RE: [Fis] Consilience & patchiness of knowledge

Dear Loet and others,

Thanks for the emphasis on cross-reference networking in your last message.
It is a fascinating aspect of science that maybe has not received yet all
the attention it deserves. The Cartesian metaphor (three axes) where you
inscribe the phenomenon is fine, but in my opinion more reflection is
needed. Just watching the impressive citation-maps among the many thousand
publications covered in the Current Contents, as appeared in the work of
Small & Garfield (1985) "The geography of science: disciplinary and
national mappings" --the founders of the ISI, and at that time editors of
the CC--- one is left with a sense of generalized "ecosystemic"
relationships among the whole domains of scientific knowledge.

Actaully, networks of references contribute to define domains of knowledge,
disciplinary boundaries and interdisciplinary mixings. They represent
shared reflections, thought collective --rejecting, affirming,
complementing, extending, etc., each other ideas. The very "cloudiness" of
the sciences, thus.

And by following the reference-network track, our collective system of
thought would appear very close to the cellular networks themselves: gene
networks, protein networks... Then, does our global system of knowledge
share the "patchiness" inherent to biological knowledge repositories---genomes?

best

Pedro

_______________________________________________
fis mailing list
fis@listas.unizar.es
http://webmail.unizar.es/mailman/listinfo/fis
Received on Wed Nov 17 13:55:58 2004