Using Double Helix Relationships to Understand and Change Informing Systems

The paper opens by generalizing the concept of 'informing science'. It then introduces some meta-scientific perspectives and a discussion of a metaphor that has considerable explanatory power. Two main schools of metascience are presented and contrasted. The difference between treating invariances in natural sciences and in social and cultural sciences is discussed. The double helix is introduced as a generic metaphor to highlight important distinctions. Highlighting new distinctions in this way can help to avoid simply assimilating them into already familiar distinctions. The paper also discusses how some metascientific perspectives and the transdisciplinary generalized concept of informing science can be seen as related. Finally, the paper argues that computerized models never keep up with continuously changing situations. However, people always have to handle the full variety of situations, including those not foreseen during requirements engineering. To address this, the paper suggests balancing requirements engineering with model transparency engineering