Chapter 5

Toward an Epistemological Transformation of the Human Sciences

This chapter presents the study of human development, in broad terms, as one of the main objects of the human sciences. If human development depends even partly on the advancement of the human sciences, then increasing the capacity of these fields to produce, disseminate and manage knowledge effectively is crucial. I therefore intend in the following pages to analyze the epistemological weaknesses of the contemporary social sciences and literary studies, in contrast with the maturity of the “natural” sciences. Far from limiting myself to this negative observation, I will show that full use of the data, calculating power and collaborative tools of the digital medium could lead to a veritable scientific revolution in the human sciences in the 21st Century. It will not, however, be possible to reach this goal unless we adopt a common system of semantic coordinates that leads to better knowledge management (KM) and to theories (and even works) that can be expressed in terms of calculable functions. The chapter ends with a cautionary note against a positivistic scientism that would overly objectify the results of the human sciences, even after such a scientific revolution, since what is known here is the expression of knowing subjects.

5.1. The stakes of human development

Many official reports from governments and international agencies have identified the digital revolution not only as a factor that is destabilizing societies and cultures, but also as an opportunity for human development. This approach is advocated by many citizens’ groups, experts, institutions and governments. To further a trend that is already well established internationally, I am proposing that the new forms of knowledge and action made possible by the digital medium be systematically used to serve human development.

5.1.1. The scope of human development

What is human development? Today, we generally understand this expression to mean the balanced, sustainable improvement of the living conditions of a population. In my opinion, the main indicators are education, health, economic prosperity, human rights, good democratic governance, peace, security, transmission of cultural heritage, scientific research that serves society, technical and institutional innovation and environmental balance. The United Nations and international development agencies increasingly use the concept of integral human development, which goes beyond economic development alone. In his book Development as Freedom, the 1998 Nobel Prize Laureate in Economics Amartya Sen¹ explains that human development cannot be reduced to the growth of the gross national product and the opening of markets. It must also take into account all those “goods” that are not directly included in the monetary circuit, such as ethical, aesthetic and social values, personal and collective freedoms and the quality of the environment. Sen’s approach emphasizes elements that, although qualitative and subjective, are essential to a decent human life. We can further extend our approach to human development along two major parallel paths: dialog among cultures and reflexive knowledge of collective cognition.

In the area of intercultural dialog, this means promoting curiosity, openness and mutual understanding in order to dissipate ignorance, fear, disrespect and aggression as much as possible. Everyday events show indisputably that there is still room for progress in civilized cross-cultural dialog. All the great wisdom traditions, whether religious or secular, share this call for polite, respectful dialog among languages, religions, national identities, philosophical points of view, disciplines, occupations and communities of all kinds.

The study of distributed symbolic cognition is a second path of exploration for human development. Indeed, we have mainly developed our science and technology to understand and control bodies and perceptible phenomena. Technoscience enhances our power and freedom in the external material world, which is obviously not insignificant. But according to Rabelais’s famous saying, “science without conscience is the death of the soul”². That is why we should be capable of balancing our knowledge of the universe of material phenomena with an equally diligent and systematic quest directed toward a different order of reality: that of the feelings, emotions, thoughts and ideas that are interwoven into our cognitive ecology. This more “internal” order of reality conditions our behavior and constructs the cultural world we live in. Symbolic cognition is obviously the object of the human sciences, understood in the broad sense as including arts and letters³.

In short, the human development approach calls for a shared international effort to increase the material, social, cultural, intellectual and personal opportunities open to every human being, and to do so in a sustainable way. One of its goals is peaceful intercultural dialog. It also advocates the development of an emotional and cognitive climate favorable to the growth of intellectual, aesthetic and social creativity and the establishment of increasingly refined intellectual and moral standards.

5.1.2. In search of models of human development

One of the reasons why the human development approach is much easier to describe than to put into practice could very well be the existence of a cognitive deficit. Indeed, in a world that everyone agrees is complex and interdependent at every level, what does it mean “to make the right decisions” for the good of human development? Is our knowledge sufficient to provide the foundation for a coherent practice, a long-term cooperative learning process in the area of human development? Can we envision extending the zone of predictability of the collective consequences of our actions, in spite of the qualitative, subjective and contextual nature of their meaning?

I stated above some of the relevant indicators of human development: education, health, sustainable prosperity, human rights, transmission of cultural heritage, scientific research, environmental balance, etc. Even a quick glance at this list suggests that there are probably strong causal relationships among the phenomena measured by these indicators. However, economic indexes, epidemiological data, education statistics, reports on human rights, etc., are usually collected using different methods and theoretical approaches. Increasing the fragmentation, this information is managed and used by different ministries and agencies at many levels of government.

In all probability, the causal circuits do not end at the boundaries of our disciplines, our ministries or our professional or national cultures. However, we have no consistent, calculable models that would enable us to simulate and study the interdependent causal circuits that generate human development in their entirety. In contrast, there are standard economic indicators (gross national product, growth, employment rate, etc.) that are accepted internationally and that therefore permit comparisons. The human development index used today by the United Nations does not have the same authority⁴. It combines statistics on life expectancy at birth, literacy and education with the per capita gross national product. It should be noted that this index – as useful as it is – is rather crude, as even its authors acknowledge. It does not in any way constitute a causal model of human development: it is at best an approximation that is easily measurable with the means available today.

