Elisabet Sahtouris’s keyboard metaphor for science, from her essay A Keyboard Metaphor.
Extended definition
The metaphor lays the sciences out along a single keyboard. On the reading this entry starts from, Western science plays a narrow range of keys, those of the measurable material world, while indigenous and contemplative traditions play other ranges, and a complete science would use the whole keyboard [TBV]. That reading needs checking against Sahtouris’s essay before the entry is expanded.
The wiki’s page on Elisabet Sahtouris credits her with popularizing the concept. It sits beside her co-founding of the Worldwide Indigenous Science Network, and it bears on how the wiki treats indigenous knowledge as a science in its own right.
Related terms
Sources
- Sahtouris, E. A Keyboard Metaphor. Essay, formerly published at sahtouris.com/docs/Keyboard.pdf. The address returned a 404 on 27 September 2026, so the text still has to be located.
Provenance
Stub entry created 27 September 2026 in the Quartz Sanitation run, to give a page to links from the Elisabet Sahtouris page that pointed at no page. Written from the wiki’s Sahtouris page and the title of her essay; the essay itself could not be retrieved, so the extended definition is tagged [TBV]. First-pass entry: sections require enrichment from the underlying project documents.