0. Summary
1. Archaic Experience
2. Science and Communication
3. Literacy and the Fragmentation of Knowledge
4. The Web Environment

0. Summary

Changes in communication technologies have over and over again in the course of history resulted in changes in the nature of producing and processing knowledge. The printing press in particular, in the specific European context, played a central role in giving rise to the development of modern science. Printed scientific texts, to a greater or lesser degree, have been regularly accompanied by diagrams and pictures; however, the text always dominated the image. And while the logic of the linear text was conducive to strict reasoning, it also fostered excessive specialization and compartmentalization within science. The philosopher and sociologist Otto Neurath, a leading member of the Vienna Circle, was among the first to entertain the view that, with the help of a pictorial language, a new unity of science could be achieved. In the concluding section of my talk I will suggest that the emergence of computer graphics and multimedia computer networking might lead to a fulfilment of Neurath's vision.

1. Archaic Experience

Neuropsychologist Merlin Donald, in his Origins of the Modern Mind, distinguishes three evolutionary transitions in the development of humankind. The first transition, from apes to Homo erectus, was characterized by "the emergence of the most basic level of human representation, the ability to mime, or re-enact, events".⁽¹⁾ Miming might be vocal, but is mostly a matter of showing and seeing; the basic layer of human intelligence, implies Donald, is visual - hence his emphatic reference to Rudolf Arnheim's pioneering 1969 book, Visual Thinking.⁽²⁾The second transition, from Homo erectus to Homo sapiens, completed the biological evolution of modern humans. "The key event during this transition", writes Donald, "was the emergence of the human speech system, including a completely new cognitive capacity for constructing and decoding narrative." The third transition was "recent and largely nonbiological, but in purely cognitive terms it nevertheless led to a new stage of evolution, marked by the emergence of visual symbolism and external memory as major factors in cognitive architecture. To this last transition Donald allots "three broadly different modes of visual symbolic invention", which he designates as "pictorial, ideographic, and phonological".⁽³⁾Of these, the pictorial mode emerged first; and the point Donald makes is that this signaled the beginnings of "a new cognitive structure",⁽⁴⁾already enabling some primitive forms of "analytic thought", i.e. "formal arguments, systematic taxonomies, induction, deduction".⁽⁵⁾

Oral language, even when used to narrate, is embedded in concrete situations. Pictures abstract; however, since they also resemble, pictorial representation invariably retains some closeness to the concrete world. It is always the same world that is depicted, even if the details singled out differ. By contrast, alphabetic written language, applying disembedded, conventional, general terms, abstracts radically. Here different directions of abstracting give rise to different problems, different modes of efficient problem solving, different disciplines - creating, at the level of theory, seemingly different worlds.

2. Science and Communication

In his paper "Visualization and Cognition" Bruno Latour points to "writing and imaging craftmanship"⁽⁶⁾as the ultimate ground of modern science. Through the technologies of writing and pictorial representation the objects of cognition become mobile, and at the same time immutable; they can be collected, presented, and combined with one another in the power centres of knowledge.⁽⁷⁾Latour does not mention, although he should have done so, the Hungarian historian István Hajnal;⁽⁸⁾but apart from that he does provide a complete survey of the more recent literature on the issue. He refers, in particular, to Jack Goody's 1977 book The Domestication of the Savage Mind,⁽⁹⁾analyzing the impact of alpahabetic literacy on systematization and logic. He refers to Elizabeth Eisenstein's 1979 monography The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe, emphasizing the narrow connection between the spread of printed books and the beginnings of modern science. "More abundantly stocked bookshelves", wrote Eisenstein, "obviously increased opportunities to consult and compare different texts. Merely by making more scrambled data available, by increasing the output of Aristotelian, Alexandrian and Arabic texts, printers encouraged efforts to unscramble these data. Some medieval coastal maps had long been more accurate than many ancient ones, but few eyes had seen either. Much as maps from different regions and epochs were brought into contact in the course of preparing editions of atlases, so too were technical texts brought together in certain physicians' and astronomers' libraries."⁽¹⁰⁾

Naturally, Latour also refers to the brilliant book by William Ivins, Prints and Visual Communication, published in 1953.⁽¹¹⁾ The point Ivins makes is that the lack of a proper technology for duplicating pictures was a major obstacle to the development of science throughout most of Western history. There are some enlightening passages by Pliny the Elder in his Natural History, written in the first century of our era, describing what can only be regarded as the ultimate failure of Greek botany as a science. Let me here quote the dramatic summary of those passages given by Ivins:

The Greek botanists realized the necessity of visual statements to give their verbal statements intelligibility. They tried to use pictures for the purpose, but their only ways of making pictures were such that they were utterly unable to repeat their visual statements wholly and exactly. The result was such a distortion at the hands of the successive copyists that the copies became not a help but an obstacle to the clarification and the making precise of their verbal descriptions. And so the Greek botanists gave up trying to use illustrations in their treatises and tried to get along as best they could with words. But, with words alone, they were unable to describe their plants in such a way that they could be recognized - for the same things bore different names in different places and the same names meant different things in different places. So, finally, the Greek botanists gave up even trying to describe their plants in words, and contented themselves by giving all the names they knew for each plant and then told what human ailments it was good for. In other words, there was a complete breakdown of scientific description and analysis once it was confined to words without demonstrative pictures.⁽¹²⁾

Picture printing was invented around 1400 A.D. Ivins argues that this was a much more revolutionary invention in the history of communication than that of typography half a century later. Pictures became more or less exactly repeatable. However, they were still a long way from being faithful copies of particular natural objects; indeed the very demand for faithful representations emerged only gradually in the course of the fifteenth century. The so-called Pseudo-Apuleius, a printed version of a ninth-century botanical manuscript, published just after 1480 at Rome, contains woodcuts that are careless copies of the manuscript illustrations, and could of course not be of any practical use. Already just a few years later the German herbal Gart der Gesundheit is printing woodcuts based on expert drawings of the original plants. However, neither woodcuts, nor etchings or engravings, could aim at complete faithfulness. Ivins points out that when Lessing wrote his famous treatise on the Laocoon group, he did not, because he could not, have reliable illustrations at his disposal. "Each engraver", writes Ivins, "phrased such information as he conveyed about [the statues] in terms of the net of rationality of his style of engraving. There is such a disparity between the visual statements they made that only by an effort of historical imagination is it possible to realize that all the so dissimilar pictures were supposed to tell the truth about the one identical thing. At best there is a family resemblance between them."⁽¹³⁾ Until the age of photography, as Ivins stresses, there existed no technology of exactly repeatable pictorial representations of particular objects.

The head of Laocoon. Engraving around 1527, woodcut 1544, etching 1606. After Ivins.

Latour's paper is acknowledged in Peter Galison's recently published book Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics.⁽¹⁴⁾Galison continues at the point where Ivins stopped: he analyzes the relations between contemporary particle physics and image recording. He refers to two competing traditions of instrument making. As he puts it: "One tradition has as its goal the representation of natural processes in all their fullness and complexity - the production of images of such clarity that a single picture can serve as evidence for a new entity or effect. These images are presented, and defended, as mimetic - they purport to present the form of things as they occur in the world. ... Against this mimetic tradition", Galison continues, "I want to juxtapose what I have called the 'logic tradition', which has used electronic counters coupled in electronic logic circuits."⁽¹⁵⁾In the early 1980s, Galison points out, the "image" tradition and the "logic" tradition fused, "with the production of electronically generated, computer-synthesized images. It was just such an electronic 'photograph' that heralded the discovery of the W and Z particles in 1983 - the first time a single electronic detection of an event had ever been presented to the wider physics community as compelling evidence in and of itself."⁽¹⁶⁾

The emergence of digital graphics is of course only one aspect of the profound change in the course of which the computer has become an everyday element of scientific routine. When I say "computer" I mean, obviously, the computer as part of the interactive multimedia global network. Those patterns of mobility, immutability, compoundability, and demonstrability analyzed by Latour gain an entirely new meaning in the medium of the internet. Science as based on the book is replaced by science as based on the global network.

3. Literacy and the Fragmentation of Knowledge

The belief that there existed a unified body of knowledge was vivid all through the Middle Ages, and was merely reformulated by Descartes and Leibniz in the seventeenth century; however, the conditions to build up a unified framework of ideas were simply not given before the age of the printed book. And by the eighteenth century it became clear that the rapidly expanding world of knowledge could actually not be fitted into that framework. The ideal of unified knowledge had been a genuine one during that fleeting moment of history, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Before that, it was unfounded; and after that, unattainable. I have described the story in some detail in my 1994 paper "Electronic Networking and the Unity of Knowledge"⁽¹⁷⁾. Here I would like to mention just one point. It is not merely the extent of modern learning that makes it impossible to synthesize all knowledge into a unified whole. It was perhaps the main discovery of twentieth-century philosophy that all knowledge, ultimately, is based on practical knowledge. Now while one can acquire dexterity in several practices, one cannot summarize them. The different branches of theoretical knowledge, conveyed through the printed text, cannot be amalgamated into a single whole when the underlying practices diverge.⁽¹⁸⁾