5.1.3. Social capital and human development

Some people might counter these pessimistic remarks by pointing to the many contemporary studies on social capital⁵. The concept of social capital, which has been developed mainly since the late 20th Century, seems at first glance to integrate or reflect many dimensions of human development. It can be approached from various perspectives. First, social capital may refer to the quality of the social bond, the essence of which is commonly called trust. Second, researchers who study social capital often do mapping of networks of relationships among individuals, which include affective relationships among family and friends (bonding) and intercommunity relationships among members of different social categories (bridging). Third, the concept includes the vitality of the public space and of associative and community relationships. The concept of social capital is interesting because it cuts across many fields of integral human development (peace, economic prosperity, health, education, human rights). Many studies suggest, in fact, that public health, education levels and economic prosperity are strongly correlated with social capital⁶. Since the beginning of the 21st Century, the development theory of the World Bank (an international financial institution based in Washington) has officially been based on the general concept of social capital.

Nevertheless, as it is used today, the concept of social capital suffers from two handicaps: it is neither precise, nor complete. It is imprecise, first, because it lacks a clear, detailed operational definition that would make it measurable and shareable in different contexts. For this reason, it is difficult to find significant data that are really comparable in studies on social capital. More important, however, the concept is incomplete. Many significant factors in human development are absent from the model provided by the theory of social capital. Social relationships, precisely because they are human, follow the technical channel of relationships to the material world and the semiotic channel of languages and symbolic systems. Theories of social capital and social networks do not include the technical and symbolic dimensions of human relationships – or do so poorly. Nor do these theories describe in detail the cognitive functioning of social networks, which I have particularly emphasized in the preceding chapters. I should, however, point out that an increasing number of researchers are taking an interest in the role that KM which includes the dimension of social capital could play in strategies of integral development. This trend is still marginal, although it too is being officially encouraged by institutions such as the World Bank⁷.

5.1.4. The knowledge society and human development: a six-pole model

The preceding remarks lead us to another major approach to human development: one focusing on the cognitive rather than the social dimension. Many international agencies responsible for stimulating development link it officially to a “knowledge society”, an “information economy” or a “knowledge-based economy” that favors high levels of education and a capacity for innovation in all sectors of society⁸. While so many governments and transnational bodies are officially promoting it, there is no systematic collection of data that clearly shows the basic cycles of the information economy or the functional relationships among its various factors. Of course, we find statistics on the communications and high-tech industries, marketing data on the consumption of paid information or tables of figures showing the percentage of people who have elementary, secondary or post-secondary education. Various international organizations, such as the OECD, provide lists of countries classified by the number of patents filed or the amount of royalties collected. Despite this, as for human development, there is no coherent set of empirical data organized on a causal model for the knowledge society

In any case, it seems to me that social capital and trust, which are based on networks of affective and social relationships among individuals, or knowledge capital, which is based on education levels and life-long learning and correlates with capacities for innovation, each represent only one of the poles of a more general dynamic of human development. After thinking long and hard about this problem and combing through large quantities of statistics and reports, I feel that a balanced approach should include at least the following six poles:

– networks of explicit knowledge, the reservoir of ideas and symbolic forms available in minds (epistemic capital, or knowledge capital);

– networks of will, the mode of governance, the values and shared vision of communities (ethical capital);

– networks of powers, in particular the availability of occupational skills and financial liquidity (practical capital);

– body networks, in particular technical equipment, public health and the quality of the environment (biophysical capital);

– networks of people, individuals with various social roles and relationships of trust (social capital);

– document networks, the media, power of dissemination as access to cultural resources and accumulated memory (communication capital).

Figure 5.1 highlights the symmetry of the relationship between two dialectics. Vertically, a bipolar virtual/actual dialectic opposes and links two complementary triplets: document/people/body networks, in the actual area (south); and knowledge/will/power networks, in the virtual area (north)⁹. Horizontally, the ternary dialectic that structures the three columns reproduces the semiotic triangle. The column to the west corresponds to the sign or the signifier (in its ideal forms in the virtual area and in its documentary and media inscription in the actual area). The central column corresponds to the signified for an interpreter, i.e. to the human mind or to the being (in its abstract intentionality, in the virtual area, and in its personal and social incarnation, in the actual area). The column to the east, finally, corresponds to the referent or the thing (in its aspect of a dated and situated material body, in the actual area, and in its aspect of a reservoir of potential, in the virtual area). The ternary dialectic sign/being/thing opposes and links three complementary pairs: 1) document networks/knowledge networks; 2) people networks/will networks; 3) body networks/power networks¹⁰.

