The Sciences in the Spectrum of Human Knowledge

Abstract

The content of human minds is extremely complex. It can be classified into the ‘folk knowledge’ of daily life and the ‘scholarly knowledge’ of the humanities and sciences. The taxonomy of scholarly knowledge into disciplines is not always significant. A more significant taxonomy is into platitudes, like the truism of mathematics; the ‘near truisms’ of the sciences, like the laws of thermodynamics; projections (stable space-time patterns), like celestial mechanics; plans, like a genome; evolutionary systems; cybernetic systems, both equilibrium and disequilibrium; creodic processes; probabilistic systems. Each study must seek an appropriate methodology. All disciplines have more secure and less secure areas; this is more important than the distinction between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ disciplines.