Inaugural lecture as Professor of Women's Studies in the Arts Faculty of the University of Utrecht, May 16, 1990.

As a contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium “Whatever Happened to Richard Rorty?,” this essay elucidates how Isabelle Stengers's signature idea of an “ecology of practices” offers a way to establish claims to expertise and—within limits that are, in effect, the limits of specific scientific practices—claims of authority within science that Rorty would have denied. The problems facing Rorty's understanding of science also imperil his vision of a society admirably seeking to realize what he calls “social hope.” Once again, Stengers's (...) ecology of practices, together with her cosmopolitical perspective, offers grounds for questioning Rorty's utopian belief that endless conversation should lead to continual expansion of the “we” who constitute liberal society. Her idea also provides tools for engaging, in mutually respectful and sensitive encounters that reopen prospects for social hope, the multiplicity of voices, perspectives, and practices of the “others” who have been excluded from liberal society. (shrink)

In this article an epistemological framework is proposed in order to integrate the emergentist thought with systemic studies on biological autonomy, which are focused on the role of organization. Particular attention will be paid to the role of the observer’s activity, especially: (a) the different operations he performs in order to identify the pertinent elements at each descriptive level, and (b) the relationships between the different models he builds from them. According to the approach sustained here, organization will be considered (...) as the result of a specific operation of identification of the relational properties of the functional components of a system, which do not necessarily coincide with the intrinsic properties of its structural constituents. Also, an epistemological notion of emergence—that of “complex emergence”—will be introduced, which can be defined as the insufficiency, even in principle, of a single descriptive modality to provide a complete description of certain classes of systems. This integrative framework will allow us to deal with two issues in biological and emergentist studies: (1) distinguishing the autonomy proper of living systems from some physical processes like those of structural stability and pattern generation, and (2) reconsidering the notion of downward causation not as a direct or indirect influence of the whole on its parts, but instead as an epistemological problem of interaction between descriptive domains in which the concept of organization proposed and the observational operations related to it play a crucial role. (shrink)

The ancient, interlinked questions about the role of chance in the living world and the origins of life, gained new relevance with the development of molecular biology in the twentieth century. In 1970, French molecular biologist Jacques Monod, joint winner of the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, devoted a popular book on modern biology and its philosophical implications to these questions, which was quickly translated into English as _Chance and Necessity_. Nine years later, Belgian thermodynamicist Ilya Prigogine, 1977 (...) winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, published a popular book on the history and philosophy of natural sciences with Belgian philosopher Isabelle Stengers. Translated into English under the title _Order out of Chaos_ and widely discussed, the whole book can be seen as a response to Monod on these biological and philosophical questions. This study will trace this intellectual controversy between two Nobel Prize winners defending two opposing scientific and philosophical visions of the living world, rooted in two different scientific disciplines. (shrink)

As figurational sociologists and sociolinguists, we need to know that we currently find support from other fields in our efforts to construct a sociocultural science focused on interdependencies and processes, creating a multidimensional picture of human beings, one in which the brain and its mental and emotional processes are properly recognized. The paradigmatic revolutions in 20th-century physics, the contributions made by biology to our understanding of living beings, the conceptual constructions built around the theories of systems, self-organization and complexity, all (...) these implore that we reflect on social sciences paradigms in the light of the great changes in these other disciplines. The application of metaphors or theoretical images of complexity and figurational sociology in understanding language and socio-communication phenomena is of great use, since language is not an ‘object’, but a ‘complex’; it exists simultaneously in and among different domains. ‘Languaging’ and interaction are co-phenomena. The former exists within the latter, and the latter within the former. By visualizing, for instance, the different levels of linguistic structure not as separate entities but rather as united and integrated within the same theoretical frame, by seeing their functional interdependencies, by situating them in a greater multidimensionality that includes what for a long time was considered ‘external’ – the individual and his or her mind-brain, the sociocultural system, the physical world, etc. – and expanding in this way our classical view, we should be able to make important, if not essential, theoretical and practical advances. (shrink)

