Wednesday, August 04, 2010

Will Varey - Apithology: An Emergent Continuum


One of the very cool presentations I attended and blogged was Will Varey's Health In, Of and For: The Ethics of Delineating 'Health' and 'Unhealth' - interesting and complex. My friend Luke Fullager suggested I check out his website, which has lots of cool stuff (there's two: emrgc and Apithology - both are cool).

At the ermrgc site, I found this introductory article to Apithology, an explanation of what it is and why it's important. This is related to the presentation at ITC 2010 - here is the beginning.


Abstract
Apithology is the field of study concerned with identifying and enhancing the essential elements for the healthy development of emergent systems and the structural and functional changes that produce emergent health.

In this paper the nature of apithology is explained, together with the reasons why the depth of practice in this field will increase. Looking at a continuum of development, the term is contrasted with its conceptual antonym – being ‘pathology’. Reasons are elucidated why a balanced focus on both the pathological and apithological is desirable.

Etymology of Apithology
Apithology is a word created to describe a timeless concept in a modern context. It is not known whether the word apithology also has an ancient meaning. The term originally emerged from the development of a concept that in essence is the counterpart to its opposite, being pathology. The origin of the word comes from the etymology of its basic elements:

Pathos ~ (the root in patho‐biology) ‐ comes from the ancient Greek. In this context pathos has the meaning related to ‘suffering’ or ‘disease’. Bios – is the ancient Greek word meaning ‘life’. Pathology can be understood literally, based on its etymology, to mean studies of the ‘suffering of life’ – being any adverse abnormality in a natural biological state.

Apic ~ (the root of apithology) – derives from the Latin. In is used here in its modern English meaning; ‘of, at or forming an apex’ (as in apical). The suffix end‐form is the same as in bi‐ology. Apithology can be understood literally, based on its etymology, to mean studies of the ‘apex of life’ – being any beneficial normalisation in a natural biological state.

An antonym is a word of opposite meaning, a counter‐term, used as a correlative of its synonym. The antonym of apithological is pathological. In a similar way, the antonym of apithology is pathology.

Technically, a noun, being a descriptive label for something, does not have an antonym ‐ its counterpart is a just a different thing. The word pathology, in its wider meaning, is also an adjective – describing not the study of something, but the descriptive quality of the thing studied (ie the pathology of the system) and therefore ‘apithology’ can have as its antonym pathology in this particular sense.

As ‘apithology’ is the counterpart concept of pathology, we can understand the less familiar term by looking at the meaning of the more familiar, which we will now explore.
Read the whole paper.


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