Pictures are better at teaching skills - practical knowledge - than are texts. It was not by chance that Otto Neurath, the ardent advocate of the logical positivist thought of a unified science, conceived of the idea of complementing his planned compendia by an international picture language.⁽¹⁹⁾ Neurath was working towards an "International System Of Typographic Picture Education", abbreviated as isotype, an interdependent and interconnected system of images, to be used together with word languages, yet having a visual logic of its own. Isotype would be two-dimensional,⁽²⁰ using distinctive conventions, shapes, colours, and so on. "Frequently it is very hard", Neurath wrote, "to say in words what is clear straight away to the eye. It is unnecessary to say in words what we are able to make clear by pictures".⁽²¹⁾ Neurath particularly stressed that the elaboration of his picture language was meant to serve a broader task, that of establishing an international encyclopaedia of common, united knowledge - the "work of our time", he said.⁽²²⁾ However, he never even came near to realizing such lofty aims. His experiments, conducted from the 1920s to the 40s, turned out to be technologically premature. The icons elaborated within the framework of the isotype program have served as models for those international picture signs we today daily encounter at airports and railway stations, but - because they are so crude, and so cumbersome to produce - they could not form the basis of a true visual language. With
the iconic revolution we today witness, such a language is clearly becoming feasible.
 

Robert E. Horn, Visual Language: Global Communication for the 21st Century, 1998.

4. The Web Environment

Philosophers these days tend to resist any position that there is such a thing as a world that is given - an in itself connected whole, describable by a coherent over-all theory. By contrast, scientists are by no means of a single mind when it comes to rejecting the possibility of a unified theory. Those who do reject such a possibility can be seen to be generalizing from their actual research experiences; but on the other hand, as Galison puts it in his introduction to the volume The Disunity of Science, they generalize certain social-political experiences, too. "[T]hese 'internal' scientific debates over fundamentality, reducibility, and so on, do not exist in a vacuum. They are profoundly embedded in a culture in which the quasi autonomy of different subcultures is valued as essential now in a way that it simply was not in the prewar years or even in the 1940's and 1950's."⁽²³⁾ Much research is conducted, even today, with the aim of developing a comprehensive theory. One can refer here to those efforts in physics Galison, too, lists;⁽²⁴⁾ or to the perspective offered in sociobiologist Edward Wilson's 1998 book bearing the subtitle The Unity of Knowledge.⁽²⁵⁾"Disciplinary boundaries within the natural sciences", writes Wilson, "are disappearing, to be replaced by shifting hybrid domains in which consilience is implicit. These domains reach across many levels of complexity, from chemical physics and physical chemistry to molecular genetics, chemical ecology, and ecological genetics. None of the new specialties is considered more than a focus of research."⁽²⁶⁾The spirited talk given by Nobel laureate physicist Sheldon Glashow in 1989 at a symposium titled "The End of Science?" probably reflects the majority view of the scientific community. Philosophical scepticism will obviously not erode, said Glashow, belief in science as a "unified, universal, objective endeavour". "Does anyone really doubt", he asked, "the existence of the moons of Jupiter, which Galileo discovered centuries ago? Does anyone really doubt the modern theory of disease?"⁽²⁷⁾

Is it possible to present philosophical considerations in favour of this view? I think it is. I will offer three arguments. All three are bound up with the once more strengthening continuity between theory and practice at this dawn of a network digital culture. First: when the relative weight of applied research as compared to basic research is growing, the experience of coherence in everyday life overrides the image of fragmented scientific specialities. Secondly: in the medium of the computer abstract calculation and concrete experiment meet; and since in the virtual space all skills tend to become similar in type, they are less likely to create a distance between particular theories. Let me refer to Galison once more. He does not believe that physics divides into "self-contained and self-stabilizing" blocks. As he sees it, there is an "intercalation of diverse sets of practices (instrument making, experimenting, and theorizing) that accords physics its sense of continuity as a whole, even while deep breaks occur in each subculture separately considered"; he believes that it is possible "to demonstrate the deep continuity of experimental practice through an analysis of the instruments of modern physics".⁽²⁸⁾ Thirdly: as a consequence of digitalization, text and picture come closer to each other. Pictures can show what texts can only describe; pictures are relatively independent from their linguistic-conceptual surroundings; and pictures, as we said earlier, are better at conveying practical knowledge than are texts. This state of affairs, coupled with the fact that in the medium of the internet disciplinary isolation is difficult to maintain, renders the perspective of a unified science rather less illusive than it was some decades ago.

