Scientific Languages and Common Knowledge: Is Cultural Integration Possible?

Abstract

For many centuries the ideal of knowledge has been identified, by galileian and newtonian science, with the possibility of predicting the future evolution of a given material system in terms of the law of Nature that rules its interaction with the rest of the world. The empirical success of this method has gradually reinforced the conviction that the whole infinite range of natural events, in spite of their widely different aspects, might be explained in terms of a few simple and universal laws. According to this ideal the detailed representation of complicated phenomena is useless and misleading. It rests in fact on the belief that reality is inherently simple, and therefore that accidental perturbations do not substantially alter the nature of things and the course of their development. In other words, it assumes that the effects of chance and of external circumstances can be reduced at will until they become negligible.