This representation of the basic dynamic of human development is compatible with actor-network theory¹¹ and more generally with the theory of the networked society that is widespread in the contemporary social sciences¹². These approaches, like the one I am outlining here, call for the integration of the mathematical tools of graph theory into the human sciences¹³. The diagram in Figure 5.1 suggests that distributed symbolic cognition, the engine of long-term human development, should be oriented toward a balanced interdependence and an ongoing exchange of resources among the six networks – or among the six “capitals” of a general information economy – with each one of them fueling the other five. I am not claiming that this diagram provides a fully constituted theory of human development. At best, it offers a conceptual map or semantic compass, a critical instrument that may enable us to avoid forgetting any important dimension of human development and situate competing theories. The fact remains that I have not found a causal theory of human development anywhere that satisfies the requirement of a uncentralized interdependence, as shown in my multipolar diagram. There is no common observation instrument, no tested intellectual technology today that allows us to study human societies as autopoietic cognitive machines in which informational energies circulate among signs, beings and things, or as selfreferential systems in which creative conversation transfers the value of virtual networks toward actual networks and vice versa. The contemporary human sciences have not yet provided us with an integrated model of human development.

5.2. Critique of the human sciences

My diagnosis is that this failure of the human sciences to provide an integrated model of human development is due mainly to the fragmentation of their disciplines and paradigms, the non-calculable nature of most of their qualitative models and, more fundamentally, the absence of a system of coordinates to support the interoperability and calculability of their theories. I am not suggesting, however, that we imitate physics. It should be understood that I am not calling for qualitative models to be reduced to quantitative ones, but for a computable formalization of symbolic structures and relationships among semantic qualities. Before going into detail on my criticism of the contemporary state of the human sciences, I would like clarify the parallel I am drawing between the revolution in natural sciences that took place in the 17th Century and the one that is required in the human sciences in the 21st Century.

5.2.1. Human sciences and natural sciences

The work that led me to develop the IEML semantic sphere is situated at the convergence of many traditions seeking the unity of nature. These traditions are spiritual, philosophical and scientific, but I am focusing here on the scientific quest. “Matter” and “mind”, the world of material bodies and the world of intelligible ideas, the objects of the exact sciences and those of the human sciences, interact in obvious ways and are certainly part of the same reality. It is not hard to reach a consensus on the fact of the unity of nature. The real difficulty lies in the absence of an articulate scientific model of this unity. In Chapter 2 I outlined the unifying pattern of an organization in successive layers – quantum, molecular, organic, phenomenal and semantic forms – with the layers connected by transcoding interfaces: atoms between the quantum and molecular worlds; DNA between the molecular and organic worlds; neurons between the organic and phenomenal worlds; symbolic systems between the phenomenal and semantic worlds¹⁴. These layers of information extend between two basic transformation groups: the unified field of physics, in the south, and the semantic sphere, in the north. If the IEML semantic sphere – or some equivalent formalism – were adopted as the system of coordinates for addressing the symbolic processes of cognition, we would have taken a giant step toward the unification of nature. That would involve a true epistemological transformation of the human sciences, however, comparable to the one that took place in the natural sciences in the 17th Century.

Before Galileo and Newton, the celestial world and the terrestrial (or “sublunar”) world were still considered to be subject to different systems of modeling. The heavens, with their hierarchies of angelic intelligences, were the place of perfect geometrical movements and theological speculation, while the crudely material sublunar world was subject to physical processes of generation and corruption, and without geometrical reason. Alchemy mixed practices for transforming materials with symbolic practices of spiritual transformation inherited from a distant premonotheistic past.

The modern revolution in the experimental sciences brought together all perceptual phenomena in the same universal, infinite three-dimensional space and reduced the essential core of scientific explanations to the mathematical formalization of causal mechanisms (however complex, indeterminate and irreversible those mechanisms might be)¹⁵. It should be understood here that the only thing required for us to be able to speak of a “mechanism” is its description in terms of calculable functions. Quarks, atoms, molecules, organisms, biosphere, planets, stars and galaxies are in principle part of the same material universe coordinated by a single space–time continuum, and the sciences that study these subjects can therefore talk to one another.

What about the objects of the human sciences, such as prices, governments, social movements, literary works and rituals? Let us begin with the most striking similarity: the objects of the human sciences circulate in an environment in which quantities exist, exactly as in the material world, as evidenced by the extensive use of statistics in the social sciences. The symbolic universe where human symbolic cognition exists also has two dimensions that are absent from the material universe: value (as it results, for example, from moral judgment: good or bad) and meaning. Neither value nor meaning can be directly situated in three-dimensional space, although they can be indirectly connected to the material world through our cognitive processes. Even though great philosophers such as Spinoza and Leibniz thought rigorously about the unity of nature, the scientific revolution of the 17th Century remained unfinished: at the technical level of mathematical modeling, nature as conceived by science is incomplete and fragmented because it does not include culture, i.e. human collective intelligence structured by symbolic systems.

I am therefore proposing the adoption of a system of semantic coordinates. This system – the IEML semantic sphere – would make it possible, first, to address meanings and, second, to precisely represent the circulation of values – the general economy of information. It is based on a transformation groupoid, so the proposed system of coordinates would enable movements, metamorphoses and variations in meaning and value to be described using calculable functions. As it is structured by a hypercomplex fractaloid circuit, this system of coordinates could represent any model in the form of a graph, including networks of knowledge, will, powers, documents, people, material bodies, and all the mixed and hybrid networks anyone could want. The edges and vertices of these graphs could be addressed using not only space–time coordinates, but also conceptual coordinates in the semantic sphere. In short, today’s fragmented world of culture would be unified through a single (practically infinite) system of semantic coordinates, and its dynamics of meaning and value could be described by calculable functions, using network-type modeling. Let us now examine the contemporary problems of the human sciences in greater detail.

