To detect the actual global nature of our present knowledge about harmony would need to make an inventory of those approaches having working parts, i.e., explanatory power for conrete phenoma of interest. Encouraging points of departure are those where music theorists recognize their situation as a crisis – either of music or of their theory. Presently, one observes a solidarity between local approaches and musical periods and styles (e.g., Schenkerian analysis for Baroque music till early Romantics, Neo-Riemannian analysis for late Romantic Music). From the viewpoint of historical relativism in the second half of the 20th century, there appeared to be no need to theoretically trace contiguity along the diachronic axis of music history.

We now leave the concrete example in order to comment upon some basic research strategies. The internal dynamics of mental culture can hardly be explained as an intended result of the collective behavior in social culture. Especially an apperance of unauthorized “aliens” may pass without any noticable effect, but it may lead to unpredicted turbulences as well. Growth, maintenance and evaluation of knowledge within the mentality of a scientific culture are internally caused by a fundamental drive towards local and global coherence. Processes of localization and globalization occur in systematic interaction.

We suggest to distinguish the following three types of knowledge management:

• Dogmatics preserves local coherence within a domain of knowledge by selective incorporation, i.e., through filtering.
• Modeling obtains local coherence within a domain of knowledge
  through construction.
• Hermeneutics collects and compares varying viewpoints on given objects of interest and hence forces globalization of knowledge.

If there is any kind of native interest in the object domain at all, it is the hermeneutician, who is in control of it. It should be stressed that the two localization strategies involve a specific normative/creative behavior intervening with such native interest. Nevertheless, one should not underestimate the role of model and dogma. While there is always some danger for a modelist to confuse a model with reality, there is also a parallel source of confusion for his critics, who are likely to take engagement for a model already as confusion between model and reality. Something similar holds for the honest dogmatist and his critics. We come back to this issue in the following section.

Whenever hermeneutic activity discovers a partially global coherence, this already implies knowledge about a global object and hence might lead to further modeling activity. The systematic interaction between knowledge localization and globalization is of recursive nature.