Did I stovepipe?

Some time ago I posted suggesting that:

• The natural sciences are the sciences dealing with the natural world;
• The sciences studying human beings (e.g. medical, psychological) are those dealing specifically with human beings;
• The social sciences (e.g. sociology, anthropology, economics, organizational sciences, history) are those dealing with society;
• Technology (in one sense of the term) deals with the human-built world.

I suppose that one could add the humanities (e.g. philosophy), dealing with the human-imagined world.

In Human-Built World: How to Think about Technology and Culture, Thomas P. Hughes mentions technology as dealing with the human built and cultivated world. He made me think. Agriculture has transformed a large part of the land surface of the earth, and that area is better described as cultivated than as either man built or natural. Indeed, there is a body of knowledge about the techniques of agriculture which is different than that dealing with engineering which the original domain of "technology".

There is a gradient in the degree of human influence on the land. It seems to be the case that fire has been used by people for thousands of years to burn grasslands and clear forest undergrowth, with the intention of increasing the productivity of goods from the land. Native Americans modified forests by protecting and planting trees that they found useful and eliminating trees that they found undesirable, making mast (nuts and berries from trees) a major source of human food and animal feed. We have in some cases commercialized gathering, as in the case of the babasu palm industry in Brazil.

It occurs to me that, while humans have modified land for human use, most of the surface of the earth is water, and we have done relatively little to cultivate the ocean. Fishing is generally based on the harvest of wild species, as is some seaweed harvesting. Only in the last few decades has aquaculture become comparable to the harvest of wild fish. I suspect that in a few centuries the seas will be far more fully cultivated by man.

The basic point is that to understand the uses of the land, we have to understand both the natural processes and the processes created or modified by human hunting, gathering and cultivation. Equally, we will not understand the technologies of primary or extractive industries without the basis of knowledge about the environments from the natural sciences.

I think we do not understand society without understanding the relation of that society to its physical environment, and Marx is given credit for recognizing that we can not understand society without understanding its technological basis. Equally, we can not understand man's environment without understanding man's impact on that environment, which in turn is dependent on understanding his society.

Too often, we stovepipe sciences and technologies, thinking about them in terms only of a specific discipline or set of disciplines. It seems to me that I may inappropriately have contributed to such an error. To understand man's world, we need to bring together simultaneously our understanding from all the sciences and technologies.

Getting back to the humanities, that area of scholarly activity has much in common with the sciences and technologies. I have been thinking a great deal for some years about cyberspace. So too, I have been thinking of the bodies of knowledge that are protected as intellectual property, common property, or traditional (and claimed by traditional societies). These form an increasingly important part of our conceptual world, and I predict we will see more and more formal academic study of these spaces. I think the traditional humanities similarly study a virtual world of the mind. Thus we may add to the social, physical, and human-built world, the virtual world. And we need to recognize that the divisions among these worlds is a reductionist artifact -- one to be overcome if we are to gain a holistic understanding of our surroundings.