Haskell’s Coordinate System in Synthesis

Abstract

Nearly three hundred years ago Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz observed:

But as things are, man’s knowledge of nature seems to me like a shop, well stocked with goods of all kinds but lacking any order or inventory. (Leibniz (ca 1683), Parkinson 1973).

Has the situation changed in the nearly 300 years since Leibniz made these remarks? The general argument is no, if anything, it has become much worse. Leibniz’s “shop” has become at least a warehouse, if not a maze of them. The continuous accumulation of scientific knowledge, accelerating in recent years, has forced an organization to evolve. That organization is the set of scientific disciplines. Ackoff (1973) says that scientific disciplines are nothing more than categories that facilitate filing the content of science. Others contend that the accumulation of knowledge by scientific disciplines contributes to the fragmentation of our knowledge of nature. This, as a result, places man in a poor position when he is expected to intelligently “govern” nature. Nature simply is not organized like our knowledge of it is, nor like our institutions where we study nature.