5.2.2. Internal fragmentation

Today, each of the human sciences deals with only a limited portion of the complete circuit of meaningful information. Fields such as theology, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, economics, psychosociology, psychology, linguistics, literary studies, communication studies, history, geography and education sciences are based on different – and most often incompatible – principles and traditions. In addition, there are conflicts of paradigms and theories within individual disciplines. Each social science and each discipline of the humanities has its own universe of reference, which is not necessarily consistent with that of the others, even though we can sense that there are resonances and complementarities between economics, psychology, sociology, history, linguistics, literature, etc. Separation and absence of communication are not absolutely negative in themselves; they are only a problem because the goal of the sciences is to comprehend (in the etymological sense: “take together”) phenomena. The divergent perspectives and principles in the human sciences do not make it possible to grasp the interdependent complexity of the causal circuits that lend coherence to the symbolic life of humanity.

Is this fragmentation normal, natural, insurmountable and desirable – as the majority of scientists today believe? Or is it, as I feel, a dated and situated state in cultural evolution and scientific history?

5.2.3. Methodological weaknesses

Some of the human sciences take intellectual formalisms seriously, in particular linguistics, economics, law and the cognitive sciences. There are generally different formalisms in each discipline, and even each subdiscipline. In other fields in the human sciences, statistical quantitativism¹⁶, concepts that are vague (which is a source of pride for certain “postmodern” writers) or even political convictions sometimes take the place of scientific method. The means of analysis applied are generally weak in relation to the objects to be understood. What needs to be understood, in general, is the meaning of phenomena and their transformations. Yet I have not found a formal, operational method for representing the rhizomatic multiplicity of meanings of information in context, nor for representing the interdependence of the technical, economic, social, cultural and symbolic dimensions of distributed human cognition from which these meanings emerge. The complexity of social phenomena is already being represented using models in networks, but the nodes and links of these networks are not variables of calculable functions.

As convincing as current approaches in the human sciences are, they offer no calculable theory that would be capable of expressing the autopoietic, selfreproducing, self-referential nature of their objects¹⁷. For these objects – societies, communities, networks or individuals – are also subjects that are as capable of interpretation, or production of meaning, as the researchers themselves. Whether they are works of art or symbolic systems, their worth as objects of the humanities arises from the fact that they are engines of interpretation rather than passive objects.

With respect to calculable theories – because there are some – they are most often limited to purely quantitative models (for example, in economics), or (as in the cognitive sciences in the broad sense) to oversimplified logical/arithmetic mechanisms (automatic reasoning), simulations of networks of logical automata or the metaphorical formalization of mechanisms borrowed from the physical or biological sciences. I am thinking, for example, of memetics, which borrows its model from the theory of biological evolution, or studies of emergent collective intelligence based on models borrowed from neurology or animal ethology. While all these models are indeed calculable, they are not good at capturing the complexity of human meaning.

5.2.4. Lack of coordination

In addition to their fragmentation and their methodological weaknesses, a third handicap prevents the human sciences from fulfilling the role they should play in promoting human development. Unlike knowledge in physics, chemistry or biology, knowledge in these areas is usually not explicit, formalized and coordinated enough to be combined and exported into a variety of different contexts. For most of them, narrative – theoretical or experimental – in natural language is still the main way of presenting their non-quantitative results. This is what makes it so difficult to make comparisons from one cultural context to another in the areas of the meaningful (semiotic and aesthetic symbolic manipulation), the valid (legal and ethical reasoning) and the possible (speculative, fictional and ludic expressions), although these areas are essential.

In the emerging discipline of KM, which was discussed in Chapter 4, this type of knowledge is known as tacit knowledge. It is a distinguishing characteristic of the contemporary human sciences: their requirement for “personal participation” to actualize meaning. We have seen that one of the main operations involved in KM is making the tacit knowledge of a community explicit so that it can easily be transferred from one context to another and combined in shared information systems. The tacit mode is not bad in itself. For KM, tacit does not mean of inferior quality. Tacit knowledge is perfectly valid and useful in its original context, but it is not possible to accumulate it, or transfer it to other contexts. In the best case, the process of explication concludes with a cultural change that is manifested in: (i) respect for common standards; (ii) the use of compatible observation and measurement instruments; and (iii) the use of symbolic systems that facilitate translation, coordinated representation and calculation. Through this cultural change, knowledge becomes shareable in a sustainable, potentially universal network of different communities.

By way of comparison, unlike researchers in the human sciences, all chemists work with the same elements. Chemistry is a science precisely because chemists share: (i) a language for describing their objects; (ii) a standard set of observation and measurement instruments; and (iii) reproducible methods. The language of chemistry makes it possible to explicate – as much as possible – the experimental knowledge of chemists. In the grammar of its system of signs, it reflects what is considered to be the structure of the chemical universe. However, we still do not have common elements, standard measurement instruments or a general method of observation for the non-quantifiable aspects – the most important ones – of the human phenomenon. We have no metalanguage for the explication of knowledge in the human sciences.

