Dear FISers, One of the problems we confront in science, and particularly in our domain of information science, corresponds to the relationship between the "theory less" and the "theory full" territories. Some realms of phenomena are very well covered theoretically --to the full satisfaction of the knowledge user-- while others are awfully covered, only rich in discrepancies. Then, one strategy is to stand up on the great theory and directly try to expand it, say treating the theory less as a potential target to be transformed in theory full. Another strategy is to go to the most interesting or strategic phenomena of the theory less, irrespective of the distance from the theory full, and try to find there new concepts, relationships, experiences, quantifications etc. which potentially may conduce to new theoretical developments in the future--or not. Both strategies have different payoffs and may be considered as complementary.
For instance, if we focus in communication, several well-known theories work exceedingly well in some particular, restricted settings (great Shannon!). But thinking in cell-to-cell communication, organismic communication, person-to-person communication, social means of communication, internal flows of information/communication in institutions... the theory less dominates overwhelmingly. Going with our neat little theories everywhere is, in general, of no avail. The alternative idea, extrapolating into our modest discussion list, is the mixing of the theoretical and the empirical explorations. In this sense, the last session was devoted to QBism, the previous one was an attempt to empirically gauge the social relationships around the person (the "sociotype"), and the next session to start in a few days will deal with new phenomena of collective intelligence: The Future of IT-Mediated Crowds. Needless to say, FIS parties with interesting themes--empirical or theoretical-- are invited to present in future sessions. Best greetings to all, particularly to John Prpic in anticipation of an exciting discusion, ---Pedro -- ------------------------------------------------- Pedro C. Marijuán Grupo de Bioinformación / Bioinformation Group Instituto Aragonés de Ciencias de la Salud Centro de Investigación Biomédica de Aragón (CIBA) Avda. San Juan Bosco, 13, planta X 50009 Zaragoza, Spain Tfno. +34 976 71 3526 (& 6818) [email protected] http://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/ ------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ fis mailing list [email protected] https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