1. Merlin Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,1991, p.16. - I am deeply indebted to Csaba Pléh for his unrelenting efforts to keep me alert to new developments in cognitive psychology, and especially for drawing my attention to Donald's work.

2. Ibid., p.167.                  ARNHEIM:

3. Ibid., p.278.             the image is simpler than

4. Ibid., p.284.                  the compound statement

5. Ibid., p.273.                  a > b, b > c, therefore a > c

6. Bruno Latour, "Visualization and Cognition: Thinking with Eyes and Hands", Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present, vol., 1986, p.3.

7. Ibid., p.7. - "Economics, politics, sociology, hard sciences", Latour writes, "do not come into contact through the grandiose entrance of 'interdisciplinarity' but through the back door of the file. ... domains which are far apart become literally inches apart", p.28. Latour refers to the "new branches of science and technology that can accelerate the mobility of traces, perfect their immutability, enhance readability, insure their compatibility, quicken their display: satellites, networks of espionage, computers", ibid., p.30.

8. Etienne [István] Hajnal, "Le rôle social de l'écriture et l'évolution européenne", Revue de l'Institut de Sociologie Solvay, Bruxelles, 1934.

9. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

10. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979, vol.I, pp.74f.

11. William M. Ivins, Jr., Prints and Visual Communication, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953.

12. Ibid., p.15.

13. Ibid., p.89.

14. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.

15. Ibid., p.19.

16. Ibid., p.21.

17. In: Stephanie Kenna and Seamus Ross, eds., Networking in the Humanities, London: Bowker-Saur, 1995.

18. The explanation Joshua Meyrowitz offers as regards the connection between the spread of the printed book, and the increase in the number of disciplines, in the sixteenth century needs to be qualified. This is how Meyrowitz sees the matter:"[a]ll fields begin to develop »introductory« texts that must be read before one can go on to »advanced« texts. Identities splinter into a multitude of separate spheres based on distinct specialties and mastery of field-specific stages of literacy. The new grading of texts serves as a barrier to straying from one field into another. Crossing into a new field demands that one must bear the embarrassement of starting again as a novice and slowly climbing a new ladder of printed knowledge. This contrasts markedly with the oral and scribal approach, which is inherently interdisciplinary and non-graded." (Meyrowitz, "Medium Theory", in David Crowley - David Mitchell, eds., Communication Theory Today, Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1994, p.65.)

19. "Was wir Wissenschaft nennen, kann als die typische Art des Argumentierens angesehen werden, die den Menschen aller Nationen, reich und arm, gemeinsam ist. Diskussionen über Sonne, Mond, Sterne, Anatomie, Geographie, Freude und Schmerz können in jeder Zivilisation geführt werden; Theologie und Rechtsausdrücke haben andererseits hauptsächlich lokalen Charakter. - Es ist wichtig, das, was den Menschen gemeinsam ist, in einer Sprache auszudrücken, die möglichst einfach und neutral ist. Eine Bildersprache, die Hieroglyphensprache, hat den Vorteil, von der Wortsprache unabhängig zu sein, ist besonders geeignet, faktische Information auf vereinfachte Weise zu vermitteln, und hat eine gewisse Neutralität." (Otto Neurath, "Visual Education: Humanisation versus Popularisation" [1945], here quoted from the German translation: "Bildpädagogik: Humanisierung gegen Popularisierung", in Otto Neurath, Gesammelte bildpädagogische Schriften, Rudolf Haller - Robin Kinross, eds., Wien: Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky, 1991, p.649.)

20. "The writing or talking language is only of 'one expansion' - the sounds come one after the other in time, the word-signs come one after the other on paper, as for example the telegram signs on a long, narrow band of paper. The same is true in books - one word over another in the line under it has no effect on the sense. But there are languages of 'two expansions'." Otto Neurath, International Picture Language, London: 1936, repr. University of Reading: Department of Typography & Graphic Communication, 1980, p.60.

21. Ibid., p.26.

22. Ibid., pp.65 and 111.

23. Peter Galison - David J. Stump, eds., The Disunity of Science: Boundaries, Contexts, and Power, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996, p.8.

24. Cf. ibid., pp.5ff.

25. Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998. I am quoting from the New York: Vintage Books, 1999 edition.

26. Ibid., p.11.

27. The talk is referred to by John Horgan in his The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age (1996). Second edition with a new afterword, New York: Broadway Books, 1997, p.62. I am indebted to Gábor Palló for having brought Horgan's book to my attention - and for many interesting conversations on the present topic.

28. Galison, Image and Logic, p.19.