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Berkeley's God: as long as it pays attention to nurses, they will continue to exist. Having ensured that all nursing acts are potentially remembered by any medical organization, the NIC team will have gone a long way to ensuring the future of nursing. |
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Classification Systems: Potential Memory and Forgetting |
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Three social institutions, more than any others, claim perfect memory: the institutions of science, the law, and religion. The legal and clerical professions claim perfect memory through an intricate set of reference works that can be consulted for precedence on any current case. The applicability of past to present is a matter of constant concern often argued in the law courts or in theological disputes. Scientific professionals, though, have often claimed that by its very nature science displays perfect memory. Furthermore they structure their recall primarily through a myriad of classification systems that give them a vast reserve of potential memory. Scientific articles are in principlethough never in practiceencoded in such a way that, hopefully, an experiment performed one day in Pesotum, Illinois, can be entirely replicated 100 years later in Saffron Walden, England. |
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The chapter now draws some more general conclusions about the ways in which classification systems structure memory within organizations, taking as a chief example the nature and operation of classification systems in science. There are two major reasons for choosing the institution of science for a wider discussionthe NIC development team claims to be rendering nursing scientific, and so these wider examples develop naturally out of that section above; and classification work has been more formalized in science than in other institutions. |
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It can readily be accepted that great discoveries were made but not recognized as such at the time (the cases of Kepler and Mendel are canonical). But it is not often held that discoveries were made, recognized, and then forgotten. Traditionally in science the discourse of perfect memory has not been that of the complete file folder, though notable publications have claimed to be archives for their respective disciplines. The more general claim to perfect memory is that this good recordkeeping is in the very nature of science. Take, for example, Henri Poincaré's Science and Hypothesis (1905). All scientific work, for Poincaré and many other positivists, went toward the construction of an eternal palace. Poincaré uses the metaphor of an army of scientists, foot soldiers, each adding a brick or so to the edifice of science. "The |
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