Complexity Epistemology - Edgar Morin
SCHEDULE
I. Life and Work of Edgar Morin
II. About Complexity
III. Complexity Epistemology
IV. In conclusion
epistemology-complexity-edgar-morinI. Edgar Morin
Edgar Nahum Beressi
• Born in Paris in 1922
• French sociologist, philosopher and anthropologist
• He studied at the Sorbonne and at the University of Toulouse
• Degree in Geography and History and Law in 1942
• He completed university studies in Sociology, Economics and Philosophy, which he interrupted due to the outbreak of World War II
• Militant of the French resistance against the Nazis.
• Member of the French Communist Party until 1951, when he was expelled
• Director of the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in 1970
• Since 1977 he directed the center for interdisciplinary studies at the CNRS Higher School of Social Sciences
• Before moving to California, he was part of the so-called group of ten, led by Dr. Robin
• As an essayist he is considered one of the great current French thinkers
• Contributor to numerous scientific publications
• Author of more than thirty books, including The Self-Criticism, The Spirit of Time I and II
• His anthropological essays include The Lost Paradigm, Human Nature (1973), The Nature of Nature (1977) and The Life of Life (1980). His works The Lost Paradigm and The Method are used as reference texts by philosophy students
II. About Complexity
complexity
1. f. Quality of complex
complex, ha (Del lat. Complexus, part. Pas. Of complecti, link)
1. adj. It is made up of various elements
2. adj. complicated (‖ matted, difficult)
3. m. Set or union of two or more things
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It is not a matter of considering external obstacles, such as the complexity or transience of phenomena, nor of incriminating the weakness of the senses or the human spirit (p. 15)
Gaston Bachelard. The Formation of the Scientific Spirit (1948)
"The present work… tries… in short to demonstrate the extraordinary complexity of the mechanism of scientific progress…"
"… After all, the route that seemed simple and rational turns out to be complex and protean" (p.3,1)
"… the The complexity of astronomy was increasing much faster than
its accuracy and that discrepancies corrected at one point were likely to occur at another ”(p.116,1)
Thomas S. Kuhn. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)
The increasing number and complexity of the sub universes makes them increasingly inaccessible to laymen; they become esoteric redoubts of "hermetic" wisdom (p.114, 2)
There are many possible complexities in this organization of relationships for the maintenance of reality… (p.190, 1)
Peter L. Berger & Thomas Luckmann. The Social Construction of Reality (1966)
“… The world we live in is extremely complex. I would be tempted to say that it is infinitely complex… We do not know where and how to
begin our analysis of the world… ”(p.166,1)
"All we can infer about the nature of the world, from the fact that we must use a mathematical language if we want to describe it, is that the world has a certain degree of complexity…" (p.396,1)
Karl R. Popper. Conjectures and Refutations (1972)
"… It can be shown that the track to track scientific revolutions is not the replacement of complex systems by
simpler ones" (p.57, 2)
"… It is currently recognized that the Copernican system was' at least as complex as the from Ptolemy '”(p.57, 3)
Imre Lakatos. History of Science and its Rational Reconstructions (1974)
"… such a series of events is not only very improbable, it is in principle impossible, given the nature of man and the complexity of the
world in which he lives" (p.139, 2)
If we turn to logic, we find that even the simplest demands are not met by scientific practice… due to the complexity of the matter (p.298, 1).
Paul Feyerabend. Treaty Against the Method (1975)
Knowledge is like sailing in an ocean of uncertainty between archipelagos of certainty
Complexity theories are pointing to a background in which a new epistemology is built:
the epistemology of complexity How to understand it?
The issue of complexity is complex!
"Complexity is complexity that is complex"
The role of knowledge is to explain the complex visible by the simple invisible *
Beyond the agitation, the dispersion, the diversity, there are laws
* Jean Perrin
Polynomials and integrals The principle of classical science is to legislate and to legislate, it must disunite, that is, isolate the objects subject to the laws
Legislate, disunite, reduce these are the fundamental principles of classical thought
While Cartesian-inspired science very logically ranged from complex to simple, scientific thought attempts to read the complexity of the real under the guise of phenomena. In fact, there is no simple phenomenon.
