Big Pictures for Science

A big picture is an abstract overview of a large, relevant environment of a special part of a cultivated activity.1 NOTE | An overview is informational, it is an information item, a physical entity that is informative about the things to which it refers, here, parts of (a) cultivated activit(y)(ies). It may refer to parts of a single cultivated activity or to any coherent collection of them, up to civilized life as a whole. Reference is often to some standard collection, for example, the visual arts, sports, the service sector, environmental science, the military-industrial complex, etc., as reflected in the use of the definite article in the phrase ‘you have got to look at the big picture’. The standard collections are so varied that it is a small step to allow reference to any sufficiently specified collection. This makes the expression ‘a big picture’ meaningful, containing the indefinite article, as referring to one of many possible information items. The part of a cultivated activity whose place in some big picture is of interest can be a special instance, case, result, manifestation, event, characteristic thing or entity (for example, a resource that is used in the activity, see main text), etc. Pertinent to science, we can now imagine a big picture which is a structurally simple overview without detail showing only important things or entities and their relations, in short, an abstract overview, for example, of an entire scientific discipline, or a multi- and interdisciplinary collection, as a large, relevant environment of a special part of the science that is done in them, the part being connected by relations to the elements of the overview, identifying topics of subsequent study. Concrete examples would be a big picture for science that is an abstract overview of biology as a large, relevant environment of new theory of cellular aging, or such an overview of the multi- and interdisciplinary field of agricultural science as an environment for a response to a pest epidemic. Similar examples of uses of big pictures for science have are expected to materialize in future science. Although they will be seen to suggest themselves increasingly strongly with the growing content of BPfS, they do not properly belong to it. A big picture for a cultivated activity, here, science, is seen as having various resource qualities2 NOTE | There are words whose importance merits having their dictionary entry assigned to a philosopher with a knack for etymology, a keen perception of usage, and a lively interest in pragmatics. This holds most strongly for words that are very frequently used today and whose usage has an interesting history. Analysis of their meaning can pose a real conundrum. The following is BPfS’s attempt at such analysis aiming to defend its ample use of a common word for a slightly novel purpose. Our point of departure is that if it is observed that the contexts in which a word is used have become substantially varied it may be concluded that the word names a general concept. This concept is powerful if it is informative and has an important role in a broad range of discourse. The relevant case here that has all the above mentioned qualities is the word resource. Its classical Latin root is surgo, the literal definition of which is to rise up; but it already had a figurative meaning as well, to come into action. The recurrence prefix re also stems from antiquity. In early 17th century French the word ressource had come to refer to something that people regularly needed, supplying a want or deficiency. Two centuries later, with the industrial revolution, the word began to be used to refer to any means available to a business, whose growing dependence on tools and machines entailed attribution of ‘tool quality’. An important reference of the word resource remained the one to simple means that people could run out of and that are vital for sustaining life, like fuel, money, or drinking water. But the new technology enriched the notion of resources to include business necessities for working efficiently and competitively, which are vital for survival in the market place, permitting the comparison. Resource variety grew rapidly. Organizers of advanced cultivated activity were increasingly challenged to keep track of it. After the 20th century adoption of the managerial concept of human resources the general idea of a resource had extended to encompass anything used in constructive activity that does not become a part of the result, and of which more, or new, identically functioning instantiations can always be found, or made, so that a resource, as a kind of thing, can always be used again. Subscribing to this idea, shedding the constructiveness requirement, and maximizing generality, BPfS defines a resource as something [any kind of thing] for which a need to use it emerges recurrently (‘comes up again and again’). This definition is a linguistic convenience for scientists, notably metascientists, and for philosophers of science (there is no space here to explain one of the most important reasons for this so that we have to suffice by saying that it is a conceptual aid in the formation of ideas concerning granularization of science, which is essential for improving organization supporting interdisciplinarity, as will be expounded in a BPfS article). Science is a cultivated activity producing knowledge that can be used again at a later time and in a different empirical setting. It intensively uses its own product, scientific knowledge, synonymously, scientific cognitive resources, which are mental, and instruments, which are physical resources, the invention of which makes use of scientific knowledge. Therefore, the expression scientific resource is especially appropriate to refer to anything that is frequently used in science. The verbed form to resource is defined as to provide with resources (this verb is not included in all modern English dictionaries; their currency can sometimes