As modern academic and scientific systems of knowledge communicate less directly with us, their social influence is diminishing.
In the Western world, the church has been succeeded on most matters of practical knowledge by research, scholarship, and education.
These forms of cognition stress well-defined logic, reasoning, and proof based on what can be observed and repeated. Because what is discovered can be passed on to succeeding generations in a cumulative "build effect," the approach has in the past few centuries been the source of enormous advances in human knowledge.
It remains highly vital in many areas today, particularly science and technology, where it represents the white-hot center of compelling economic and military interests. But in other areas, if we look a bit beneath the surface, we already find its influence beginning to wane.
This is largely because with the so-called "information explosion" we have experienced in recent years, our communications have tended to become more and more specialized.
One offshoot of this change is that today, people at the forefront of knowledge are significantly less likely to communicate directly with society at large than they were in earlier eras. A seminal contemporary scientific work is hardly ever read by laymen, as Darwin's The Origin of Species was. Nowadays, scholars and scientists and academics tend to write mainly for other scholars and scientists and academics—except in technology and certain applied sciences, where they may sometimes also write for a small audience of specialists in business and the military.
(c) COPYRIGHT 1998 ROBERT WINTER. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
