abstract statements into one another. Genealogies of scientific research equip-
ment have become part of inescapable banal reality. The effectiveness of this
equipment in producing and reproducing special phenomena in ordinary time-
space, which the network of scientific intellectuals interprets, ties the non-im-
mediate entities of scientific theories closely, if not immediately, to ordinary
reality as well.
How then does far-reaching doubt arise about so many of these realities?
In part it simply continues the main dynamic of creativity, the law of small
numbers. Intellectuals thrive on disagreement, dividing the attention space into
three to six factions, seeking lines of creativity by negating the chief tenets of
their rivals, rearranging into alliances or fanning out into disagreements as the
material base for one faction or another is strengthened or weakened. Conflict
over the attention space is a fundamental social fact about intellectuals. It
follows that intellectuals produce multiple competing views of reality. And this
disagreement will go on in the future, as long as intellectual networks exist.
Disagreement over fundamental realities has been normal in the intellectual
world ever since specialized networks appeared in ancient times; it is only in
the last dozen generations of modern European networks that a social structure
has arisen producing intellectual consensus on some topics. The network of
intellectuals has split into several branches: philosophers and general-purpose
intellectuals, whose dynamics continue to be determined by the law of small
numbers; rapid-discovery science, which developed out of a technique for
evading the law of small numbers; and mathematicians, whose niche is a
cumulative, self-entwining investigation which builds a core of virtual certainty
in its lineage of knowledge. Besides these, in a limbo between rapid-discovery
science and philosophy, are the disciplines of social science and humanistic
scholarship; they resemble the natural sciences in taking topics of empirical
(including historical) investigation, but share with philosophy the social or-
ganization which produces intellectual fractionalization under the law of small
numbers.
As intellectual networks have continued to branch, especially with the
accelerating expansion of academic populations since 1900, criticism of the
reality of the objects studied by particular branches has entered a new phase.
Some branches take one another for their topics of investigation. These disci-
plinary overflows are a normal source of the expansion of knowledge. Crea-
tivity in philosophy since the academic revolution of the 1800s has been largely
stimulated by the adjudication of new disciplinary boundaries. The emergence
of history of science, sociology of knowledge, the literary theory of textual-
ity, along with many other actual and potential combinations, heightens the
reflexivity of the intellectual community as a whole. The search for problems,
for energizing points of attention and contention, which is the life of intellectual876 •^ Meta-reflections