Conclusion

In conclusion, if human knowledge has the structure of a scale-free network, which is as much a feature of the fact that it is generated by a society of interacting agents as it is reflective of the physical world, then there is no sense in talking about a most fundamental area of knowledge.

Although I have argued that physical knowledge is reflective of physical reality, we still have the question of how objective it is. Does the physics knowledge network necessarily have to look similar to our current theories of physics, or could there be a very dissimilar looking network that is equally efficient, formed on the basis of the same evidence? Even if we think of the process of acquiring knowledge as looking for the most efficient scale-free encoding, there could be local minima in the space of all possible networks, which would be difficult for a process based on locally adding nodes and replacing links to get out of. If two societies can end up with very different networks based on the same process, then this lends weight to the argument that social construction is the dominant influence of scientific theories. However, if the physics networks generated by this process all tend to look the same up to minor differences, then they are more reflective of the world than of society.

I view this as an empirical question. If we ever encounter an advanced alien civilization that has developed in isolation from us, will its physics network look similar to ours or not? I think it is likely that the answer is yes, but that is not something I can prove. Barring contact with aliens, we could answer the same question by placing a network of sufficiently advanced artificial intelligences on a knowledge gathering quest. This is obviously not a question we can answer right now, but maybe one day we will.

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