FW: [Fis] Consilience: Writing on the Clouds

> We have to start in the middle of the human social life world where
knowledge is created and later cultivated to science. All the critical
social studies of science shows us that it is very difficult to get behind
that social prerequisite for science and get to a truth of a world beyond;
be it the social reality, the real nature, the pure consciousness or the
core of life and body hood.

Dear Soeren and colleagues,

The problem in the above is "we have to". If one starts from your
perspective of "embeddedness", one can no longer move behind that
perspective towards an analysis of the "intangibles" which are partly
embedded and partly not. Actually, one can specify the conditions of
bifurcation in this co-evolution: when the diffusion rate becomes larger
than twice the size of the production race one expects a saddle point and
thus a bifurcation (Turing). Perhaps, this has happened with the Internet.
It most surely happened after the invention of the printing press: when one
can print the Bible, the society changes.

>From a historical perspective, however, the system has to remain "nearly
decomposable" since it would otherwise no longer be able to manifest itself
historically. Thus, one obtains a metastable unbalance between stabilization
and globalization. We live in this transition. But there is no a priori
reason to take an a priori side.

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 Fri Dec 3 08:05:58 2004