RE: [Fis] consilience of limited observers

Dear colleagues,

There seems to me a hidden assumption in the concept of "consilience" namely
that the sciences would be hierarchically organized and/or from a common
origin. Aleks's approach already indicates that there may a texture with
woofs and warps. The domain is not two-dimensional, but multi-dimensional.
The sciences operate in specialties which are juxta-posed to one another and
which exhibit also 'life-'cycles. ('Life' has to be put between quotation
marks because there is not necessarily a cycle from birth to death.) The
multi-dimensional texture is interwoven with most activities at the nodes.

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. For
example, Stan will tell us one story about the organization of the sciences
and Aleks another. It is almost predictable. As is my story! :-) But I can
back it up with some empirical materials about citation patterns among
scientific journals. Of course, one may nevertheless prefer the
philosophical stories. :-)

With kind regards,

Loet
  _____

Loet Leydesdorff
Amsterdam School of Communications Research (ASCoR)
Kloveniersburgwal 48, 1012 CX Amsterdam
Tel.: +31-20- 525 6598; fax: +31-20- 525 3681
loet@leydesdorff.net ; http://www.leydesdorff.net/

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Received on Mon Oct 18 19:21:27 2004