Editorial
A few words
A research center that chooses to work with the Arts in their confluence with Communication and Technologies is always at great risk: we deal simultaneously with exact sciences and with the often inexact field of the Humanities. In spite of all the transformations that the 20th century has undergone, in the 21st century we continue to work with positivist criteria, clearly inadequate even for the so-called hard sciences. It is necessary to start working with a different paradigm allowing true dialogue between the arts and the sciences, especially since the boundaries between these two fi elds have long been crumbling.
If the scientific/positivist criteria were never adequate to understand the arts, we lack even adequate criteria to understand science itself as it seeks new paths and, curiously, these paths bring it closer to the Humanities. The eminent chemist Ilya Prigogine worked with Complexity Theory in an attempt to find satisfactory answers to a series of questions that his studies on thermodynamics imposed. He acknowledged, as many scientists also have, that scientific principles alone would not suffice to account for a constantly expanding universe, in which Cartesian certainties are replaced by doubts, and organization is replaced by the understanding and acceptance of chaos. Complex thinking is above all a dialogical thinking that allows for a transdisciplinary approach between areas apparently as diverse as philosophy and science.
The neo-positivist belief in the unity of science has long since lost its place. It does not make sense, therefore, to continue to imprison research within the boundaries of a scientific grammar. Not all research produces an output of knowledge. Whatever knowledge it construes, this research has to be well grounded in rigor, which is not a premise of exact sciences alone but rather part of the genuine need to build a fruitful and constant dialogue that does not exclude differences, errors, and noises and which, above all, does not try, in vain, to organize chaos, but wisely seeks to negotiate with it.
Esta publicação também está disponível em: Portuguese (Portugal)