The claim of the freedom of the will (understood as an individual who is transcendent to Nature) in the name of XXth century scientific knowledge, against the perspective of XVIIIth-XIXth century scientific materialism, is analysed and refuted in the present paper. The hypothesis of reductionism finds no obstacle within contemporary natural sciences. Determinism in classical physics is irrefutable, unless classical physics is itself refuted. From quantum mechanics, some authors argue that free will is possible because there is an ontological indeterminism (...) in the natural laws, and that the mind is responsible for the wave function collapse of matter, which leads to a choice among the different possibilities for the body. However, here I defend the opposite thesis because indeterminism does not imply free will, and because the considerations about an autonomous mind sending orders to the body is against neuroscience or evolutionary theories about human beings. The quantum theory of measurement can be interpreted without the intervention of human minds, but other fields of science cannot contemplate the mentalist scenario. A fatalistic or materialist view, which denies the possibility of a free will, makes much more sense in scientific terms. (shrink)

Michel Serres’s philosophy of entropy takes what he famously calls the ‘Northwest Passage’ between the sciences and the humanities. By contextualizing his approach to entropy and affirming the role of a philosophy of difference, this paper explores Serres’s approach by means of ‘entropic differences’. It claims that entropy – or rather, entropies – provide Serres with a paradigmatic case for critical translations between different domains of knowledge. From his early Hermès series, through to The Birth of Physics and later writings (...) on social and ethical themes, he keeps thermodynamical and informational – or ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ – understandings of entropy apart, while simultaneously exploring their relation. By focusing on the systematic significance of Serres’s ‘entropic difference’, this paper shows how it unfolds not necessarily as an ontological difference but as an operative function between the history and philosophy of science, epistemology, and a theory of negentropic (inter)subjectivity. (shrink)

According to the article, Neurath's reflexive epistemology—expressed by the metaphor of the ship in need of reconstruction on the open sea—represents a philosophical alternative to the classical and contemporary forms of scientific realism and ethical cognitivism, including Popper's falsificationism. Against Quine's reductive interpretation of Neurath's boat argument as the basis for a 'naturalized epistemology,' the article maintains that the metaphor suggests the idea of an insuperable situation of linguistic and conceptual circularity. This prevents any attempt at self-foundation in scientific knowledge, (...) as well as in ethics and politics, and rules out any 'constructive philosophy' aiming to break circularity in pursuit of some methodological beginning. (shrink)

This article addresses complexity by selecting some of its key aspects that share a common feature: the power to change. They seem to change not only the way the world is approached by scientists, but also the way this approach, the resulting perspectives and their multiple relationships, are interpreted. These main aspects are: the challenge of measurability, with an unexpected result that escapes the gravitational field of the measurability problem; the meaning of reproducibility and the redrawn boundaries of scientific inquiry, (...) with implications for the social sciences; the altered expectations concerning prediction, which seem to break with a glorious tradition of unquestioned technological success; and the discovery of all-embracing patterns of events that unavoidably include large events, possibly perceived as ‘crises’, which one may hope to understand and confront, rather than rule out. The resulting geography, with its new landmarks, new relationships among its elements and new means of orientation, is expected to reach the public sooner or later, even if the effect – according to complexity theory itself – cannot be foreseen in detail. All these fibres of change are considered in the context of a fresh meaning of time and of a topology dominated by network concepts. (shrink)

This article explores Edgar Morin's contribution to our understanding of the nature of being human and its implications for our understanding of, and approach to, the future. The notions of being, self, and community are addressed in terms of a planetary "community of destiny," and the processes of natural and social evolution.

The pace, the scale, the nature and the reach of social transformation are such that moments of destruction and moments of creation succeed each other in a frantic rhythm without leaving time or space for moments of stabilization and consolidation. This is precisely why I characterize the current period as one of transition.

(1999). Figures in (De)composition: The genesis of the paradoxical self in paul auster's moon palace (a fuzzy grammar of subjectivity) 1 . Angelaki: Vol. 4, No. 3, pp. 75-91.

Descartes's distinction between res cogitans and res extensa is a paradigmatic concept on which Western thought has been grounded. The reductionist and objectivistic approach of modern science draws its fundamental premise from it. This dualism has also instigated a view of human as separate from nature. The complexity approach in its most radical form questions many of these assumptions, asserting that the subjective and objective dimensions are involved in a relation of mutual determination and dependence. This article argues that if (...) the dualistic metaphysics is replaced by a vision emphasizing this mutual dependence, a new way of interacting with nature may also be fostered. (shrink)