be seriously questioned, for example, looking up human resources in editions of the Oxford English Dictionary or Webster’s International Dictionary that have appeared long after the coinage of the term). that can support the activity. Three important kinds of intended functionality of big pictures for science3 NOTE | Today, no information item in science is known as ‘big picture for science’. The neologism is introduced in BPfS whose content is dedicated to defining the concept that it designates. are to help (i) the scientist-in-the-making in orienting him or herself, and in choosing subjects, (ii) the individual scientist, or the research group, in resourcing problem solving,4 NOTE | Problem solving in science often needs to be creative. A likely consequence of creative activity in problem solving is that the definition of the problem changes, if only subtly. In response, the collection of useful resources must be adapted to the new situation, requiring the resourcing of problem treatment to be updated. and (iii) administrators in science organizations in articulating policies and in defining and programming activities that contribute to their implementation. Note that (ii) implies that a big picture can be a metaresource, a resource that refers to other resources (for alternative expressions and a detailed explanation, see note5 NOTE | (This note is long and difficult. It attempts to answer a number of questions typically evoked by the possibility of reflexivity, concretely, by the use of expressions including the prefix meta.) Cultivated activity is conscious, intentional, and exclusively human. It can target and apply to, or operate on, or act on, etc., things or entities. A variety of kinds of cultivated activity can have instances that target and apply to etc. different instances of the same kind. The former can be labeled instances of meta-activity. Between the meta-activity and the activity in a dyad there is an agent-patient relation. Many products of cultivated activity can be published, defined in more detail, they can be externalized with reference to some part of ‘the mental world’ as results that are meaningful at least for fellow-agents. In the eyes of these agents, published results can refer to, concern, or be about, etc., other results of the same cultivated activity. So, to meta-activities we can have published metaresults (we cannot use the expression meta(published result) because it is inadmissible in nonformal written language, or ‘metapublished result’, which is incorrect, see further below). Necessarily, the aspect of a metaresult that is ‘doing the referring’ contains, holds, bears, is a source of, etc., information about the result it refers to, its referent. The implied relation holding between a published metaresult and a published result can be verbally defined as is informative about. In BPfS, this relation is of the highest interest. Making big pictures for science is almost entirely a meta-activity whose visible results are published metaresults. The big pictures can be seen as manifestations of a trend in philosophical thought. Tracing the roots of that trend we find that relations in which one of the relata is named with a word prefixed meta are called reflexive, or self-referential (Bartlett, Suber 1987; both adjectives are inaccurate descriptors but they can serve as keywords in searches for relevant material). The use of the prefix meta in the sense just mentioned started in the 1920–30s with words like metamathematics, metalanguage, and metascience, interpretable as naming meta-activities that can produce published metaresults — the first and the last having to be preceded, for disambiguation, by the verb form doing, and the middle one, for correctness, by the combination inventing and using. Douglas Hofstadter’s books Gödel, Escher, Bach (Hofstadter 1979) and Metamagical Themas (Hofstadter 1985) have drawn attention to elucidation of their meaning. A reflexive relation may or may not be realistically definable for a kind of cultivated activity or published result. The words meta-legislation and metabook are easily interpretable, metacarpentry and metashoe are not (notice that we use the hyphen only for convenient reading). Metascience is well interpretable and can be given a very important content. But being a potentially multilevel meta-activity with many different parts, it is riddled with complications concerning reflexivity, manifesting as linguistic ones. We outline a few of these here. Most cultivated activities produce — usually in the sense of inventing or designing but not of manufacturing — results that they use themselves again as resources. There are weak and strong examples of this. Science is a very strong one, producing an exceptionally powerful kind of result, namely, knowledge, or cognitive resources. A reflexive relation can be defined for both science and knowledge. We already know that we can meaningfully speak of metascience; the same holds for metaknowledge. It demands considerable effort to find a way to translate any phrase using the word knowledge into one using the expression cognitive resource(s). Unsurprisingly,the effort must be increased when the prefix meta is involved. Here we restrict ourselves to the consequences of its involvement. It causes the following linguistic complication that must be explicitly resolved to retain clarity. The expressions metacognitive resource and cognitive metaresource can be interpreted as meaningful and equivalent. But comparing ‘meta-published result’ and published metaresult, only the last expression can be made sense of. ‘Metapublishing’ is nonsensical; publishing is not a possibly reflexive activity. A perverse circumstance is that the word metapublication can refer both to an activity and a result of that activity, disadvising its use (peculiarities of nonformal language like these keep philosophers in business). This concludes the first example of a linguistic complication. The following are