How Knowledge is Formed: A Study of Formation and Structure

Every textbook you open, every database you search, and every shelf you scan in a library represents a slice of something far larger: the entire universe of human knowledge. But this universe was not handed to us fully formed. Subjects like biochemistry, geopolitics, and bioinformatics did not always exist. They were formed through identifiable processes that scholars have studied closely. Understanding how knowledge takes shape helps explain why information is organised the way it is, and how new fields keep emerging. This study of formation and structure begins with the work of Dr. S.R. Ranganathan and continues with his successors at the Documentation Research and Training Centre.

Why the formation of knowledge matters 🔗

Knowledge is not static. It grows, splits, merges, and reorganises itself constantly. For anyone working with information, this growth poses a practical problem: how do you classify a subject that did not exist when a classification scheme was first designed? Ranganathan answered this by studying the modes of formation of subjects, the recurring patterns through which new areas of knowledge come into being.

The value of this study is concrete. It helps predict how subjects will interrelate, guides the design of new classification schemes, supports the revision of existing ones like the Colon Classification, and aids teaching and learning. In short, mapping how knowledge forms gives information professionals a framework to organise an ever-expanding intellectual world.

Ranganathan’s modes of knowledge formation 🔗

Ranganathan first proposed a small set of modes and refined them over his career. By the time of his later work, the core processes he identified included dissection, denudation, lamination, and loose assemblage. Three of these, dissection, denudation, and lamination, are the foundational building blocks worth examining in detail.

Dissection: cutting into coordinate parts 🔗

Dissection is the process of cutting a universe of entities into parts of coordinate status. The classic comparison is slicing a loaf of bread into strips of roughly equal thickness. The parts that result are mutually exclusive, equally ranked, and together exhaust the whole.

Examples make this clear. The universe of life science divides into botany and zoology; physics divides into its traditional branches such as heat, light, sound, electricity, and magnetism; the earth divides into its seven continents; and a country divides into its states. In each case the division is horizontal and instantaneous. None of the resulting parts is subordinate to another. India splitting into Maharashtra, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, and the rest is a familiar instance of dissection at work.

Denudation: peeling away to reach depth 🔗

Denudation works differently. The word literally means “to make bare.” Here a subject undergoes a progressive decrease in extension and an increase in intension, or depth. Rather than splitting a subject into a flat array, denudation follows one and only one subdivision downward, repeatedly narrowing the focus.

A geographic chain shows this neatly: World → Asia → India → Tamil Nadu → Madurai. Each step narrows the scope and deepens the specificity. Another example runs Philosophy → Logic → Deductive Logic. As scholars note, repeated dissection of a single line eventually becomes denudation, which is why denudation can be seen as including dissection. This process explains how broad fields like “Natural Philosophy” gradually gave rise to the specialised experimental sciences we know today.

Lamination: layering facets together 🔗

Lamination forms a subject by overlaying facet on facet, much like building a sandwich by placing a layer of filling over a layer of bread. When isolate ideas are laid over a basic subject, the result is a compound subject.

Consider the basic subject linguistics. By placing the laminae “English,” “grammar,” and “English grammar” on it, we obtain English language, linguistic grammar, and English grammar. The number of laminae placed on a subject is a direct measure of how specialised that topic is. Compound subjects formed this way are the most populous in the universe of subjects, virtually infinite in number. A faceted scheme such as the Colon Classification or the Universal Decimal Classification makes the structure of such compound subjects visible, while an enumerative scheme like the Dewey Decimal Classification struggles to express them.

Loose assemblage: relating without merging 🔗

Loose assemblage brings together two or more subjects or isolate ideas based on a relationship between them, without either losing its identity. This is the basis of what Ranganathan called phase relations, where one subject is studied in relation to another, for example the influence of one field on another or the application of one to another. The components remain distinct even as they are studied together.

Neelameghan’s extension: fission and fusion 🔗

Ranganathan’s framework was deepened by his colleagues at the Documentation Research and Training Centre, notably A. Neelameghan and M.A. Gopinath. Their contributions added precision to the dynamic processes of splitting and merging, formalised through the concepts of fission and fusion. These were largely worked out around 1968 and the years that followed.

Fission: splitting a subject into subdivisions 🔗

Fission is the splitting of a basic subject or an isolate idea into subdivisions, a process also called fragmentation. In Neelameghan’s treatment, fission becomes the umbrella process under which dissection and denudation sit as two specific kinds. Neelameghan’s 1973 paper, Primary Basic Subject by Fission, argued that even the initial set of traditional basic subjects in a classification scheme can be understood as having formed by fission of the universe of subjects.

Fission operates in two ways. Fission of a basic subject divides a primary basic subject into secondary basic subjects of coordinate status, as when biology divides into botany and zoology. Fission of isolate ideas handles divisions such as geography, where Asia divides into India, Iran, Nepal, Afghanistan, and so on, or where a principal isolate combines with a speciator, as in the pairing of “car” with a brand name like “Ford.”

