*James Vincent* > [!summary] Progressive Summary # Structured Notes ## Definitions ## Chapter Summaries ## 5 - The metric revolution ### Condorcet Condorcet was a late Enlightenment figure who believed in human reason's power to index the world: > Each entity in the system would be described with a ten-digit code, with each number expressing a different permutation of a primary quality. So, an entry with the designation 4618073 might be located in the kingdom animalia, class mammalia, order carnivora, family felidae, species F. catus, with the colouring tabby and the body type obese. In other words: a fat tabby cat. Condorcet imagines this system of universal data entry capturing every type of fact and statement imaginable. Such information could then be rendered in vast tables, like those advocated by Francis Bacon the century before, storing not just scientific knowledge but moral and political wisdom too. Thus, the knowledge of the world – translated, sieved, and distilled – would become newly pliant, yielding to calculation, verification, and discovery. Anyone faced with such tables would, at a glance, be able to ‘discover all the results, all the general facts, all the natural laws which this system of facts can reveal’. > > Condorcet’s vision is both utopian and totalitarian. It imagines that perfect categorisation of the world and equal access to knowledge would lead to complete happiness. In both his method and plan, there is no space for ambiguity. And like the ancient Egyptian onomasticon or Linnaean taxonomy, it imagines categorisation as a method of knowledge production in and of itself. It is classification as revelation. # Quotes # References [[Reference Notes/Books/The Making of Measure and the Promise of Sameness]]