This concept can be written simply, but is difficult to grasp the significance of (in my own humble opinion…).

Imagine a network of interconnected ideas. Some of these ideas make up other ideas: e.g. the ideas of government, people, voting, etc can be jointly referred to as democracy. This ability allows us to reduce the mental processing power required to manipulate concepts. We can group some concepts together into another one and use that as a handy shorthand term.

This implies a hierarchy as one concept can be composed of a group of others and that in turn can comprise part of a wider concept. There can be higher or lower concepts that encompass greater or fewer concepts within them and some can be very basic whilst others are more advanced.

All of this is true, however a hierarchy implies that there are lots of things at the bottom and something at the top in the form of a pyramid. This simply won't work in a network because every concept can form part of many others and can in turn encompass many others. In a traditional hierarchy there must be some concepts that do not encompass any others (to make up the bottom row) and one that does not form part of another (to make the 'top' concept).

Dave believes that it would be useful to understand that even in a network localised hierarchies can exist and that a hierarchy is itself a useful shorthand for conceptually dealing with how concepts are built up. However, a new term must be invented to allow for the particular behaviour of hierarchies in networks, hence this.

Properties of networked hierarchies:

1. All entities form part of others
2. All entities consist of others
3. There are no single relationships between entities i.e. every entity is always in more than one other entity and consists of more than one entity
4. An entity is only higher or lower relative to a frame of reference, there is no absolute measurement of stature.

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