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−4−Preface : A journal of original papers of Type Tow Basic Research (H. Yoshikawa)Synthesiology - English edition Vol.1 No.1 (2008) activities. Real societal activities are not just technology. Basic knowledge acquired through basic research is the basis of all societal activities including politics, public administration, economy, finance, management, medicine, education, industry, production, and media. At the same time, it is fundamental to regard scientific knowledge created through basic research as public knowledge i.e. the collective property of society. This is the premise for the public funding of basic research. Today, basic research result sometimes becomes privately owned intellectual property, but this is only temporary. In general, research results are published in various specialized journals as research papers that are publicly recognized as the original work of the researcher who conducted the research. At this point, the knowledge becomes public property.It is necessary to consider whether Type 2 Basic Research fulfills the fundamental requirements of basic research. The fundamental requirements are as follows: research results should refine or add to specific knowledge regarded as the collective property of society, and it should be useful to actual societal needs although individual research does not necessarily have to have immediate purpose. With these considerations, if we were to distinguish Type 2 research from general basic research, the Type 2 body of knowledge should be different from existing scientific knowledge. Here, general basic research is referred to as Type 1 Basic Research, and the body of knowledge consists of the scientific knowledge accumulated over history. The argument that the body of knowledge of Type 2 Basic Research is different from that of Type 1 Basic research is the basis for claiming the existence of two types of basic research. Therefore, it is now necessary to clarify the difference between the bodies of knowledge of Type 1 and Type 2 research.The body of knowledge created by Type 1 Basic Research is knowledge of the actual world. The driving motive of research is a researcher’s intellectual curiosity. Physics, for example, historically began as a study of the properties of the world around us, and has been successful in consistently explaining the emergence of matter, the dispersion of matter and its historical transition in the universe, and the properties of matter both on earth and in space. Explanations were initially limited to nonliving matter, but now are being applied to life as well. Physics has achieved great success in creating a consistent body of knowledge concerning the existence and behavior of all matter on earth as well as in the universe. Being consistent means, for example, that the explanation for the light originating from a light bulb nearby is consistent with the explanation for the light emitted by distant celestial body.Physics, however, has not explained everything. Traditionally, the academic study of nature has included chemistry, biology, geology, meteorology, oceanography, and archeology, and if human beings are included in nature as study subjects, then there are also the fields of linguistics, psychology, anthropology, sociology, economics, and cultural anthropology. These varied fields are commonly referred to academic disciplines. Individual disciplines do not necessarily use common concepts, and in general, unrelated, different explanation may be given for the same topic. Therefore, it is necessary to state precisely what “mutually consistent body of knowledge” means. This consistency is valid only within each academic discipline, and the explanations are unrelated or mutually non-interactive rather than consistent between disciplines. However, a larger movement is emerging within the field of science, where physics is expanding its scope to interactions between matter and life and the demarcations between other disciplines such as chemistry and biology are blurring. In a similar way the topic of neuroscience hints at merging with parts of linguistics. Unity, however, will not be easily attained because the situation is complex and irregular, and it is unclear whether non-interacting areas will disappear.Type 2 Basic Research can be considered as independent form of basic research by determining whether the research defined as Type 2 Basic Research has a unique body of knowledge created under its umbrella, and if so, whether that body of knowledge is essentially different from the aforementioned body of knowledge created by Type 1 Basic Research. It is important to seek out the relationship between the two bodies of knowledge in considering the relationship between science and society, but this will not be considered here. Simply stated, the body of knowledge of Type 1 Basic Research is, as mentioned above, a system that explains or provides understanding of all phenomena that we can experience by creating disciplines that are initially non-interacting and by slowly integrating these disciplines. The motivation of the research is intellectual curiosity. If this is defined according to the same terms used for aforementioned Type 2 Basic Research, it will be:“Creation of new knowledge by using existing knowledge of a discipline that is consistent with the knowledge of that discipline”.Here, Type 1 Basic Research is mainly considered as “normal science” as described by Thomas Kuhn [2], but it should be pointed out that what Kuhn calls the “paradigm shift” is the integration of disciplines or the creation of new disciplines which are important but particular to his theory.Both definitions concentrate on use of knowledge, but Type 1 uses the knowledge of a single closed discipline whereas Type 2 is not limited by discipline. In general, use of knowledge in a certain discipline is formulated by experiments or by a logical thinking process, but there is no formulated method for using knowledge in multiple disciplines. Moreover, the

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