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The epistemological impact of investigations on "complexity"

Complexity posed as a philosophical idea (even trough it is from the sciences that approach it) was seen by some as the expression of a new "epistemological spirit" that would be changing not only our mechanist image of nature but also our relationship to it and the way we do science, in a more qualitative, less aggressive, and more human approximation. By overcoming traditional reductionism, by acknowledging the autonomy and interrelations of the distinct levels of reality and the symbiosis between order and disorder, regularities and randomness, sciences, assimilating the spirit of complexity, would be open to an awareness of their fundamental limits. By considering the approach of "complex systems" in some disciplines, I argue that, because of demands for effectiveness and objectivity, the search for simplification, compression, and the effort towards "calculation" of all its objects, the typical face of sciences remains, including those of "complexity.

complexity; simplification; reductionism; mechanism


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