Re: [Fis] Consilience: Writing on the Clouds

A couple of thoughts on Pedro's posting.
(1) I have found that the liklihood of one's efforts reaching the clouds is
strongly tied to one's connections with other workers. No cloud without
lots of water!
(2) On the return flow to nurture technology, this is vastly increased by
storm conditions. The metaphor for storm in this case would be war.

STAN

>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 Fri Nov 26 16:52:00 2004