RE: [Fis] consilience of limited observers

Loet wrote:
> Thus, the metaphor of "consilience" is, in my opinion, misleading.
> Similarly, a reduction in the form of a hierarchy does not
> sufficiently appreciate that the classification is a
> reduction of the complexity which tells us more about the
> analyst than about the multi-dimensional space.

Loet's approach is scientific, empirical: he is observing consilience
happening, the patterns of scientific communities, what they read, what they
cite. These patterns are complex, tangled cobwebs, labyrinthine paths of
thought. Of course, Malcolm's equalities, Stan's hierarchies, Pedro's
informational spines and my tools cannot pretend to be able to capture this
complexity. But I'm not sure this is the goal.

That I'm referring to tools is not a coincidence, I'm an engineer. I am not
trying to capture or describe the existing complexity, but I'd like to
provide tools that would be as widely applicable as possible. Stan is
seeking to provide a framework that would make the self-similarity through
space and time explicit. Malcolm studies ideas that are shared across
disciplines, such as hypotheses and models. Pedro would like to transfer
discoveries from one discipline to another, by establishing
interdisciplinary nexuses that solve some abstract problems. (I hope I have
not oversimplified too much.)

Loet is on the descriptive side, but there is also the normative one. The
normative side is not trying to *describe* connections, but to *transform*
implied similarities into explicit connections, to establish new
connections, to defragment, to get rid of the redundancy, to exploit the
synergies. The goal is in getting rid of unnecessary complexity.

Aleks

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Received on Tue Oct 19 20:34:57 2004