Is this the reason why we sometimes have the feeling that there is no progressive accumulation of knowledge in the human sciences as there is in the material natural sciences? If we compare a book on physics or biology from the end of the 19th Century with one from the beginning of the 21st Century, we will observe that there has been rapid change and remarkable advances in knowledge about life and matter. On the other hand, if we compare the books of some of the founders of sociology (e.g. Emile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss and Max Weber) with a sociology book published in 2011, would we observe the same progress in knowledge? Would we learn less about the essence of social life by reading the old texts? To ask the question is to answer it. Sociology certainly includes a large portion of philosophy. Although there is obviously an irreversible history of philosophy, we cannot really talk about “progress”, since each great philosophy represents a unique thinker and none makes the preceding ones obsolete. Aristotle or Leibniz is always current.

In spite of the philosophical and critical nature of sociology, the discipline claims the status of a positive science. In this regard, it is rather shocking that no consensus has emerged in the community of sociologists (which includes Marxists as well as practitioners of social network analysis or ethnomethodology¹⁸) on the discoveries or major advances in the discipline.

5.3. The threefold renewal of the human sciences

To go beyond their fragmentation and work in a coordinated way to promote human development, the human sciences will have to seize the opportunities created by the digital medium and undertake a complete overhaul of the management of their knowledge. As I pointed out above, this agenda implies a major epistemological and cultural change. This revolution has already begun in (1) methods of collaboration; it is beginning to appear in (2) instruments of observation and calculation; but (3) the prospect of a common metalanguage of modeling is still generally beyond the concerns of the community of researchers.

5.3.1. New possibilities for collaboration

Just as printing transformed the practices of scholars and scientists in the Renaissance and was one of the technical conditions for the revolution in modern science¹⁹, the arrival of the Internet is transforming the way the scientific community functions. Since the 17th Century, its creative conversation mainly took place through handwritten correspondence or print publications. Today, this pattern is tending to be replaced by new communication mechanisms based on the digital medium. This new pattern of communication includes three interdependent practices: direct access to and collective use of data and tools; open publication; and the acceleration of informal exchanges of ideas.

5.3.1.1. Direct access to and collective use of data and tools

Among the changes taking place, one of the most important is without doubt the sharing of primary data in real time. Once digitized, collections of documents and primary information sources are immediately available to researchers anywhere there is a connection to the network. This new situation is transforming the work of historians and researchers in the human sciences whose work involves the use of archives. Since the considerable effort previously required to access primary sources is no longer necessary, the center of gravity of researchers’ activity has shifted almost exclusively to the interpretation of data, which is increasingly automated, and to critical conversation with other researchers using the same corpus. Thus, close collaboration takes place in huge “virtual teams” that are widely dispersed geographically and institutionally, but are working on the same questions. Moreover, research communities join together systematically online in real time to share their models for analyzing and interpreting data, including software and simulation tools that operationalize these models.

5.3.1.2. Open publication

New mechanisms for personal and collective management of articles are being put in place, redefining the rules of publication. New observations and theories can be made public without going through the traditional scientific journals because they are published on specialized sites where researchers criticize each other’s work (peer review) after publication. The site that initiated this revolution is http://arxiv.org/ at Cornell University. The movement started in the physical sciences and engineering in the late 20th Century, but it began to have an impact in the human sciences in the early 21st Century. Most public research institutes and big universities have encouraged this movement²⁰. An increasing number of voices are criticizing the privileged position of scientific publishers and calling for free open access to the results of research subsidized by tax dollars. This change is linked to the use of distributed systems for collection and sharing of articles, such as (around 2011) CiteUlike and Mendeley.

The consequences of this change in publishing are twofold: the circulation of research results is much faster, and their subsequent evaluation through citation, comment and reference is also faster. I would like to point out in conclusion that the centuries-old traditions of the scientific community are not only being respected, but are enhanced: “open science” using the new digital mediasphere is more than ever based on the principle of critical conversation and inter-citation.

5.3.1.3. A new type of informal creative conversation

Without prejudging the tools researchers in the human sciences will use for informal conversation in the future, we can say that in 2011 this conversation takes place primarily in the hypertextual interweaving of research blogs and conversations in social media. The social media used may be general ones such as Ning, Facebook or Twitter, or specialized for research. This practice has given a growing number of researchers a foretaste of what could become an even more effective interconnection of their systems of personal KM in the future. It goes without saying that all these forms of online collaboration are usually accompanied by a good deal of travel and conferences, rather than the isolation and immobility predicted by prophets of doom such as Virilio.

5.3.2. New possibilities for observation, memory and calculation

5.3.2.1. Availability of data and calculating power

Perhaps we have no science of symbolic cognition that unifies culture (as modern experimental science unified nature) simply because its object – meaningful information circuits in their interdependent totality – has until now been unobservable and thus only an object of speculation. This situation is now changing.

