Welcome
A message from Gianni Frisardi, President of the The Charity
|
Dear friends, |
my dearest welcome to the Masticationpedia Project and its wiki.
This site is a communication tool, and at the same time a place of collaboration among those interested in the study of possible evolutions of Medicine, specifically of Dentistry, and for this reason it is a highly interactive site; a "wiki"[1], in fact, by express choice.
It is the wiki of the Charity, a non-profit British law organisation that aims to cultivate the studies and insights of the Medical Disciplines in the field of chewing (mastication in English and in scientific literature, hence the name).
To clarify why Masticationpedia, and for what purpose it could respond, we could start from a point of philosophy of science, remembering that not always in the history of the mankind there have been unequivocally certain answers, because an answer can be coherent today and inconsistent tomorrow; and viceversa. Socrates, probably the first to become interested in gnoseology, said that what is essential is intuition, and along with it is pursuing the progress of knowledge through discussion.
Masticationpedia in this sense is essentially, to use Feyerabend's words, an "Anarchist Process"[2] in which colleagues, scientists and researchers donate a part of their knowledge in the field of neuroscience of the masticatory system and oral rehabilitation; it is this form of giving, the primum movens of the project. At the same time, this process implements the progress of Basic Science because it is not committed to achieve predefined strategic editorial objectives such as "Open Access", nor to non-specific scientific weights such as the "Impact Factor"[3].
The principle of this initiative, therefore, is to raise awareness among colleagues to appreciate the gift of intelligence as an "empathic process" in which everyone recognizes each other because the progress of science exponentially increases only through the "paradigmatic innovations", typical of human genius and absolutely not comparable to "Incremental Innovations".
I wish that the contents that we present and produce here can be clear and understandable to everyone, especially patients; unfortunately it is not always possible to simplify, the subjects we deal with are complex and highly specialized, and first of all we have to deal with them, and consequently we talk about them, with scientific language. I hope that this is not read as an exclusion, because the aim of the project is the opposite; but I would like to thank in advance all those who will collaborate to clarify the most difficult steps, and help us in providing the answers that we will be happy to provide. The project is dedicated to patients, this is an unchangeable cornerstone of everything you will read here.
Best regards
References
- ↑ A "wiki", according to Wikipedia's definition, is «a knowledge base website on which users collaboratively modify and structure content directly from a web browser»
- ↑ We are talking about "epistemological anarchism" in the sense meant by Feyerabend, the author of an anarchist theory of knowledge; see Tilocca Piera, «L'anarchismo epistemologico di P.K. Feyerabend», 2005 – in «XÁOS. Giornale di confine Anno IV, N.1 Marzo -Giugno 2005/2006».
- ↑ See The Guardian, Nobel winner declares boycott of top science journals (interview: Randy Schekman), and Fulci Roberta, «Una wikireview per gli articoli scientifici», in Le Scienze, Scientific American, 2012».
particularly focusing on the field of the neurophysiology of the masticatory system