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scientist must set in order. Science is built up with facts, as a house is with stones" (101). The thing about bricks is that they do not get forgotten: they are there in the nature of the edifice. Nobody need actively recall them: buildings do not remember. But each brick that is in a building is continuously present and is therefore ageless. In another metaphor, Poincaré sees the work of doing physics as similar to building a collection of books with the role of the theorist being to facilitate information retrieval, to catalogue: |
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Let us compare science to a library that ought to grow continually. The librarian has at his disposal for his purchases only insufficient funds. He ought to make an effort not to waste them. |
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It is experimental physics that is entrusted with the purchases. It alone, then, can enrich the library. |
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As for mathematical physics, its task will be to make out the catalogue. If the catalogue is well made, the library will not be any richer, but the reader will be helped to use its riches. (104) |
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The very nature of theory, then, is that it furnishes a classification system that can then be used to remember all (and only that) which is relevant to its associated practice. |
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All classification systems, however, face a bootstrapping problem. In a world of imperfect knowledge, any classificatory principle might be good, valid, useful: you will not know what makes a difference until you have built up a body of knowledge that relies, for its units of data, on the classification scheme that you have not yet developed. This is Spinoza's problem. Consider its form in the world of medical record-keepinga world in which every trace might count for a patient's health or a clinical discovery. To maintain a good system of medical records, a state needs to classify a huge amount of information not only about its own citizens but about citizens of countries that it is in contact with (classification systems are necessarily imperialistic; witness the protests of African doctors to pressures from western AIDS researchers). As seen in chapter 2, the need for information and thence the burden of classificatory activity is effectively infinite. |
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In a world in which, as Ann Fagot-Largeault (1989, 6) has pointed out it is impossible to die of old age (the category of being "worn out" having been removed from the ICD) it appears that we are afloat in a sea of multiple, fractured causalities each demanding their own classification systems and their own apparatus of record collection. To deal with the plenum of information that all good organizations logically need, one can operate a distribution of memory in space (such and |
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