Myths and Models

Abstract

Thales believed that “everything is made of water.” At the dawn of mathematical physics, Descartes thought he would be able to produce (all on his own) an exact picture of reality as it is. At the start of an unprejudiced questioning about the world, a fresh mind, aiming at lucidity, imagines quite naturally that it is possible to say what is. It does not pause to ponder that in order to “say” something, words are needed, which, in turn, express concepts, and that our concepts—reflecting as they do the conditions under which action was possible, either for the children we were or for our prehuman ancestors—are not necessarily adapted to the description of a reality considered, by assumption, to be independent of man.