Dear James and colleagues,
I have a few comments to the discussion colophon. First, it seems difficult
to explain something which has already happened. For example, one cannot
test statistically whether what happened could also have been expected. In
the tradition, one distinguished more carefully between explanatory
(nomothetic) sciences and hermeneutic understanding. Thus, you may wish to
adapt the metaphors.
The quest for an explanation of the emergence of modernity in terms of a
single cause seems not productive to me. Marx, for example, considered new
forms of book-keeping as crucial, Weber attributed this revolution to the
Protestant ethics, and others have pointed to the effects of the printing
press. What most of these writers agree upon is that there is a phase
transition between the early 15th and late 16th century. An additional
degree of freedom was developed in the systems of interhuman coordination.
We have an intuition (e.g., based on artificial life) that a hypercycle can
emerge if a number of uncertainties operate at the same time. At the minimum
one would need three, but perhaps even more. Why three? Because only a
system with three sources of variance operating selectively upon one another
can generate redundancy (perhaps, measurable as a negative value of the
mutual information in three dimensions). In discussing the Triple Helix of
university-industry-government relations we have called this hypercycle an
overlay with as an additional communication routine is added to the system
and then changes the systems dynamics of all underlying routines.
For example, age-long traditions were inverted into different institutional
spheres such as autonomous sciences, liberal capitalism, civil liberties,
etc. Niklas Luhmann has called this the functional differentiation of
society. In my opinion, what was functionally differentiated were the codes
of communication; for example, between science and religion. Some of this
can perhaps be traced back to the struggle of the Investiture which broke
the hegemony of a single order, and left agents with room to make up their
own mind. Initially as an imitatio Christi -- that is, no longer prescribed
by Rome, but as an individual task, but then generalized to other domains.
During the Roman empire and early Christianity, this interpretation of the
Gospel was not yet possible because of the worldy constraints, but once the
system (cosmology) began to tear apart, further erosion could not be
prevented.
I am not offering this as an explanation, but as a reading of history. I am
doubtful about those messages which claim more objectivity to their
statements than such an informed reading. As Whitehead noted: a science
which does not forget its past, is doomed. Probably, a kind of Scylla and
Charybdis between which one has to travel reflexively.
Best wishes,
Loet
_
Loet Leydesdorff
Professor, University of Amsterdam
Amsterdam School of Communications Research (ASCoR),
Kloveniersburgwal 48, 1012 CX Amsterdam.
Tel.: +31-20- 525 6598; fax: +31-842239111
mailto:l...@leydesdorff.net l...@leydesdorff.net ;
http://www.leydesdorff.net/ http://www.leydesdorff.net/
From: fis-boun...@listas.unizar.es [mailto:fis-boun...@listas.unizar.es] On
Behalf Of Pedro C. Marijuan
Sent: Thursday, March 24, 2011 12:02 PM
To: fis@listas.unizar.es
Subject: [Fis] Discussion colophon--James Hannam
Dear all,
Thank you very much to Pedro for asking me to suggest a discussion for the
list and to everyone else for indulging me. As a historian, I have learnt
that questions I naively thought were quite simple have turned out to be
very complicated indeed. The purpose of history, I think, is to explain the
past. It is not just a collection of facts (one damn thing after another)
or even attempting to find out what really happened (although it does help
if we can do this). Historians want to ask why? and how? as well as
what?
Among historians of science, there are two camps. The larger one examines
science as a cultural artefact within a particular historical milieu. It
seeks to answer questions like why did people believe what they believed?,
why did they practice science in the way they did? and what did they hope
science could achieve? Historians in this camp tend to be specialists in a
particular area. They want to see the world through the eyes of their
historical agents. Questions about whether a particular scientific theory
is true or corresponds to objective reality are not very relevant. What
matters is the way people in the past saw things. We need to understand
them.
A second, smaller camp of historians of science where I have pitched my own
tent want to know what caused modern science. They recognise the enormous
utility of scientific discovery and seek to explain how mankind came by this
wonderful tool. In other words, they seek a theory of the historical
origins of science. For this camp, questions about
