Ecology of concepts

1. Change and stability on the planet are now mediated by: (a) transfers and transformations of energy, which are universally applicable to material objects; (b) responsiveness, which operates additionally and in varying degrees in all organic forms (and an increasing number of artefacts); and (c) appreciation, which through the human conceptual system constitutes the means whereby humans represent, interpret, value, and increasingly create the world in which they effectively live.

The mediator in such a conceptual system is human communication and the system itself is a psycho-social artefact of which the conceptual world created by science is the most stable, coherent, and explicit example, although business, politics, and other human activities have their own partly autonomous systems. All communication, and hence all cooperation, depends on such shared appreciative systems, on ways of conceptualizing and valuing which are systematically organized and which, when they change, may have to change extensively before they reach anything approaching a new equilibrium.

2. The general ecology of knowledge is used heuristically to mean the study of patterns of interrelationships among the various ''species'' (subsystems, sub-subsystems, etc.) or fields and subfields of knowledge with emphasis on (a) preserving the condition of dynamic balance between the ''species'' and their environment; and (b) optimizing the over-all, symbiotic fruits of synergistic interactions among them.