Worlds Hidden in Plain Sight by David C. Krakauer

Author:David C. Krakauer [Krakauer, David C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Complexity, Science
Publisher: Santa Fe Institute
Published: 2019-10-08T14:06:58+00:00

16: Transcience: Disciplines and the Advance of Plenary Knowledge

David C. Krakauer

SFI

SFI Bulletin, 2011

“Everyone takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world.”—Arthur Schopenhauer

Scientists, a risk-averse group, tend to eschew announcing their larger aims. After all, it is not entirely licit or proper to say, “We are trying to discern the laws of biology, or why social systems might proceed through sequences of increasing complexity,” preferring instead remarks like “We are interested in gene regulation, or how large molecules are synthesized, or why the ancestral Puebloans stored maize.” We feel that the larger objectives come across as grandiose, and so we retreat into prosaic descriptions of the work we do. In other words, we retreat into disciplinarity, a comfortable and familiar zone of tribal and historical cohesiveness, where the consolation of crowds helps to justify our activities. There is nothing wrong in cleaving to operational particulars, and for those interested in detail, these provide valuable information about what we do. The cost of this maneuver is that it restricts the scope of our inquiries and causes us to lose sight of the numerous extradisciplinary ideas and methods that have contributed to (and will be required to further) our progress through the thorny branches of science.

As we have systematically overcome our ignorance of the cosmos, we have pushed at the boundaries of natural phenomena, intermittently reaching critical points where the methods of a field have proven inadequate for further progress. New ideas, techniques, and devices imported from other fields have been required to squeeze through explanatory bottlenecks. Sometimes this fusion of fields has been of sufficient magnitude to warrant the creation of a new discipline (genetics, ecology, etc.), and in time these absorb the insights of others. In this way, scientific disciplines possess something akin to a life cycle, with periods of rapid growth, maturation, sex, and finally senescence and even death. As the pace of life has accelerated, so has the production of disciplines and the rate of their extinction.

Scientists, as a professional order, were not recognized before 1837, when William Whewell coined the term in his History of the Inductive Sciences. As for science itself (excepting those who locate its true origins in the European scientific revolution of the seventeenth century), it is now widely accepted that scientific activities—meaning systematic forms of inductive–deductive process—have been ever present in human society. Best known of the pluralists is perhaps Joseph Needham, who in his Science and Civilization in China (first volume appeared in 1954, coauthored with Wang Ling) went to great lengths to demonstrate evidence of science and technology long before the European Renaissance, extending into the early millennia BC in China. These are efforts at locating concepts; however, we seek to explore their transmutation. It is not so much when and where science and scientists first appeared that interest us but the pace of scientific transformation. The geocentric model of the solar system proposed by Ptolemy in the Alamagest in the second century remained unchanged right up

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.