Tree and Rhizome

• lysozyme is a rhizome. Unlike the (Christmas) tree, they have no center and are connected to each other.

• Deleuze. criticized the model of the tree, which since Descartes has been “metaphysics is the center, from which the other disciplines are derived and cannot be compared with each other,” and proposed the model of the rhizome.

Relevant issues from the perspective of “tree denial”

In his 1965 article “Cities Are Not Trees,” Christopher Alexander, who would become famous for his 1977 book “Pattern Language,” argued that real cities are not trees but semilattices. A semilattice is a mathematical term for a bundle that satisfies only one of the two conditions of a lattice.

A Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) is a graph that admits a confluence in the tree. This is an even looser condition than semi-bundling. DAGs can be fully ordered by topological sorting.

The idea that “a belief is justified only if it is grounded in a self-evident fundamental belief” (fundamentalism) and the idea of mathematics as a system deduced strictly from a few “axioms” (axiomaticism, Hilbert) were criticized as dogmatic by Hans Albert in his 1967 Critical Reason (see Munchausen’s trilemma). Albert criticized it as dogmatic in his “Treatise on Critical Reason” in 1967 (see Munchausen’s trilemma).

Since “individual beliefs” can no longer be justified by foundations, the coherence theory (a theory that a proposition is true if it corresponds with a specified set of other propositions) was born. This is the idea that the central or foundational axiom is true. This is a system of knowledge without a center or underlying axioms, and is similar to the idea of a rheme.

• blind spot card 1

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