Fusion: merging subjects into something new 🔗

Fusion is the more striking process. Here, two or more primary basic subjects merge so completely that each loses its individuality with respect to the isolates needed to form the resulting compound subject. What emerges is a genuinely new field, sometimes called a hybrid discipline.

The examples are everywhere in modern science: biochemistry from biology and chemistry, biophysics, astrophysics, geochemistry, geophysics, chemical engineering, geopolitics, and bioengineering. Fusion occurs when a new field of specialisation emerges from interdisciplinary research, and the new field develops its own normative principles in addition to borrowing from its parent subjects. This is the formal mechanism that connects Ranganathan’s classification theory to the broader phenomenon of disciplines being born at the boundaries of older ones.

Further modes: distillation, agglomeration, and clusters 🔗

Gopinath and S. Seetharama broadened the framework still further, expanding the original set into a richer typology. Distillation describes how a pure discipline evolves as a primary basic subject out of its repeated appearance-in-action across many compound subjects; international relations and management studies are often cited examples. Agglomeration and clustering describe how several specialised studies on a single phenomenon gather around a common nodal idea to form a field of study. Together with subject bundles and partial comprehension, these modes give classificationists a fuller vocabulary for describing how the universe of subjects keeps reorganising itself.

Interdisciplinary knowledge formation 🔗

The modes of fusion, distillation, and clustering all point toward the same modern reality: a great deal of new knowledge now forms at the intersections between established disciplines. This is the domain of interdisciplinary research, and it has become one of the most important engines of knowledge formation today.

What interdisciplinary research actually means 🔗

A widely cited definition from the United States National Academies describes interdisciplinary research as a mode of research, by teams or individuals, that integrates data, techniques, perspectives, and theories from two or more disciplines to advance fundamental understanding or to solve problems that lie beyond the scope of any single field. The key word is integration. Unlike multidisciplinary work, where experts contribute in parallel without truly merging their methods, interdisciplinary research relies on shared knowledge and genuine collaboration across boundaries.

How new fields emerge 🔗

When this collaboration deepens over time, a fundamental shift can occur and a new field is born. Biochemistry, nanoscience, and neuroscience all began as interdisciplinary meeting grounds and eventually grew into disciplines in their own right. This is exactly the process Ranganathan and Neelameghan described as fusion, now visible at the scale of entire scientific landscapes.

The pattern continues in the present day. Fields such as synthetic biology, bioinformatics, and human brain science have emerged at the intersection of existing scientific disciplines, often described in the research literature as science convergence. Cognitive neuroscience offers a clear case: it blends neuroscience, anatomy, psychology, and physiology, and its rise was tied closely to new brain imaging techniques such as functional MRI. Bioinformatics emerged because modern biology became nearly impossible to conduct without computing. Newer areas like artificial intelligence, immersive reality, and material sciences continue this trajectory.

The challenge for classification 🔗

This constant emergence creates a real difficulty for information organisation. New discoveries with multidisciplinary roots are often hard to fit into existing classification schemes, because those schemes were designed around an older map of knowledge. This is precisely why the study of formation modes remains useful. By understanding fusion, distillation, and clustering as living processes rather than historical curiosities, librarians and information scientists can anticipate where new subjects will appear and revise their schemes to accommodate them. The framework built decades ago in Bangalore continues to describe how knowledge grows in an age of artificial intelligence and convergence research.

Bringing the structure together 🔗

Seen as a whole, these modes describe a knowledge universe in constant motion. Dissection and denudation pull subjects apart into branches and depths. Lamination and loose assemblage build compound subjects by layering and relating. Fission formalises the splitting, while fusion, distillation, and clustering describe how genuinely new disciplines crystallise, often through interdisciplinary work. Each mode captures a different motion in the same continuous process, and together they explain why the shelves of any library are never quite finished being organised.

What do you think? If a brand-new field like data science were forming today, would you describe its origin more as fusion of older disciplines or as distillation from many compound subjects? And as artificial intelligence reshapes research across every field, do you think Ranganathan’s modes are still enough to describe how tomorrow’s knowledge will form?

References

1. https://ebooks.inflibnet.ac.in/lisp2/chapter/subjects-and-disciplines-modes-of-formation-of-subjects/
2. https://www.isibang.ac.in/~bisu/paper/ModesOfGrowthOfSubjects_PreprintVersion.pdf
3. https://www.srels.org/index.php/sjim/article/view/49297
4. https://www.lisquiz.com/2025/09/modes-of-formation-of-subjects.html
5. https://research.ncsu.edu/rdo/the-difference-between-multidisciplinary-interdisciplinary-and-convergence-research/
6. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048733324000751
7. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK22616/
8. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-024-03044-y