Re: Selling Rosen to the University

[Tim Gwinn <***>]

Hi JohnK,

> -----Original Message-----
> Hi Tim and others,
>
> I am trying to introduce some Rosen concepts to the Environmental

Which particular Rosen concepts did you have in mind? He had so many! :)
Even 'Rosennean complexity' as a topic can be approached in so many ways
that it is probably too broad to introduce as one concept.

> Studies Dept. and a Cooperative Institute for Research in the
> Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado in Boulder. It is a
> very conservative group and strongly biased toward physical science, but
> there are some ecologists who would like to create a focus. I'm
> wondering if any of our Rosen colleagues would have some advice.
>
>
------snip-----
> It seems that the few true system ecologists are
> very much interested, except for fears of comitting some kind of
> epistemological sin (fears borrowed from positivist traditions, to be
> sure). We have the ear of the Dean of Libraries, and while that may not
> seem highly relevant at first glance, he is quite interested in the
> whole emerging field of informatics and information complexity.
> Geography may have some interests, although I doubt anyone there would
> really get into the theory much.
>
> The recommendation we are pushing is to start a research theme in
> "ecological informatics" but I will have to get past a number of
> physical scientists, chemists, and molecular biologists in the target
> institute.

I wonder if introducing the Modelling Relation as a methodological paradigm
might be a good entry point? It's fairly non-threatening, and it might make
a nice unifying, underlying principle that the Dean of Libraries, system
ecologists, and the ecological informatics theme could possibly agree on, or
at least perhaps use as a lingua franca for discoursing on any kind of
modeling. In due time, questions can then arise about the nature of models
and whether the entailment structures of the systems under study require
complex models or not.

Regards,
Tim