In the era of cyberspace, all earlier media are converging. Almost all cultural signs are created, recorded and interconnected in an ever-expanding digital network that includes computers, smart phones and mobile electronic gadgets, as well as things and machines of all kinds with embedded radiofrequency identification chips. Digital data are both localized and delocalized. In terms of localization, the new augmented-reality systems provide real-time access to relevant information associated with places and situations. They make it easier than ever to find people and services we are looking for according to their geographic position. In terms of delocalization, the recording of data and applications in the “clouds” of the Internet permits their access from any point on the network²¹. More generally, we are slowly but surely progressing toward a situation of ubiquitous computing, in which capacities for memory, calculation and wireless communication are almost unlimited and are completely integrated into the environment.

All documents are virtually interconnected, in principle forming a single fluid hypertext, read and written by a huge number of readers and writers of various languages, cultures and ethnicities. In the digital era, language has moved beyond the autonomous memory provided by writing, the capacity for automatic reproduction provided by printing, and the near ubiquity provided by electricity. It now possesses a capacity for autonomous action and interaction. Indeed, what is software, if not a type of writing adapted to the world of networked computers and capable of acting on its own, interacting with other software, creating combinations of signs of all kinds, starting up a machine, activating a robot or reproducing itself even more automatically than the printed word? In this regard, computer viruses are simply a spectacular manifestation of this general characteristic of all software. Plastic and metal robots are activated from within by this writing that is capable of decoding and sending signals. In the new environment of ubiquitous computing, the universe of the soft is the logical liquid, the sea of living complexity, the culture medium from which images, music and words now spring. I maintain that this new techno-cultural situation has profound implications for the human sciences.

I said above that we do not yet have a commonly accepted method capable of providing a precise, objective and measurable account of the totality of the intertwined causal circuits that hold together a viable society. However, the intertwined unity of the circuits of the human symbolic ecology could, if we so desired, become apprehendable in the digital medium to which an increasing proportion of the content and transactions of human collective intelligence has begun to migrate. The ubiquity of data, the unity of their binary encoding, their hypertextual interweaving and the calculability and local traceability of information circuits in the digital network have given rise to a new epistemological situation²². It is now socially and technically possible to establish a holistic, critical, reflexive scientific discipline of which the object – the observable object – is the general circulation and organized transformations of meaningful information within human communities.

5.3.2.2. Absence of the tools for semantic synthesis needed to make full use of the new situation

As we have seen, the data on symbolic cognition are increasingly being spontaneously produced and accumulated in the digital medium by human communities themselves. Yet, in the early 21st Century, we have no means of synthesizing – and observing – a dynamic image of the collective intelligence that is evolving in cyberspace.

The famous image²³ in Figure 5.2 represents the decentralized structure of the Internet well, and if only we could identify the nodes, gives an idea of the source and quantity of the information flows exchanged in the network. But such an image really gives no idea of the content of the information exchanged, and even less of the relationships among the meanings of the information flows. Statistics from search engines can provide indicators of the popularity of certain words over time, but these are words in natural languages, not concepts independent of language. No search engine or social medium currently provides a dynamic, explorable representation of the relative distribution and interrelation of concepts found in searches, messages exchanged or documents posted on the network. However, the minimum we can ask of a useful scientific representation of the collective intelligence that is developing in the digital medium is that it maps the relationships between meanings.

To usefully query and interpret data produced by – and reflecting – human symbolic cognition, we need appropriate observation instruments and practical units of measurement. The common nature of these observation and measurement tools is a sine qua non condition for open scientific dialog. It is not possible to envisage the establishment of a science without sharing the interoperable open source observation tools, standard units of measurement and, finally, a common system of semantic coordinates to harmonize everything. This constraint is not trivial. Indeed, this is the first time we have found ourselves in the situation of having to coordinate the totality of symbolic activities.

5.3.3. Toward a system of semantic coordinates

5.3.3.1. Historical context

The following are some of the main conventional systems currently used for communication and distributed human cognition:

– calendars, time zones, systems of time measurement;

– systems of cartography and geographic location, meridians and parallels;

– scientific units of measurement (length, weight, heat, electric potentials, etc.);

– systems of numerical notation, mathematical notation;

– accounting systems of businesses and governments, standards governing public statistics.

All these systems of notation, accounting, measurement and coordinates are universal or tend toward universality. Yet they are conventional and perfectible. As its name indicates, the main function of a system of coordinates is to harmonize knowledge and human action in a specific field. There is thus no reason that new systems of coordinates should not be adopted when humanity opens up new spaces of knowledge and common action, as is the case today with the digital revolution.

By way of comparison, the invention of money has enabled us to mobilize, measure and calculate quantities of value. What we now need to mobilize, measure and transform automatically is meanings, and even circuits for processing meaning: symbolic configurations. Still with regard to mobilization, measurement and calculation, we could also draw a parallel between the unification of geographic space–time and the unification of semantic space. For a long time, every major culture had its own system of mapping and its own “center of the world” (for example, Mount Meru, Jerusalem). Furthermore, although the base map or geometric system of coordinates was conceived in antiquity, it only began to be used in the “Age of Discovery” at the turn of the 15th and 16th Centuries by Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, French, Dutch and English sailors navigating the Atlantic. Geometrization is very important, since it alone permits the calculation of angles, distances and positions. It should be remembered that the system of geographic coordinates – meridians and parallels – in use today only began to be effectively universal in the 18th and 19th centuries, spread by European printing and imperialism²⁴. The measurement of time, with its circular representation and its division into minutes and seconds, was inherited from the number and measurement systems of ancient Mesopotamia. The system of time zones was adopted, after much discussion, only at the beginning of the 20th Century, when the globalization of land and sea transportation networks made a new type of time coordination essential²⁵. It is this system that today enables us to coordinate the flights of the World’s airplanes. Systems of space–time coordinates, which are both universal (hence their usefulness) and cultural (they are symbolic conventions, tools constructed for a purpose) have been a very concrete part of the journeys, exchanges and global unification of the past three or four centuries²⁶.

