> Entropy and energy are particular concepts that, at an
> abstract level, can be applied to many areas. If you allow me
> to oversimplify: in physics, energy is, well, energy; in
> economics, energy is money; in biology, energy is food; in
> chemistry, energy is heat; in psychology, energy is motivation; etc.
Dear Aleks (and colleagues,)
Your two points about using consilience heuristically and using metaphors
from the one discipline in the other context, hang together, don't they?
If, in biology, energy is food, and in economics, energy is money, is food
than also money? Or is money motivation? I agree that the abstraction can
help us to develop a heuristics, but one always needs a special theory for
understanding the substantive development in a dynamics.
Stan's model, for example, raises the question of whether our society is
"mature" or "senescent". Or should we say that the European society is
"senescent" and the American one "premature"? :-) It seems to me that one
always has to write these metaphorical uses of terms between quotation
marks. The mathematics indeed may be helpful for the translation.
More specifically in relation to the different notions of "entropy", I would
like to argue that the mathematical theory of communication can be
recombined with special theories of communication, but one should expect
differences (!) in the semantics. These semantics may additionally hang
together at the unformalized (informal) level. Thus, there can be all kinds
of criss crossing and overlap among the scientific discourses. The
mathematics helps at the "epi" level, but not at the "meta" because the
various discourse can be expected to develop without much coordination or
hierarchy.
These statement can be empirically informed, for example, by studying the
aggregated citation patterns among journals. Journals in specialties cluster
together, but there is hardly any citation traffic among disciplines.
(General science journals like Nature and Science have a special position.)
Each discourse develops in its own setting. There may be more general
patterns of how discourses develop. While a biological model may be helpful,
the analogy remains limited to the heuristic functions. Otherwise, we end up
with socio-darwinism. Actually, I heard Wilson once giving a lecture, and it
was pretty close to that.
With kind regards,
Loet
>
> In these examples, I am examining the consilience not of
> hypotheses, but of scientific "tools" (calculus: applicable
> whenever there are variables and infinitesimal quantities)
> and "patterns" (second law of thermodynamics:
> applicable whenever there is a notion of energy and a notion
> of space).
>
> Best regards,
>
> Aleks
>
> --
> mag. Aleks Jakulin
> http://www.ailab.si/aleks/
> Artificial Intelligence Laboratory,
> Faculty of Computer and Information Science, University of Ljubljana.
>
> ====
> For reference:
> > Whewell distinguishes four tests of scientific hypotheses:
> >
> > (1) The Prediction of Tried Instances (used in the
> > construction of the hypothesis).
> >
> > (2) The Prediction of Untried Instances;
> >
> > (3) The Consilience of Inductions; and
> >
> > (4) The Convergence of a Theory towards Simplicity and Unity.
>
> _______________________________________________
> fis mailing list
> fis@listas.unizar.es
> http://webmail.unizar.es/mailman/listinfo/fis
>
_______________________________________________
fis mailing list
fis@listas.unizar.es
http://webmail.unizar.es/mailman/listinfo/fis
Received on Fri Sep 17 07:52:22 2004
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.8 : Mon 07 Mar 2005 - 10:24:47 CET