4. Contagious Knowledge: Contagion as a Quality Criterion for Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Science

I wish to thank my wife Christine von Weizsäcker for many talks and for very helpful comments on the draft version of this chapter. Also I owe much to the comments by my colleagues M. Anandakrishnan and Lilly Landerer at UNCSTD, and later by the participants of the Nobel Symposium, especially Professors Menon and Simon. Earlier talks with my father Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker and Georg Picht (1913–1982) founded the basis of the thoughts forwarded in this chapter. This text was presented to the 58th Nobel Symposium 15–19 August 1983 in Oslo.

The Science Citation Index lists all new citations earlier papers have received in major journals during the time period covered. The main value lies, of course, in quickly guiding specialists to all new papers which build on known existing papers. The SCI is published quarterly and in a cumulative version annually by the Institute for Scientific Information, Philadelphia. The use of the SCI for additional purposes including the evaluation of impact is discussed in: Garfield, Eugene, 1979: Citation Indexing (New York: Wiley). See also Porter, A.L. 1977: “Citation Analysis: Queries and Caveats”, in: Social Studies of Science, 7: 257–267.

Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker developed this notion in the context of physics but it is meant to hold also in other disciplines. See von Weizsäcker, C.F. 1971: “Materie, Energie, Information” in: Die Einheit der Natur (München, Hanser): 342–366, especially, 351–352. The ideas are developed further in von Weizsäcker, C.F. 1977: Der Garten des Menschlichen, paperback (Frankfurt: Fischer, 980): especially 139–152.

The statement expresses a condition for contagious information. It is tempting to go a small step further and to omit the word ‘only’ so that the statement would read “Information is what creates information”. This would be a quasi ontological definition of contagious information. The later parts of my paper are consistent with this ontological definition. Thus I call the statement a defining condition indicating thereby that I would accept saying that whatever creates information may be called information. It does not harm but it does not help much either if one distinguishes by index numbers ‘parent’ information from ‘children’, “grand children”, etc. information. The notion of contagious knowledge is an old theme in philosophy. it is the central notion in the chapter “Die Bildung” in Hegel’s “Phänomenologie des Geistes”.

Shannon, Claude E.; Weaver, Warren, 1949: The Mathematical Theory of Communication (Urbana: University of Illinois Press). There have been many modern reformulations of Shannon's work, especially by Brillouin, Leon, 1962: Science and Information Theory (New York: Braziller) who, in my view, rather confused the matter by calling information ‘negentropy’ (for a discussion of this point see Zucker, Francis, 1970: “Information, Entropie, Komplementarität und Zeit”, in: von Weizsäcker, Ernst (Ed.): Offene Systeme I (Stuttgart: Klett): 35–81. However, all reformulations adhere to the idea that information should be quantified using the logarithm of the expectation probabilities.

There are various approaches to the quantification of semantically meaningful levels of information, notably by Bar Hillel, Jehoshua; Carnap, Rudolf, 1953: “Semantic Information”, in: British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 4: 144–157. For an overview heeding especially the important work of Donald M. MacKay, see Nauta, Doede, 1972: The Meaning of Information (Den Haag: Mouton). Not surprisingly, none of the approaches overcomes the problem of quantifying probabilities of unique events. Unfortunately, the inapplicability of Shannon’s qualification to higher levels of meaning has led to a language use restricting ‘information’ to meaningless levels. It is my expectation that a deeper understanding of the higher levels, spurred by brain research and the development of artificial intelligence, will lead us back to a meaning-full meaning of information.

von Weizsäcker, Ernst; von Weizsäcker, Christine, 1972: “Wiederaufnahme der begrifflichen Frage: Was ist Information?”, in: Nova Acta Leopoldina, 206: 535–555. Reprinted with small modifications in von Weizsäcker, Ernst (Ed.): Offene Systeme I, loc. cit. In both papers novelty (Erstmaligkeit) and confirmation (Bestätigung) were conceived as being representable on the same axis, if in opposite directions. This has meanwhile been corrected in favour of a two-dimensional plane with novelty and confirmation increasing in perpendicular directions and pragmatic information represented on a third axis, thus demanding a three-dimensional representation, as in Fig. 4.1. See von Weizsäcker (1984).

The term “subjective novelty” indicates that the creation of pragmatic information out of confirmed novelty is not restricted to things or objective phenomena. To gain knowledge about things or objective phenomena also requires a balance of novelty and confirmation.

