A beginning June 11, 2006
Posted by reivers in Boundaries.trackback
On boundaries is a joint effort between reivers and gesta. It is our first attempt, hence the current simplicity of the site. We shall see how it goes before making things more complex than necessary.
The point of the title reflects the differences between the authors. reivers is a scientist, of very theoretical bent. gesta is a medievalist, perfectly happy with the description of "mathematically challenged". It's often said that there is a boundary or a dividing line between the two approaches. We shall see how much it comes across. More importantly, I hope that we'll see how much of that boundary is really artificial.
[...] From: http://border.wordpress.com/2006/06/11/beginning/ [...]
The following excerpt is from a paper by Paul Celliers:
In it he talks about the role of boundries and their formulation. I thought the following section would be an interesting bit to inject into the discussion.
It begins with a quote which Celliers included in his paper.
Zeleny[
From Khalil, E.L. & Boulding, K.E. (eds.) (1996) Evolution, Order and Complexity. London:
Routledge] (p. 133):
“All social systems, and thus all living systems, create, maintain, and
degrade their own boundaries. These boundaries do not separate but intimately connect the system with its environment. They do not have to be just physical or topological, but are primarily functional, behavioral, and communicational. They are not “perimeters” but functional constitutive components of a given system.”
As an example of this logic, think of the eardrum. It forms the boundary between the inner and the outer ear, but at the same time, it exists in order to let the sound waves through. As a matter of fact, if it was not there, the sound waves would not be able to get through at all! If the boundary is seen as an interface participating in constituting the system, we will be more concerned with the margins of the system, and perhaps less with what appears to be central.
There was a very good conference called the ‘Permeability of Boundaries’ which examined the boundaries, or perceived boundaries between art, archaeology, belief and folklore. It was published as:
Wallis and Lymer (eds.), A Permeability of Boundaries?: New Approaches to the Archaeology of Art, Religion and Folklore (British Archaeological Reports (BAR) International Series, 2001). Academically, I have found that it is very difficult to feel comfortable in an arena where the majority of your colleagues, no matter what they think of your research, will want to pin you down as a something-ist when that is the boundary by which you definitely don’t want to feel confined.
I agree with much of the quote from Celliers given by G Robertson. In a sense what I was hoping was that this blog would show how much of the boundary between the “arts” and the “sciences” is socially constructed, to (mis)use some of the language that I have absorbed.
Where I disagree probably indicates my specific scientific training: I believe that talking about “systems” and “environments” is always dependent on the model that you are using. In the eardrum example the authors are concentrating on the human / animal as the system, and want to know how the environment (everything else) affects the system through the eardrum. To me, the eardrum is just converting the information contained in the gasdynamics of the airwaves into the information contained in the brain. That is, there is no “environment”; just information in one system being changed into a form that can be interpreted in another system.
So if we decide where the boundaries are and how they appear, we should be able to move them and demystify them. More importantly, we should be able to understand how information changes when viewed on different sides of the boundary. I hope some of that will come out…