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