5.3.3.2. A metalanguage that serves the human sciences

The human sciences now have new methods of collaboration available that make it possible for vast international networks to co-construct and use huge databases whose contents are renewed in real time. For the first time, they also have an instrument for observing human symbolic life, insofar as this symbolic life directly uses the digital medium or is reflected in it²⁷. The epistemological transformation of the human sciences will only be complete, however, when they have adopted a common metalanguage of description equivalent to elements in chemistry, or meridians and parallels in geography. In adopting such a metalanguage, the human sciences would go from an uncommunicative, fragmented state to one in which the explication and semantic interconnection of ideas and data would become the new common currency of scientific practice. It would then become possible to carry out strategies for human development based on coordinated observations and verifiable causal models. A creative loop could be initiated between: (i) more precise data; (ii) theoretical refinements; and (iii) practical wisdom to serve human development; all brought about by; (iv) creative conversation among researchers enhanced by their online KM tools.

Ordinary three-dimensional space and the system of geographic coordinates of the Earth’s surface obviously do not provide adequate models for marking out the symbolic universe. A concept, an idea or a meaning cannot be precisely located using this type of system of coordinates: where would justice, the number 12 or the color red be? A concept has no space–time address. That, however, does not preclude there being clearly definable relationships and operations among concepts. In everyday life, we use natural languages to identify ideas and their relationships. Due to their multiplicity and their irregularity, however, natural languages do not lend themselves to calculability, “geometric” projection and interoperability, which are required here.

Like all scientific metalanguages, this system of coordinates will have to represent its object through its grammar, i.e. through its articulation or its formal structure, rather than through the names that are conventionally given to its elements. Only on this condition could such a language be operational and permit automatable simulations, and thus be useful. It is therefore inevitable that the metalanguage of explication of the human sciences will be based on a hypothesis (whatever it may be) regarding the type of structural articulation that would govern the symbolic universe. No scientific metalanguage functions differently.

In terms of KM, this metalanguage would have to possess two usually incompatible qualities: (i) computability and (ii) the potential to express the complex relationships of meaning of the objects of the human sciences in infinitely variable contexts. We need a system of coordinates that is universal (i.e. not just common but also sufficiently broad, deep and open to be all-inclusive), on which we could “project” the in principle unlimited capacity for semantic differentiation of the phenomena of symbolic cognition. Far from reducing or flattening the cultural creation of meaning, this metalanguage would have to make measurement an calculation possible in a virtually infinite space of semantic variation on the scale of the digital medium.

Once there was such a system of coordinates marking out creative conversations, the processes of collective intelligence, as transversal, heterogeneous and miscellaneous as they are, could begin to observe themselves – to reflect themselves – in the immanent mirror of the Hypercortex.

Once we had a common semantic medium, KM would have a new method of explication that would take it into a new phase of effectiveness and cross-cultural “geometric” transparency.

Once a protocol for modeling symbolic configurations has established standard exchanges of semantic metadata and made all possible games of indexing, classification, research and circulation of value measurable, then, far beyond mere access to documents, we would have something like the true common good of an information economy that serves human development.

5.4. The Ouroboros

As I noted above, from the 17th to the mid-20th Century, scientists only had the printed word as a means of recording and communication. To automate their calculations they only had mechanical machines, which were slow and unwieldy. Since the early 21st Century, thanks to the ubiquitous digital medium, memory capacity for data has become virtually limitless, and data communication on a global scale is instantaneous. As for automatic calculation, its speed, distributed power, flexible programming – not to mention its intuitive, interactive and multimedia control – have achieved heights far beyond anything imagined by previous generations. It therefore falls to our generation and those that follow to use this increase of our cognitive capacities to complete the construction of a unique, immense, inexhaustible, scientifically determinable nature that includes human symbolic cognition.

Although this meaningful information nature is an object of science, it should not be reified or overly objectified: it is also a nature in evolution that is emerging from a self-referential creative process. Indeed, everything we can perceive, imagine or know about the inexhaustible immensity of nature is a product of this cognitive system in open evolution: human collective intelligence.

Symbolic cognition is in a sense the active mirror of nature as we are able to know it. We have no access to nature that is not a reflection in this cosmic mirror. At the same time, it is impossible for us to observe this mirror independently of what it reflects. As I discussed at length above, the ideas or categories that organize our phenomenal experience always appear to us in the form of perceptible or imagined signifiers. These signifiers are recorded, communicated and processed by large numbers of very material devices and machines that clearly play an important role in the functioning of collective intelligence.