We have believed that knowledge had a starting point and a term; Today I think that knowledge is a spiral adventure that has a historical starting point, but it has no end, that the case of the genetic code, once discovered, must endlessly make concentric circles, sends us back to the question:
Why is there such an extraordinary diversity of forms in animals and plants?
Lorentz transformation equations
Unfortunately, nature has not been gentle enough to make things as simple as we would like them to be.
We must face complexity »
Dobzhansky, Theodosius. Evolutionary biologist
"The primary physical laws will never be discovered by a science that tries to fragment the world into its constituents"
Bohm, David. Physics, philosophy and neuropsychology
Complexity has struggled to emerge because it has not been the center of great debates and great reflections, as has been the case with rationality with the debates between Lakatos and Feyerabend or Popper and Kuhn
Edgar Morin
Scientificity and falsifiability are great debates that are talked about; but complexity has never been debated
The literature on complexity is very limited
• Weaver, Warren «Science and complexity» in 1948 in the American Scientific
• von Neumann, John in the theory "On self reproducing automata"
• Bachelard in Le nouvel esprit scientifique
• von Foerster in «On self organizing systems and their environment“
• HA Simon: «Architecture of complexity“
• Henri Atlan: Between the glass and the smoke
• Friedrich von Hayek "The theory of complex phenomena» in Studies in philosophy, politics and economics
It has been a lot about complexity but it has been mostly about what Weaver calls disorganized complexity
But organized complexity is often redirected to complication…
What is the complication?
Complexity is much more a logical notion than a quantitative notion Examples: the enormous cellular multiplicity in a molecule, the neural interactions
Complexity appears to us, as irrationality, as uncertainty, as anguish, as disorder
Every time there is an irruption of complexity in the form of uncertainty, of randomness, there is a very strong resistance
Quantum physics, Relativity
Every time there is an irruption of complexity in the form of uncertainty, randomness, a very strong resistance occurs.
Quantum physics, Relativity… it is impossible to measure simultaneously, and with absolute precision, the value of position and the amount of movement of a particle
This means that the precision with which things can be measured is limited, and the limit is set by the Planck constant
Heisemberg Principle of Uncertainty or Indeterminacy
… we cannot enter the problem of complexity if we do not enter that of simplicity because simplicity is not as simple as this
Simplification Paradigm
Commandments
1. The principle of classical science is to legislate: It is legislation, it is not anonymous, it is found in the universe, it is the law, and it is a universal principle.
The great laws that govern it, are laws of interaction are not laws in themselves but laws that only manifest
2. The disregard of time as an irreversible process: Simplicity does not consider time, time can be irreversible and repetitive,
complex thinking faces not only time, but the problem of polytemporality in which repetition, progress,
decadence appear linked
3. Principle of reduction, of elementality: Knowledge of systems can be reduced to that of its simple parts or elemental units that constitute them. Duality of light De Broglie
4. Principle of the Order-King: The Universe strictly obeys deterministic laws, and everything that seems disorder (that is, random, agitating, dispersive) is only an appearance due solely to the insufficiency of our knowledge The discovery of the planet Jupiter The discovery of the planet Neptune
5. Simplifying principle: In the old simplifying view, causality is simple, it is external to objects
6. On the organization problem: At the origin is the principle of emergence, that is to say, qualities and properties that
are born from the organization of a group retroactively affect that group
7. Simplifying thinking was founded on the disjunction between the object and the environment: the object was understood by isolating it from its environment; it had to be removed from the environment to be placed in a new artificial environment that was controlled, which was the medium of experience, of experimental science
In complex thinking, the distinction between the complex and the simple, the complicated and the simplified is very important, understanding the usefulness and the risk of simplification, what would be the limits in which simplification is valid, and when it involves epistemological risks that we must avoid “I will say, first of all, that for me, complexity is the challenge, not the answer. I am looking for a possibility to think transcending the complication… ”
