GALILEO AND THE INVERSE PRECISION RECALL RELATIONSHIP - MEDIEVAL ATTITUDES IN MODERN INFORMATION-SCIENCE

The tight adherence to dogmas, created and advocated by authorities an d disseminated through hearsay, constitutes an impediment to the progr ess badly needed in view of the low effectiveness of the vast majority of our bibliographic information systems. The Italian mathematician a nd physicist Galileo has become famous not only for his discoveries bu t also for his being exposed to the rejective and even hostile attitud e on the part of his contemporaries when he contradicted several dogma s prevailing at that time. This obstructive attitude can be traced thr oughout the centuries and manifests itself in the field of modern info rmation science, too. An example is the allegedly necessary, inevitabl e precision/recall relationship, as most recently postulated again by Lancaster (1994). It is believed to be confirmed by empirical evidence , with other empirical evidence to the contrary being neglected. This case even constitutes an example of the suppression of truth in the in terest of upholding a dogma.