subtleties surfacing in a particular argument concerning big pictures for science of which we need the outcome here. Say, we consider as part of a cultivated activity whatever is both (i) produced as a result of, and (ii) used as a resource in, that activity. Metascience studying some other instance of science must study, among other parts of it, the knowledge that is used or produced in that instance. Being a kind of science, metascience must produce knowledge itself. Then that knowledge will either be metascientific knowledge or metascientific metaknowledge. Introducing another fine point, appreciate that scientific research focuses on problem solving, which directs its efforts. The solution of a problem marks the natural end of the research into it. Science thus always needs fresh problems. Many are conceived and formulated within science itself. This makes the activity of problem conception and formulation and its products, scientific problems, parts of science. Acknowledging possible reflexivity but noting that ‘metaconception’ and ‘metaformulation’ are nonsensical in this context, the corresponding meta-activity must be labeled metaproblem conception and formulation, which resolves another linguistic issue. We can now make the following summary. Science itself produces problems to work on if it is not presented with them by the world at large, and uses them to direct its efforts. This identifies problems as another brand of scientific resources and so, again, big pictures for science, intended to advance science by, among other things, supporting problem treatment, as metaresources; also, since big pictures for science can be metaresources of any level (see note 6), the problems may include metaproblems of any level, possibly conceived in metascience of any level. ), in addition, a metaresource of any level.6 NOTE | Many big pictures for science share a quality resulting from the generalization that is inherent in their conception, being abstract overviews of considerable parts of science. It is that they show or suggest connections between various scientific domains, which are usually mentioned by name. On the next page of BPfS we present three examples of what may be construed as modern big pictures for science avant la lettre intimating a constructive role for them in activities akin to (i–iii) mentioned under (I) (without illustration, which would us too far afield). The connection of different scientific domains elicits the interdisciplinarity problem (see note 7; an equivalent of it can be imagined for many cultivated activities besides science). It can be identified as a metaproblem (see note 5). Each case of reflexivity forces a distinction between two levels. Starting at some reference level, it can be extended ‘upward’ adding level after level as long as the result is meaningful and valuable, demanding ever greater generality and abstraction. Accordingly, big pictures for science can be ls‘ordinary’ metaresources, or first-level metaresources, ‘metametaresources’, or second-level metaresources, etc., in other words, metaresources of any level. It is preferable to label them i-level metaresources, seeing the obvious notational superiority of the prefix i-level meta, with i some ordinal numeral (first or 1st, second or 2nd, third or 3rd, fourth or 4th, etc.). As metaresources, big pictures for science are expected to support the treatment of metaproblems, a supreme example of which is the interdisciplinarity problem.7 NOTE | The interdisciplinarity problem originates from the individual scientist’s limited ability to acquire knowledge of, or about, or mastery of, the ever-growing collection of scientific resources. Its immediate consequence is the necessity to organize scientific education using a subdivision into distinct domains, disciplines. Science’s main occupation is conceiving, formulating, and treating, that is, attempting to solve, problems. Problems thought up within a disciplinary community can often be adequately handled internally. But next to their category there exists an at least similarly large one of problems generated in the outside world, in civilized life. If fruitful scientific treatment of its members appears to be possible, society at large understandably urges and rewards science to direct efforts towards them. Characteristically, their research almost always needs the use of resources from various domains. Sometimes, producing a binder with reports from different disciplinary angles suffices, representing multidisciplinarity. But in most cases, some of the used resources and many results of their use have to be ‘integrated’, implying considerable complication, and making the research deserving of the label interdisciplinary (Klein 1990). From considerations like the previous emerges the meta-problem of how science must be organized in a way that best supports interdisciplinarity in education and in research.
Activities like (i–iii) are the natural concern of organizations whose mission is the advancement of science, as named above, science organizations. Today, there is no indication that these organizations consider the activities as any concern of theirs. This deficiency agrees with their limited assignment in embodying science administration (see next page). Requiring comprehensive redesign, science organizations should embrace supporting all resourcing — much of which will involve metaresources — of activity that advances science. This requires their current goals and functionality to be expanded. In the resulting more versatile science organizations, big pictures for science can be projected to be useful resources, generally, for improving the organization of science at all social and domain-type levels and, specifically, for integrative activities above the level of the discipline, for example, in interdisciplinary science. Summarizing, future science must have science organizations supporting the creation, dissemination, updating, and use, of big pictures for science.