[Fis] Consilience: Writing on the Clouds

Dear colleagues,

Could the "cloud" metaphor of citation networks be useful as an overall
contemplation of science? Let me try.

Along that metaphor, we earthbound scientists find ourselves "writing on
the clouds". It is not so easy getting access to that celestial
quasi-Platonic realm, rather it becomes a hard work which involves crafting
pieces of theoretical and experimental stuff into a consistent whole, maybe
in cooperation with other parties (or very luckily, just "copy-paste"!),
and then it has to pass the scrutiny of a publishing "jury", and if
accepted it will appear somewhere, in one publishing fragment or chunk of
those clouds, with the hope that future links of new arrivals to the cloud
will strengthen it... otherwise it will evaporate into oblivion, though
fortunately a written record grants some hope of long-lasting permanence.

In this "ascension" of our individual piece of knowledge up to one of these
clouds in the skies, quite many social-community aspects are involved
--aren't they?

Almost symmetrically, we might try to observe the "descend" of our piece of
knowledge into the realms of social action. Perhaps a far bigger assembly
of social-community processes get involved in this reverse motion. The
social use of the stocks of knowledge appears far more haphazard, complex
and branched than the relatively "simple" creation. For instance, Who makes
use today of the stock of scientiific (technologic) pieces of knowledge?
Depending on the concrete disciplinary cloud we watch (imagine some
environmental issue, or climatic change), we could write down an unending
list of other applied researchers, technologists, entrepeneurial,
institutional, administration and political bodies... Luckily, our piece of
knowledge will fertilize the action of a number of heterogeneous social
parties. The bureaucratic fashion of today about that very "translation"
---how research becomes development and innovation. Contemporary societies,
are loudly demanding that the clouds, both nationally and internationally,
produce a lot of descends ("rain")...

In this metaphor, analytical philosophy has been devoted to "within cloud"
processes and laws (inner conceptual structure), while continental
philosophy has approached (often ideologically) to the winds and currents
and other general climatic conditions. In info science, around the term
consilience, who knows whether we might put together a new vision
highlighting the ascend/descend crucial movements.

best

Pedro

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Received on Wed Nov 24 13:57:53 2004