Contemporary complexity sciences claim a literal, non-metaphorical applicability to physical, economic, social and cultural events. They envision the development of a general social or historical physics. Conversely, in the social sciences and humanities, complexity sciences have been typically treated as a source of new metaphors or tropes to be used in theory-building. Can there be a critical social or historical physics that is not a world-view and that does not treat science as a source of metaphors? The Lorenz attractor figures (...) centrally in the history of complexity science as a popular image of ‘deterministic chaos’ and the ‘butterfly effect’, as an indication of how far complexity science has progressed in the last two decades, and, as this article argues, as an event whose multiplicity of interpretations attests to the problem it raises, the problem of generality associated with complexity. Via the Lorenz attractor, the article examines three attempts to treat complexity non-metaphorically in recent theoretical work. In these accounts, the attractor performs several different functions. It forms part of a re-engineered concept of multiplicity, it helps conceptualize feeling or sensitivity, and it raises the general problem of practice in theory-building. (shrink)

In order to create a post-neoliberal society we need to change the way we look at the world. This article begins by considering the lesson learned in the case of “Mont Pèlerin,” where ideas that th...

This paper focuses on the link between systems criticism and anti-mathematicism in the French-speaking philosophical literature of the mid-18thcentury. Moving from Condillac’s omissions to the exemplary cases of Diderot and Buffon—as well as considering Formey’s crucial remarks—I reconsider the complex relationship that the authors of the French Enlightenment have with the Newtonian model. Finally, I inquire into the fate awaiting both mathematics and systems in this context after 1750.

El prefijo “auto” en autoorganización y autopoiesis se refiere a la existencia de una identidad o agencialidad implicada en el orden, organización o producción de un sistema que se corresponde con el sistema mismo, en contraste con el diseño o la influencia de carácter externo. La autoorganización (AO) estudia la manera en la que los procesos de un sistema alcanzan de forma espontánea un orden u organización complejo, bien como una estructura o patrón emergente, bien como algún tipo de finalidad (...) o identidad autoconstruida. En este trabajo nos ocupamos del concepto de AO en el contexto de la problemática sobre la naturaleza la vida y de los organismos vivientes. Este concepto se elabora en diferentes tradiciones científicas y filosóficas, a partir de su origen en la filosofía kantiana. La cibernética trata de emular la organización de los seres vivos y su teleología mediante la construcción de máquinas; desarrolla una perspectiva centrada en la regulación y en la causalidad mutua entre componentes del sistema. Estos trabajos, a veces complementados con la teoría de sistemas y la teoría de la información, son fundamentales para el desarrollo de la ciencia del siglo XX, especialmente las ciencias computacionales y la biología. Una segunda corriente surge desde la termodinámica de los procesos irreversibles alejados del equilibrio a partir, entre otros, de los trabajos de la escuela de Bruselas, en la que la AO se explora como la formación espontánea de estructuras de orden disipativo. Una tercera tradición, tal vez la más profundamente kantiana, se desarrolla en el contexto de la biología del desarrollo e integra a las dos mencionadas previamente, pues combina aspectos de las dos previas en el desarrollo ontogenético. Podemos decir que cada una de estas concepciones de la AO se relaciona con modelos paradigmáticos diferentes. La noción de autopoiesis (AP), por su parte, fue propuesta en los años 70 por los biólogos chilenos Humberto Maturana y Francisco Varela para explicar la organización individual de los seres vivos como un proceso dinámico que genera una identidad desde las operaciones del sistema (Maturana y Varela 1973). Puede decirse que hereda y reorganiza ideas de la tradición de la AO, especialmente la kantiana y la cibernética, para proponer una teoría biológica alternativa. El enfoque autopoiético concibe el fenómeno de la vida y a los seres vivos de forma muy diferente a la teoría de la evolución o la biología molecular que constituían las líneas de investigación predominantes en la biología de su tiempo. La teoría subraya como propiedad básica de un sistema viviente su autoconstitución dinámica como unidad dotada de identidad a partir de interacciones entre sus componentes. Sin embargo, aquellas propiedades de la vida consideradas primordiales en el enfoque darwiniano, como la reproducción o la evolución, se ven como secundarias, pues requieren de la existencia previa de sistemas autopoiéticos. El objetivo de esta voz es examinar diferentes aspectos que configuran las tradiciones autoorganizativa y autopoiética, en especial las tensiones conceptuales internas que permiten comprender los desafíos a los que se enfrentan ambas en el marco de la filosofía y la teoría de la biología, así como la forma en que sus posiciones e intuiciones contrastan con otras perspectivas en biología. (shrink)