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The discomfort that we feel in the absence of a commitment to a specific rhetoric or to a "base map" (as Len put it) is the same discomfort that a child experiences when it discovers that it is not the center of the universe. Globalization must necessarily go to the heart of how we adapt to each other and to the situations in which we find ourselves, both individually and collectively. I sense that globalization is widely expected to necessitate the suppression of most existing perspectives, and the imposition of something that's often called "modernity" on the not-so-modern. In fact, however, we *all* have to adapt. Time will make today's "modernity" uncouth. A good way to ease the required adaptations is to give equal honor to the rhetorics of others, and particularly for the rich and well-educated to refrain from expecting more adaptation from the poor and ill-educated than they expect from themselves. There doesn't need to be *a* base map; we need lots of them. Readers of this list are enhancing the ability of humanity to adapt whenever they develop rhetorics that respect particular perspectives and, at the same time, clarify what those perspectives are (i.e., make them understandable to people whose perspectives are different). When I first started working with SGML in 1986, I naively thought, "This is great! SGML information is self-describing information." Now I realize that no information can ever be self-describing, and that self-description is a quest like the quest for truth. It's vital for survival, and although it has a goal, it doesn't end. John Sowa's "Lattice of Theories" notion is interesting. It recognizes that it's useful to express intersections between different universes of discourse governed by incompatible ontologies. The Topic Maps Reference Model is interesting, too. It establishes a standard rhetoric for expressing such wormholes. In both cases, there's no requirement for a "base map". I think these kinds of ideas show the way forward, because they sidestep any requirement that everybody agrees about anything before information from different perspectives can be integrated, or before information expressed in terms of a given perspective can become useful to people who don't share it. Steve Newcomb
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