[Sigia-l] moving beyond first principles: how?

[Listera]

"Groot, Boyd de" wrote:

> Though I am from the old continent I have no clue what
> 'Nullius in Verba' means. Ziya could you enlighten me?

I like the translation: "Take no one's word for it; see for yourself." It's
the motto of the Royal Society, whose aspiration was "not the Artifice of
Words, but a bare knowledge of things."

Sorry, for inadvertently introducing a sense of history to a thread that
starts the birth of IA just a handful of years ago!

It's not very difficult to see intense IA work slightly before the birth of
the web. Go back, uhm, 300 years and you have John Ray (who turned down the
Society's leadership offer) inventing the notion of 'species'. I'm pretty
certain what Ray and Linnaeus did for the classification of plants and
animals or what Mercator and his successors did for the classification of
the earth's surface happen to be IA. ("Deus creavit, Linnaeus disposuit/God
created, Linnaeus classified" they said of him.)

You can easily go back even further any number of centuries and find quite
advanced notions of IA firmly planted and exercised in our past. Recent
attempts to micro-define IA minutiae that fall under our own noses without
the benefit of history is laughable in my opinion, but I digress.

Ziya
Nullius in Verba