Dear FIS colleagues, The recent messages from Joe, Stan, and Bob Ulanowicz (and many previous ones), with whom I wholeheartedly agree, may evidence that "the making of a new theory rarely occurs in isolation. Rather it depends on the support of colleagues, social networks and interactions within the scientific community, as well as the power of the theory itself." (Berry & Browne, 2008, about Darwin and Wallace confluence, or Charlie and Fred). Well, the ongoing discussion on categorization may demand a new metaphysics (as Joe & Bob have pointed), however given that factually any discipline becomes "metaphysical" when contemplated from the vantage point of another sufficiently distant discipline, I would claim that the pretended info science we seek becomes per se a new metaphysics --and further, that any advancement on our individual-social processes of categorization might preferentially come from taking support on the action-perception cycle that relevant neuroscientists claim as the foundations of our "automated cognition".
Neuroscientist J. Fuster was recently advocating the "cognit" substituting for the "concept". Any cognit, (also following Collins & Marijuan), would have "two ears" or two sides to be handled from: the motor side and the perceptual side, always one of them playing a dominat part... Applied to language, this means that any pure "noun" category would inevitably be surrounded by a shadow of multiple related actions, and any "verb" would be surrounded by a shadow of potentially subordinated objects to be applied. The very neural programs to organize motor action take care of the loops or trajectories among the nodes and the networks of these cognits, organized by dominance and later on subject to grammar and logical refined constraints. But in our social linguistic games we continue to use this mixed, inner nature of our cognit/categories for metaphors, games of words, jokes, etc. Contexts delimitate very well what partial shadows are permissible and survive in order to create the ad hoc meaning. Along the advancement of science we have arranged meaning construction in a rigorous way. Explicit logics (and writing!) have somehow dispersed all the shadows and have left but the pure categorical abstractions. At the same time, mathematical constructions have completely substituted for "action", working as a sort of "universal virtual constructor". Together with logics, they have created new forms of relating perception and action, new realms to configure social meanings as experimental knowledges---terrific ones in order to explore and to simulate nature, create technologies, etc. Paradoxically, by killing the cognits' inner shadows, they have really left in the shadow the individual and collective processes related to the "meaning" part: limitations of the individual, formulation and circulation of ideas, discussions, consensus, meetings and congresses, disciplinary "tribes"... If the extent to which these expostulations have a grain of truth, it would also be part of the mission of info science to cast light upon all those shadows, to try to enlarge and re-naturalize categorization and logics, to throw a helping hand for a better social use of the stock of knowledge beyond mere pragmatics (those formidable 7.000 disciplinary fields to combine and recombine) , etc. best regards Pedro PS. From Stan, "Hierarchy theorists propose.. that higher levels make ensemble representations of lower level configurations, while lower levels are affected by higher level informational constraints in the form of impinging boundary conditions." It is really intriguing; would it apply to the division of work among the cells in a multicell organism? Who is lower and higher level there? Is the neuron "higher level" than the hepatocist, the brain than the liver? _______________________________________________ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
