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The Union of the “Two Cultures”
not prevent us from obtaining measures that are more meaningful, stable, and realistic”
(Wallerstein, 2012, p, 251). In the social – human – world there is more quality than quantity.
Men cannot
be figures, and they must not be.
4. Jumping over the “Two Cultures”? Not a conclusion but a starting-point
We need a “new synthesis, a new naturalism” against this unnatural dissection and
fragmentation (Prigogine & Stengers, 1984, 22). The general frame of it has been laid down
by great minds –Prigogine – and gifted and most tenacious fighters – Wallerstein. Their one
has not been a quixotic endeavor. So, to conclude this heartfelt call – a call by a mere
passionate Ph.D. student – I want to go back at the “pernicious” roots of this totally senseless
divide of the “Two Cultures”.
Although an overall triumphant nomothetism and the constant pretension of
universality and eternity, it is almost certainly unachievable an utmost and unconfutable truth
in nature; universal scientific laws, valid for all times and spaces of the universe(s), do not
exist. But science is, above all, our ability to cross the limit. The
Annus Mirabilis of Science,
whatever it is, is always the one that has to come. Newton, the secular god of Science of all
sciences, fell because of an unknown non-even-academic German-Jewish youngster.
Newton’s
laws were the Nature laws. Nowadays, it is not like that anymore.
‘Science [Wissenschaft] must no longer give the impression it represents a faithful reflection of
reality. What it is, rather, is a cultural system and it exhibits to us an alienated interest-determined
image of reality specific to a definite time and place’. […]. [May it] be that the pendulum of
intellectual fashion will soon swing back towards a greater emphasis on the special status of scientific
knowledge[?] (Collini, 1998, L).
So, what does it mean? Does it means, to keep using the nomothetic Physics world
against itself, that today Laplace is definitely dead and Heisenberg has triumphed for good?
Does a “Man’s new dialogue with nature” arise form Newton’s ashes? In other words, can
Nineteenth century scientific determinism, whereby we could have taken all the universe in
through a sheaf of laws capable of exactly determine the universe’s evolution starting from its
configuration at a specific time, still subsist? Deterministic Laplace’s hopes cannot be brought
to light in their own terms of reference since Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, even within
the nomothetic world, has disclosed a new universe of unreachable precision. May the
ideography of the nomothetic certainty arise?
Do “The laws of nature now express possibilities instead of certainties”? (Lee, 2011,
171). Laws cannot be the purpose of Science. Pure quantification, accounting, measuring in
science, in any science, is a chimera. Conversely, “[m]athematics is always embedded in
words” (Collins, 1989, 128). Today perhaps, an uneven spread of “such relativistic accounts
of science has made it more difficult to endorse the starker or more aggressive version of the
'two cultures' thesis” (Collini, 1998, L). So, we are probably crossing an edge, an historical
one: “[w]ith the transition from an industrial society based on heavy inputs of energy, capital,
and labor to a high-technology society in which information and innovation are the critical
resources, it is not surprising that new scientific world models should appear” (Toffler, 1984,
XIV).
In place of the idea of sovereign, anonymous, permanent laws directing all things in nature [we need
to substitute] the idea of
laws of interaction …There is more: the problem of determinism has become
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Andrea Lo Bianco
that of the order of the universe. Order means that there are other things besides ‘laws’: that there are
constraints, invariances, constancies, regularities in our universe … In place of the homogenizing and
anonymous view of the old determinism, [we need to substitute] a diversifying and evolutive view of
determinations (Edgar Morin as quoted in ivi, XXII-XXIII).
And this, as far as I am concerned here, is the intellectual goal that a fully-fledged
theory of historical change could fulfill within the social sciences.
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