Proposition

Writes the relation on the line, so two boxes and the link between them read back as one sentence you can check.

You have a page of notes about why the same argument with your brother keeps happening. Boxes, arrows, a circle around the word that seems to start it. A week later you look at the page and cannot say what any of the arrows meant. One of them might have meant causes. One might have meant is the same as. You drew the shape of your thinking and left the thinking out.

Proposition writes the relation on the line. Two things, and a labeled link between them, so the picture reads as a sentence: fear of mistakes keeps you out of unscripted speaking. The label is the entire point. An unlabeled arrow can mean six different things, and you will read whichever one you already believe. A labeled link makes a claim, and a claim can be argued with, checked against a week of notes, or found to be wrong.

There are three renderers. A concept map is the handmade one: your boxes, your linking phrases, usually drawn while you are still learning the thing. A knowledge graph fixes the relation types in advance so every thing gets one node and collects each statement made about it, which is what makes it searchable later. A semantic network stays close to meaning, with links like is a kind of, is part of, and is heard as, and it is the version to reach for when two people are using one word for two things.

Reach for this family when your understanding of something is fuzzy in a way you cannot point at. Writing 12 relations forces 12 small decisions you have been skipping. It is weak wherever the answer is a shape rather than a sentence: a proposition map will not tell you which node is central, which link bridges two clusters, or how far apart two ideas sit. Scale is the other limit. Past roughly 20 links the sentences stop being read, and you are left with a hairball wearing captions.