[Fis] Focusing on Narratives. Infordomics

[Loet Leydesdorff]

>Narratives are needed, because the facts are overwhelmingly complex. 
>One may invite the audience to look into a newly discovered extension 
>to the cave, where we no more regard the shadows of the facts, but the 
>patterns of the shadows of the lights we ourselves dream up.
>
Dear Karl,

Leibniz formulated in a letter to Huygens (8 Jan., 1692): "What I love 
best about the calculus is that it frees us from working with our 
imagination."

Reversely, a narrative is based on a geometrical metaphor; the 
multi-dimensional complexity is reduced to the three dimensions for 
working with our imaginations. However, a model may do terrible things 
to the tangents.

Casti, J. (1989). Alternate Realities. New York, etc.: Wiley; pp. 42-44:

"Unfortunately (for the reductionist), an operation geared to simplify 
state descriptions will usually do drastic and terrible things to the 
tangent vector associated with the original system dynamics." (This 
reflects the inability to simultaneously simplify both the state and 
velocity description; Cooper Langford, personal communication, 3 Feb. 
2001).

Best,
Loet


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Loet Leydesdorff

Professor emeritus, University of Amsterdam
Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR)

loet at leydesdorff.net <mailto:loet at leydesdorff.net>; 
http://www.leydesdorff.net/
Associate Faculty, SPRU, <http://www.sussex.ac.uk/spru/>University of 
Sussex;

Guest Professor Zhejiang Univ. <http://www.zju.edu.cn/english/>, 
Hangzhou; Visiting Professor, ISTIC, 
<http://www.istic.ac.cn/Eng/brief_en.html>Beijing;

Visiting Fellow, Birkbeck <http://www.bbk.ac.uk/>, University of London;

http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ych9gNYAAAAJ&hl=en

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listas.unizar.es/pipermail/fis/attachments/20181210/90d70913/attachment.html>