Our bodies and our artifacts are immersed in a biosphere on which they are dependent, and beyond that, in a dizzying ultra-complex universe of interacting masses and energies. The Ouroboros is eating its tail: the scientific or mythical/traditional representation of the cosmos from which human symbolic cognition emerges is itself a product of this symbolic cognition, and this representation is evolving in complexity as cognition grows in power. The empirical and the transcendent co-emerge and co-evolve²⁸. The metaphor of the mirror is relevant insofar as it is impossible to observe the shiny face of a mirror reflecting nothing: human collective intelligence is inseparable from the nature it reflects and to which it belongs.

It is misleading to imagine a nature independent of the cognitive processes that reflect it: the phenomenal face of nature (i.e. the nature that appears to us), once again, is inseparable from the cognition that structures it, observes it, experiments with it and transforms it.

---

1 The Nobel Prize in Economics is, in fact, the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. See Development as Freedom [SEN 1999].

2 “Sapience n’entre point en âme malivole, et science sans conscience n’est que ruine de l’âme”. Rabelais, Pantagruel, chapter VIII (1532).

3 The French sciences de l’homme correspond to the English social sciences and humanities, the subjects taught in faculties of arts and social sciences, including communication, education, law, etc.

4 The reports on human development and the method of calculation of the United Nations index can be found at this address: http://hdr.undp.org/.

5 I am not using the concept of social capital in Bourdieu’s sense (network of relationships showing a socially dominant position), but in Putnam’s sense (quality of social links in a community). See:

- Alain Degenne and Michel Forsé, Les Réseaux Sociaux [DEG 1994].

- Francis Fukuyama, Trust, the Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity [FUK 1995].

- Robert David Putnam (probably one of the most influential thinkers in the area of social capital), Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community [PUT 2000].

- Lin Nan, Social Capital: A Theory of Social Structure and Action [LIN 2001].

6 It has been demonstrated that there is a strong correlation between the social capital of a community, its health and its level of education, for example; see the OECD report The Well-being of Nations: The Role of Human and Social Capital [OEC 2001].

7 See, for example, Catherine Gwin, Sharing Knowledge. Innovations and Remaining Challenges [GWI 2004]. For a more philosophical approach, see Kathia Castro Laszlo and Alexander Laszlo, “Evolving knowledge for development: the role of knowledge management in a changing world” [LAS 2002].

8 I will go into more detail on all these concepts in Chapter 6, on the information economy.

9 For a philosophical explanation of the concepts of virtuality and actuality, see my book Becoming Virtual: Reality in the Digital Age [LÉV 1995].

10 Readers will undoubtedly recognize the general model shown in Figure 1.7 and others in Chapter 1.

11 For an introduction to this theory, see Michel Callon (ed.), La Science et ses Réseaux: Genèse et Circulation des Faits Scientifiques [CAL 1989], and Bruno Latour, Science in Action [LAT 1987].

12 See, for example, Mark Granovetter “The strength of weak ties” [GRA 1973], Manuel Castells, The Information Age [CAS 1996] and Barry Wellman, “Computer networks as social networks” [WEL 2001].

13 The idea of a new scientific paradigm organized around network modeling was put forward by Albert László Barabási; see his Linked, the New Science of Networks [BAR 2002].

14 See section 2.3.5

15 See Alexandre Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe [KOY 1951] and Isabelle Stengers, The Invention of Modern Science [STE 1993].

16 Which too often amounts to nothing more than counting answers to a questionnaire and calculating averages, standard deviations, etc.

17 Niklas Luhman (see his Social Systems [LUH 1995]) clearly identified the self-referential, autopoietic aspect of the objects of the social sciences, but he did not propose any operational or calculable formalization.

18 According to ethnomethodology, the theoretical spontaneous creation of communities is a major element in the very construction of the social. See Harold Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology [GAR 1967].

19 As shown by Elisabeth Eisenstein in The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe [EIS 1983].

20 In this regard, The Budapest Open Access Initiative (2002) must be mentioned. See http://www.soros.org/openaccess. A great deal of historical documentation on the Open Science movement may be found on the French-language site of the Institut de l’information scientifique et technique (INIST): http://openaccess.inist.fr/.

21 I am referring, of course, to cloud computing: material resources, applications and data are provided to users on demand through the Internet.

22 This new situation also creates problems with respect to ethics and the protection of privacy. As a provisional moral principle, I suggest that the human sciences not keep any personal data, processing only the semantic, axiological and quantitative dimensions of data flows.

23 This image is taken from http://www.opte.org/maps/.

24 See the beautiful book Cartes et Figures de la Terre, published by the Centre Pompidou in Paris [COL 1980].

25 See Peter Gallison, Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps [GAL 2003].

26 This unification has often been accompanied by conflict, but there has been unification all the same.

27 It is clear that we will not go to the dentist, hairdresser or tattoo parlor on the Internet, at least not in the foreseeable future. On the other hand, all the data on dentists, hairdressers, tattoo parlors and the services they provide will soon be available online. We therefore need to make a distinction between cases in which symbolic life takes place directly through the network (issuing and reading news, for example) and cases in which it is reflected there (dentist appointments, for example).

28 On this co-emergence of the empirical and the transcendent, see my article in the journal Chimères: “Plissé fractal, ou comment les machines de Guattari peuvent nous aider à penser le transcendantal aujourd’hui” [LÉV 1994].