All 26 Uses of
hierarchy
in
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
- I've been going into all this business of analyses and definitions and hierarchies not for their own sake but to lay the groundwork for an understanding of the direction in which Phaedrus went.†
Part 1
- This structure of concepts is formally called a hierarchy and since ancient times has been a basic structure for all Western knowledge.†
Part 2
- Kingdoms, empires, churches, armies have all been structured into hierarchies.
Part 2 *hierarchies = something divided into levels -- typically by importance
- Tables of contents of reference material are so structured, mechanical assemblies, computer software, all scientific and technical knowledge is so structured...so much so that in some fields such as biology, the hierarchy of kingdom phylum-class-order-family-genus-species is almost an icon.†
Part 2
- The overall name of these interrelated structures, the genus of which the hierarchy of containment and structure of causation are just species, is system.†
Part 2
- This morning I talked about hierarchies of thought...the system.†
Part 2
- Now I want to talk about methods of finding one's way through these hierarchies...logic.†
Part 2
- For example, if, from reading the hierarchy of facts about the machine, the mechanic knows the horn of the cycle is powered exclusively by electricity from the battery, then he can logically infer that if the battery is dead the horn will not work.†
Part 2
- Solution of problems too complicated for common sense to solve is achieved by long strings of mixed inductive and deductive inferences that weave back and forth between the observed machine and the mental hierarchy of the machine found in the manuals.†
Part 2
- This you know from the hierarchy.†
Part 2
- By asking the right questions and choosing the right tests and drawing the right conclusions the mechanic works his way down the echelons of the motorcycle hierarchy until he has found the exact specific cause or causes of the engine failure, and then he changes them so that they no longer cause the failure.†
Part 2
- They don't like it when you talk to them because they are concentrating on mental images, hierarchies, and not really looking at you or the physical motorcycle at all.†
Part 2
- They are using the experiment as part of a program to expand their hierarchy of knowledge of the faulty motorcycle and compare it to the correct hierarchy in their mind.†
Part 2
- They are using the experiment as part of a program to expand their hierarchy of knowledge of the faulty motorcycle and compare it to the correct hierarchy in their mind.†
Part 2
- He saw philosophy as the highest echelon of the entire hierarchy of knowledge.†
Part 2
- If all of human knowledge, everything that's known, is believed to be an enormous hierarchic structure, then the high country of the mind is found at the uppermost reaches of this structure in the most general, the most abstract considerations of all.†
Part 2
- One can see how both the informal and formal processes of hypothesis, experiment, conclusion, century after century, repeated with new material, have built up the hierarchies of thought which have eliminated most of the enemies of primitive man.†
Part 2
- What we think of as reality is a continuous synthesis of elements from a fixed hierarchy of a priori concepts and the ever changing data of the senses.†
Part 2
- In this phase he made systematic, rigid statements about what Quality is, and worked out an enormous hierarchic structure of thought to support them.†
Part 3
- But when he asked it, because of his past, it spread out for him like waves in all directions simultaneously, not in a hierarchic structure, but in a concentric one.†
Part 3
- Data, classifications, hierarchies, cause-and-effect and analysis were discussed, and somewhere along there was some talk about a handful of sand, the world of which we're conscious, taken from the endless landscape of awareness around us.†
Part 3
- What had previously been asked for was a metaphysical hierarchy that looked like this: _ What he gave them in return was a metaphysical hierarchy that looked like this: _ The Quality he was teaching was not just a part of reality, it was the whole thing.†
Part 3
- What had previously been asked for was a metaphysical hierarchy that looked like this: _ What he gave them in return was a metaphysical hierarchy that looked like this: _ The Quality he was teaching was not just a part of reality, it was the whole thing.†
Part 3
- Poincaré laid down some rules: There is a hierarchy of facts.†
Part 3
- I want to start a whole new academic field, gumptionology, in which these traps are sorted, classified, structured into hierarchies and interrelated for the edification of future generations and the benefit of all mankind.†
Part 3
- Aristotle fouled up what Phaedrus wanted to say by placing rhetoric in an outrageously minor category in his hierarchic order of things.†
Part 4
Definition:
a ranking -- typically by importance; or something with such a ranking -- such as an organization of people