Complessità e storia della scienza

Post date: 10-lug-2012 11.21.44

Forse la complessità deve essere compresa psicologicamente, prima di poter essere "usata" come strumento cognitivo. Per partecipare cognitivamente alla complessità è necessario uno stato mentale di un certo tipo. L'ansia non aiuta.

Dal punto di vista culturale invece, Morin cerca di analizzare i motivi per i quali l'ambiente scientifico (S.O accademico) stenta ad accogliere la complessità

RESTRICTED COMPLEXITY, GENERAL COMPLEXITY*

EDGAR MORIN

CNRS Emeritus Director

Centre d’Etudes Transdisciplinaires. Sociologie, Anthropologie, Histoire

Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales

Why has the problematic of complexity appeared so late? And why would it be justified?

1. The three principles of the rejection of complexity by ‘classical science’

Classical science rejected complexity in virtue of three fundamental explanatory principles:

• The principle of universal determinism, illustrated by Laplace’s Daemon, capable, thanks to his intelligence and extremely developed senses, of not only knowing all past events, but also of predicting all events in the future.
• The principle of reduction, that consists in knowing any composite from only the knowledge of its basic constituting elements.
• The principle of disjunction, that consists in isolating and separating cognitive difficulties from one another, leading to the separation between disciplines, which have become hermetic from each other.

These principles led to extremely brilliant, important, and positive developments of scientific knowledge up to the point where the limits of intelligibility which they constituted became more important than their elucidations. In this scientific conception, the notion of “complexity” is absolutely rejected. On the one hand, it usually means confusion and uncertainty;...

complete book chapter from World Scientific Books