ABSTRACT
The practitioners of the new cluster of disciplines centering on communications and electronic media puzzle increasingly over the epistemology of computerized technology. R. Buckminster Fuller in his Utopia or Oblivion distinguishes between two such intellectual performances: differentiation and integration. The computer, according to Mr. Fuller, has already effectively eliminated man as differentiator but it can never replace him as integrator. The author locates his discussion of computerized performance within a larger polemic against specialization. Integration, an accident in computers, is a commonplace in men. Analytic inferences, themselves formal, are anchored in a priority out of which they are actualized. Human reasoning as creative synthesizing analogically mirrors or refracts the structure of being as understood by Thomas Aquinas. The eminent scientist's testimony points to an almost classic instance of Aristotle's understanding of a chance event. Two unconnected lines of causality "clash" or interfere with one another. The result is reducible to absolutely nothing which went into either causal nexus.