In this context it should be noted that the fashionable concept of DNA or of the genes being ‘parasitic’ to the ‘hosts’, i.e. the organisms to which they belong (Dawkins, Richard, 1976: The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Dawkins, Richard, 1982: The Gene as the Unit of Selection (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Crick, Francis H.C.; Orgel, Leslie, 1980: “Selfish DNA: The Ultimate Parasite”, in: Nature, 284: 604–607. Doolittle, W. Ford; Sapienza, Carmen, 1980: “Selfish Genes, the Phenotype Paradigm and Genome Evolution”, in: Nature, 284: 601–603), is, of course, limited by the tolerance of the ‘hosts’. Moreover, (as argued in the text), symbionts which effectively help the survival and evolution of their hosts, strive better than neutral or destructive parasites; and this naturally holds also on the level of DNA and the genes.

Mentioning the merits of individuals may be found improper in the context of this chapter. On the other hand, the otherwise fairly abstract reasoning seems to require some illustration.

The ‘symbiotio’ relations between science and technology were highlighted at the Nobel Symposium by M. G. K. Menon. See his contribution in the same volume, where this chapter was first published.

See, e.g. Hiltz, R. 1982: “Experiments and Experiences with Computerized Conferencing”, in: Landed, et al. (Eds.): Emerging Office Systems (Norwood, N.J.: Ablex), cited in WAAS-MIRCEN-IFIAS (Stockholm: Aug 1983); A Dispersed Conference on Biconversion of Ligfto-cellulose for Fuel, Fodder and Food, Needed for Rural Development in Poor Countries, 12–17 December 1983. More information can be obtained from Prof. Carl-Göran Heden, Bacteriological Institute, Karolinska Institute, S-l0401, Sweden.

Complex energy research may perhaps deserve the palm for breaking the ground in complex interdisciplinarity. It began. in the 1950s with an interdisciplinary development and assessment of nuclear energy. Energy demand and technology assessment led Wolf Häfele to his concept of ‘hypotheticality’ (the insight that planning cannot wait until all contingencies are removed and therefore has to rely in part on unproven hypotheses; Häfele, W. 1972: Hypotheticality and the New Challenges—The Pathfinder Role of Nuclear Energy (Laxenburg, Austria: IIASA). Later it became evident that the non-nuclear path involved even more interdisciplinary reasoning (Lovins, Amory, 1977: Soft Energy Paths (Pelican Books). And today the food-energy-nexus appears to be one of the most promising research themes with practical relevance (see note 22).

An impressive series of multidisciplinary, sometimes interdisciplinary volumes has been published by the International Society for the Study of Time. Easiest to obtain and to read may be: Fraser, Julius T. (Ed.), 1981: The Voices of Time (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press), 2nd edn. The philosophical dimensions of time and its connections with responsibility, reason, peace and human ecology are discussed in a very challenging way by Georg Picht in his two volumes: Hier und Jetzt—Philosophieren nach Auschwitz und Hiroshima (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1980), and earlier by Klaus Müller, A.M. 1972: Die präparierte Zeit (Stuttgart).

IFIAS has so far 28 members Institutes with specialities ranging from international relations to livestock management. It conducts eight interdisciplinary programmes and projects such as “Land and Water Resources for a Sustainable Biomass Production”. The secretariat’s address is: Ulriksdal Slott, S-17171 Solna, Sweden (Dr. Sam Nilsson).

For an account of M.S. Swaminathan’s impressive life work, see Ramanujam et al. (1980). The Green Revolution in India has been widely described. A well documented assessment also addressing the shortcomings and the economic considerations on the farm level is given by Dasgupta, Biplab, 1977: Agrarian Change and the New Technology in India (Geneva: UN Research Institute for Social Development).

This is not to say that mistrust cannot be justified. But in assessing the costs and benefits the contagiousness has to be taken into account.

This is normally called “Technology Assessment”. It has been institutionalized in many countries, most prominently perhaps in the U.S.A. with the Congressional Office for Technology Assessment, Washington, D.C. The dimensions of technology assessment were laid out in the OECD publication by Hetman, François, 1973: Society and the Assessment of Technology (Paris: OECD). A recent survey of and some teaching approaches to technology assessment are given by Liao, Thomas T.; Darby, William P. 1982: “Technology Assessment”, in: Bulletin of Science, Technology and Society, 2: 583–624.

For a more thorough account of anti-scientific, anti-intellectual movements and events see J. Ben David, in the volume, where this chapter was first published.

The problematique is well described by Meyer-Abich (1979). See also von Weizsächer, C.F. 1977: Der Garten des Menschlichen, loc. cit.: 45–65 and 66–77.

Error-friendliness in technology is more than ‘reliability’ (which is normally rather associated with a certain inertia). As in biology such notions as resilience, barriers against damage-spreading, and mutations are important. To refer once again to M. S. Swaminathan (see note 25), contingency planning, risk distribution, disaster preparedness, and mid-season corrections were important factors in the Indian agricultural success (i.e. pp. 7–8).