Abstract
With this issue, ISR introduces (or, rather, reintroduces after long hiatus) a genre we are calling the ‘Comment’: an expression of a personal view on a subject with the intention of provoking responses. This reintroduction was itself provoked by an idea for an essay which began in a conversation about artificial intelligence between Editorial Board member Alan Blackwell and myself. Alan holds a professorship in interdisciplinary design at Cambridge — perhaps the only such professorship in the world. His “Two kinds of artificial intelligence” extends this conversation we had into prose as a way of provoking further comments.
Readers will already be aware that ISR publishes mostly research articles — but with a difference. As the journal has developed over the years, its emphasis has shifted ever more from interdisciplinary science in the usual sense to scientia, which by definition embraces all disciplines, and so raises the question of their cross-disciplinary interrelations. With this shift, ISR has moved away from an emphasis on ‘results’ (bricks in the building of knowledge) to explorations of multidimensional borderlands. There a provisional, conversational style gets much further than a definitive or final argument, and the perspectives of those who learn by conversing becomes part of what is revealed. The immediately previous issue of ISR provides an example; there the research articles are affected and the adventurous provocation which stimulates them hugely rewarded. If anything, then, the ‘Comment’ genre is overdue.