specifically designed (or rather, evolving) for the purpose, the Waldzell Canon Ontology. The first task in approaching the Canon for the first time will be to understand the Canon Ontology -- only then will the Canon make sense, and only then can one contribute to the further development of the Canon or even to the evolution of the Ontology itself.
As mentioned parenthetically above, there are different pursuits to which a comprehensive polymath might apply knowledge and expertise.
One possible pursuit is the acquisition of new knowledge that is not yet part of the Canon, i.e. the expansion of the Canon Inventory. Inventory activities in this early stage in Canon development will involve mostly the reformulation of previously documented (often in discipline-specific language) knowledge in metacanonic terms and the integration of that knowledge into the existing Canon Inventory. In addition, Canon Inventory activities will hopefully arise in the form of original research, leading to the direct incorporation of new knowledge into the Canon Inventory.
Another possible pursuit of the working comprehensivist is the synthesis of available knowledge into a new way of doing things -- including the creation of new ways of organizing knowledge itself. Canon Innovation activities are the way in which the polymathic enterprise transcends the mere regurgitation of previously acquired knowledge. Although the other polymathic pursuits may drive Innovation activities toward a very specific end, Canon Innovation is a perfectly valid pursuit in its own right. Interested persons can introduce new syntheses into the Canon Innovation Archive without regard for any particular objective -- real or potential.
Finally, the comprehensive polymath may pursue the solutions to very specific problems in any area, such as medicine, engineering, management or law. These Canon Application activities are what thrusts the polymathic enterprise as defined by the Canon out of the ivory tower and into the real world of people with problems to solve. Canon Application activities may involve, in the simplest situation, the selection and synthesis of knowledge and expertise from the Canon Inventory and Innovation Archives in resolving a problem. In more refractory problem situations, the needs of an Application problem may drive Innovation activities in order to synthesize existing knowledge and expertise into a more usable form. In the most refractory problems of all, even Innovation will not suffice until creative Inventory processes have acquired new knowledge without which the problem at hand proves to be insoluble.