principles.md

Basic Principles

The Croker Method uses mainly 3 principles:

1. Contexts and context-instances: It is not only concepts that knowledge workers find themselves trying to explain. There could be instances when knowledge workers need to explain processes, ideas, algorithms, and literally any piece of knowledge. In the Croker Method these are gathered under the term contexts. A context is a grouping of similar situations.

   Think of the famous phrase "All animals are equal but some are more equal than others." There are many animals in the world, but clearly we can draw connective lines between some of them to group them in a particular category. For example, should we have a cat, a hen and a tiger, we can draw a line between the cat and the tiger in a category we can call Feline Animals. Similarly, however, we can also draw a line joining cat with hen in a category we will call Farm Animals. Both are very valid connections. In the Croker Method we call these groupings and categories as contexts.

   Within every context we have the concepts, ideas, processes, and other instances of that context from which we are drawing features. We call these context-instances.

2. Orders of magnitude: The relationship between elements within a context can be expressed in orders of magnitude. The weight will depend upon the situation that the knowledge worker is trying to examine.

   Back to the animal example, let us say that we're examining specifically the cat. If the context was Animal Roles in Farms, a higher order of cat can be a guard dog as it has a more authoritative role within the farm, while a lower order of the cat can be a mouse as many times it is an unwanted guest. Should we be seeing the cat in the context of Zoo we can say that higher order context-instances would be a lama and an elephant, since both animals are physically bigger than a cat, while a smaller order context-instance will be a green finch.

3. Analogies as parallel contexts: Since analogies emerge out of similar patterns in different contexts, we like to think of analogies as parallel contexts.

   In the animal example, a guard dog is more authoritative than a cat in an Animal Roles in Farms context just like the best-man is more authoritative than the waiter in a Family Wedding context. Both the guard dog and the best-man have a guarding role in their contexts, and hence are good analogies to each other.