[Air-L] anthropology is not a science?

[William Bain]

Denise N. Rall wrote: "Our understanding of the discipline, social science, employs the term science as Wissenschaft, or a generalised sense of knowledge, as in what can be discovered or known about a given topic."
   
  I just wanted to say thanks, first, for posting all of that. I visited the Christine Borgman webcast Denise mentions and was interested by the distinction between creating "infrastructure of information" and "infrastructure for information", as well as the way the distribution of the sciences is addressed as being bureaucratic. It may be of interest on that last point to note something I recently read by Murray Gell-Mann in _The Quark and the Jaguar_ (paperback, Abacus, 1995), where the hierarchy of the sciences is discussed. On p. 109 Gell-Mann suggests that a science A is more fundamental than a science B when "1. The laws of science A encompass in principle the phenomena and the laws of science B. and 2. The laws of science A are more general than those of science B (that is, those of science B are valid under more special conditions than are those of science A)."
   
  He goes on to assign to mathematics a special place in the continuum. Looking for more information to patch up my view of quanta after getting confuse onlist the other day, i found an interesting discussion i wanted to share (fwiw) and so note it here. It applies quantum statistics to psychological studies of decision processes and, well, left me somewhat less confuse or confused :-)
   
  Thanks again to Denise et al.
   
  Best regards, Will
  
 


William Bain
PhD Student
Comparative Literature
Department of Spanish Philology
Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona
       
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