On Culture (1990-1999)

"Science is an integral part of culture. It’s not this foreign thing, done by an arcane priesthood. It’s one of the glories of the human intellectual tradition." (Stephen J Gould, Independent (London), 1990)

"Works of science are ways of understanding created through human effort which, like works of art, can be interrogated for what they say about ourselves and our development. By finding out about our science we find out about ourselves." (Joseph Schwartz, "The Creative Moment: How Science Made Itself Alien to Modern Culture", 1992)

"Mathematics was born and nurtured in a cultural environment. Without the perspective which the cultural background affords, a proper appreciation of the content and state of present-day mathematics is hardly possible." (Raymond L Wilder, American Mathematical Monthly, 1994)

"New knowledge is not science until it is made social. The scientific culture can be defined as new verifiable knowledge secured and distributed with fair credit meticulously given." (Edward O Wilson, "Naturalist", 1994)

"Culture in the broadest sense is a form of highly participatory activity, in which people create their societies and identities. Culture shapes individuals, drawing out and cultivating their potentialities and capacities for speech, action, and creativity." (Douglas Kellner, "Media Culture", 1995)

"Human mind and culture have developed a formal system of thought for recognizing, classifying, and exploiting patterns. We call it mathematics. By using mathematics to organize and systematize our ideas about patterns, we have discovered a great secret: nature's patterns are not just there to be admired, they are vital clues to the rules that govern natural processes." (Ian Stewart, "Nature's Numbers: The unreal reality of mathematics", 1995)

"Networks constitute the new social morphology of our societies, and the diffusion of networking logic substantially modifies the operation and outcomes in processes of production, experience, power, and culture. While the networking form of social organization has existed in other times and spaces, the new information technology paradigm provides the material basis for its pervasive expansion throughout the entire social structure." (Manuel Castells, "The Rise of the Network Society", 1996)

"Any global tradition needs to begin with a shared worldview - a culture-independent, globally accepted consensus as to how things are." (Ursula Goodenough, "The Sacred Depths of Nature", 1998)

"Despite being partly familiar to all, because of these contradictory aspects, mathematics remains an enigma and a mystery at the heart of human culture. It is both the language of the everyday world of commercial life and that of an unseen and perfect virtual reality. It includes both free-ranging ethereal speculation and rock-hard certainty. How can this mystery be explained? How can it be unraveled? The philosophy of mathematics is meant to cast some light on this mystery: to explain the nature and character of mathematics. However this philosophy can be purely technical, a product of the academic love of technique expressed in the foundations of mathematics or in philosophical virtuosity. Too often the outcome of philosophical inquiry is to provide detailed answers to the how questions of mathematical certainty and existence, taking for granted the received ideology of mathematics, but with too little attention to the deeper why questions." (Paul Ernest, "Social Constructivism as a Philosophy of Mathematics", 1998)

"Even revolutionaries conserve; all cultures are conservative. This is so because it is a systemic phenomenon: all systems exist only as long as there is conservation of that which defines them." (Humberto M Romesin & Pille Bunnell, "Biosphere, Homosphere, and robosphere: What has that to do with Business?", Society for Organizational Learning, 1998)

"[Mathematics is] a human activity, a social phenomenon, part of human culture, historically evolved, and intelligible only in a social context." (Reuben Hersh, "What Is Mathematics, Really?", 1998)

"Cultural archetypes are the unconscious models that help us make sense of the world: they are the myths, narratives, images, symbols, and files into which we organize the data of our life experience" (Clotaire Rapaille, "Cultural Imprints", Executive Excellence Vol. 16 (10), 1999)

"Every culture has a shared pattern of thinking. It is the cement that holds a culture together, gives it unity. A culture's characteristic way of thinking is imbedded in its concept of the nature of reality, its world view. […] A change of world view not only brings about profound cultural changes, but also is responsible for what historians call a ‘change of age’. An age is a period of time in which the prevailing world view has remained relatively unchanged." (Russell L Ackoff,"Re-Creating the Corporation", 1999)

"Imagining the unseeable is hard, because imagining means having an image in your mind. And how can you have a mental image of something you have never seen? Like perception itself, the models of science are embedded inextricably in the current worldview we call culture." (K C Cole, "First You Build a Cloud", 1999)