Dear Malcolm,
Many thanks for all your contributions --we have enjoyed a very exciting
session and a very elegant chairing of yours. No doubt that the consilience
theme will continue to reverberate in the list (as usual we will keep open
the discussion, more or less relaxed until a new session starts,
tentatively around the middle of January "On Networks").
The homework on consilience you propose us in your last message is much
appreciated, at least I consider that the notion deserves far more
attention within the rather empty discussions of today on
inter-multi-pluri-trans-disciplinarity. When you say:
>The problem with inferences to the best explanation is that this notion is
>mysterious until we are told what counts as an explanation, and what makes
>one explanation better than another. The trouble is that different people
>have different intuitions about what is explanatory. Cartesians refused
>to accept Newton's theory was explanatory because it postulated
>instantaneous action-at-a-distance. Today, many people refuse to say that
>quantum mechanics is explanatory because it is provably inconsistent with
>common cause explanation; that is, the postulation of local hidden
variables.
The "same" problem applies (I venture) to the discussions on
interdisciplinarity. Confronting some facts or phenomena that show
'marginal' aspects not explainable within some disciplinary background, at
some point one has to make a "leap" and transport those aspects to another
disciplinary domain. Why? Where? A sort of consilience mysteriousness would
guide the practitioner, when he/she performs that creativity jump which
translates the unknown to another realm intuitively showing new explanatory
possibilities. It really reminds our own "emotions", when in a twinkling
they transport us from one to another mood of action/sentience... At this
point one can also argue on the importance of scholars in the scientific
system, as usually these consilience jumps are performed around figures,
environments, and ways of thinking that explicitly try to put (some)
disciplines together.
And I briefly return to the "clouds". We usually take the sciences as
static fields or levels, more or less separated among themselves and
separated from concrete societies, or perhaps as a very elegant
supracultural decoration of modern societies. However, in a radical sense,
the clouds are not hovering above societies, but viceversa. In the
historical perspective societies would be literally hanging out from those
volatile, miscible clouds of knowledge emanating from them. It is like in
Escher's engrave "Celestial Castle" --or in Swift's suspended island --
which can be seen in our own fis web pages: the foundations are in the sky.
Then, survival for entities, institutions, companies, etc., would depend
ultimately on how they are collectively managing their strictly limited
"ties" to the cloudy world of knowledge.
best
Pedro
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Received on Thu Dec 9 13:22:51 2004
