To Loet and Marcus: let us agree that disciplines are based on "communities of inquiry" that follow strict laws of "intellectual economy". Our limited capabilities force us to establish disciplinary specialization, and that's good, but a healthy knowledge system would also establish quite many "vertical" multidisciplines integrating the "horizontal" disciplines that apply simultaneously into concrete subjects (as happens in eg, medicine, engineering, anthrolpology, etc.).
Dear Pedro and colleagues, Empirically, we witness the rise of a new business model of publishing scholarly journals that are cross-disciplinary, such as PLoS One. See for more details my recent paper: Loet Leydesdorff & Wouter de Nooy, Can <http://arxiv.org/abs/1502.00229> "Hot Spots" in the Sciences Be Mapped Using the Dynamics of Aggregated Journal-Journal Citation Relations?, Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (in press); http://arxiv.org/abs/1502.00229 This is a major development in the communication dynamics since 2007. Furthermore, I don’t think that the metaphor of “communities of inquiry” is the right one. The communication is not limited by individual capacities, but supra-individual (at the relatively global level). The dynamics is not to be reduced to the interactions among communicators, but is due to the interaction among communications and in this sense second-order. Behavioral (including biological) aspects are not so relevant. Offline, Soren suggested that this can all be modeled using bio-semiosis. I somewhat agree with the semiosis; but I don’t understand what the “bio” adds. This usually goes with references to Charles Pierce, but that does not really help. It seems to me that one has to add to semiosis a dose of structuralism (Parsons, Luhmann). The selection mechanisms are to be specified; these are not “natural”, but culturally constructed, fallible and probabilistic. Best, Loet _____ Loet Leydesdorff Professor Emeritus, University of Amsterdam Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR) <mailto:l...@leydesdorff.net> l...@leydesdorff.net ; <http://www.leydesdorff.net/> http://www.leydesdorff.net/ Honorary Professor, <http://www.sussex.ac.uk/spru/> SPRU, University of Sussex; Guest Professor <http://www.zju.edu.cn/english/> Zhejiang Univ., Hangzhou; Visiting Professor, <http://www.istic.ac.cn/Eng/brief_en.html> ISTIC, Beijing; Visiting Professor, <http://www.bbk.ac.uk/> Birkbeck, University of London; <http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ych9gNYAAAAJ&hl=en> http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ych9gNYAAAAJ&hl=en
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