[Fis] 'Locale' Knowledge

Dear FIS colleagues,

Apologies for the two blank messages (my Eudora is rebellious --with my
incompetence).

I was trying to add a few lines on Stan's comments, and also on Loet's and
Jerry's.

The term 'local' applied to science may create problems and a suspicious
proximity to the postmodern criticisms (that I do not share, or perhaps at
a very long distance). But the same would happen in my opinion with the
term 'global', and it is even worse because of the load of dogmatic
self-deception that it so easily conveys. Maybe 'locales' used as an
adjective could be more adequate to what I was trying to convey.

Therefore, scientific knowledge would partake a retinue of 'locale'
attributes or tags concerning, for instance, the author, the communication
vehicle, the institution, the 'school', the culture, the epoch, the
'discipline'... The particular pieces of knowledge we may individually
produce would gain their credibility, respectability and currency by
getting caught in an unending circulation among the other locales: other
authors, schools, disciplines (eg, 'references', 'citations', personal and
doctrinary influences, interdisciplinary extensions, 'imperialism' of
disciplines, etc.).

In actuality, we scientists, at least in most fields of natural science,
are taking locality very seriously, and are continuously struggling to
transcend it as much as possible. Precisely, the monumental effort we are
collectively making to transcend it becomes an important aspect that
distinguish our profession from other modes of human experience: artistic,
religious ones, etc. (where circulation is deprived of almost all of the
tough conditions of logical rigor, experiment, and repeatability we put in
our scientific exchanges). But those very stringent conditions also
'alienate' ourselves from those quite subtle realms of human experience.

The absences and needs we feel along our personal participation in that
unceasing collective circulation of knowledge mosaics might underlie some
of the ideas recently discussed by Viktoras (cultural distortions and
unified views), Luis (science and humanities breach), and Jerry's system
taxonomy (that could contains several problems: at least, extending the
peculiarities of our knowledge and information flows towards other
inanimate realms, as I understand from 'knowing' molecules 'exchanging
information', may be confusing for our efforts of clarifying the
foundations of info phenomena) and the 'be' in Loet's approach .

best regards

Pedro

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Received on Tue Jan 13 14:14:48 2004