Semantics in Note Taking Apps
When it comes to note-taking, I see two powerful schools of thought. There might be different variations in which the thought processes are applied. I would identify the two approaches as follows:
- Tiago Forte Approach
- The Zettelkasten Approach
The differences between the two come down to a question of how semantics is enforced: Distributed Semantic Authority Vs Central Semantic Authority.
Authors declare semantic authority within their domains with ease. But a frequent problem that comes is a mismatch between the author’s semantics and the reader’s reality.
People can come up with “ad-hoc proto semantics” to better fit with their current data. The challenge they have is when it comes to converging this data with their pre-existing semantics.
Tiago’s approach focuses heavily on “Semantic Pre-ordination”(Meta-semantic formalization), while Zettelkasten approach thrives on Distributed Semantics (Ad-hoc semantic capture). Apps such as Logseq and [[ Roam Research ]] helps deal with intersubjective semantic convergence.
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