DISUNITY OF SCIENCE

Dear fis colleagues,

Some comments of past days could be related to the topic of "causality"
--how causality is distributed among the different entities that compose
the world, and how science manages to capture it and to build "causal
explanations". Quite a few philosophical debates surround these topics, so
what follows has to be taken --am affraid-- with something else than a
grain of salt:

1. Assuming a pluralistic stance ("promiscuous realism" for philosopher J.
DuprŽ) causality does not stem only from the microphysical or the chemical
real. All objects -entities- both large and small have reality and causal
efficacy. Thus causality becomes a too scattered and variable feature to be
tracked down in a logical way along the compositional layers of existence.
Existential turbulence (the chaotic mixing of scales and dynamics) impinges
massively and makes up for the famous "butterfly effect" and in general for
the interplay of mutual order/disorder islands in inanimate nature.

2. Beyond turbulence and its apparently pernicious effects on causality
(actually it is the oposite: it enriches the world with a fascinating
variability) a new source of problems stem from the phenomenon of life. In
my opinion, with life there is the emergence of both "information" and
"agency"... the living agent is immersed in a cycle of
self-production-degradation activities, it has to perform regularly
"abduction" operations upon its environment (and doing so it extracts
"info"), it enacts new laws that intersect with natural laws, it can relate
to other agents and create higher level ones, etc.

3. As a result, the "informational turbulence" of life enters into the
causality game, and generates the amazing tapestry of organizational and
social phenomena that so efficiently master the inanimate nature. This high
level causality has its own rules, in general abductive (informational)
ones. Abduction is a central operation: myriads of futile items are
discarded and only a few relevant ones count as information. If it is so,
any conception of a seamless web of causality is alien to the real
individual and social practice of organisms in their handling of info
phenomena.

4. Science becomes the rather limited enterprise of building causal
explanations --whenever and wherever possible. Then the problem with
reductionism and the like (defenders of the unity of science) is that they
conceal the most interesting aspect of the system of the sciences: how the
scarce islands of order that we can capture in the world have to be used in
any imaginable combination and mixing in order to tackle the turbulence of
real world problems. Unfortunately, in the name of a myth (an ideology?) we
have been left without any notice or any interesting discussion about the
genuine Art of interplaying perspectives that is at the very center of the
scientific activities...

If the above has any consistency --what I doubt- one of the missions of
info science would precisely be throwing a new light upon that fascinating
info game that we scientists individually and collectively perform.

bests

Pedro

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Pedro C. Marijuan. TEL 34 976 761927, FAX --761861 and -- 762111
Dept. Ingen. Electronica y Comunicaciones, CPS Universidad de Zaragoza,
Maria de Luna 3, Zaragoza 50015, SPAIN
email: marijuan@posta.unizar.es
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Received on Wed Jan 27 14:04:31 1999