Ciencia: Pisos de su pirámide disciplinaria
Con la relativamente reciente aparición en el medio de la ciencia y la tecnología, de "la teoría de sistemas" se ha pretendido desmontar la clásica cultura de ver la primera a través de una óptica piramidal en materia de sus componentes disciplinarios, "quitando de los lados" todo aquello que no sea SISTEMAS, SISTEMAS, SISTEMAS. En este artículo no nos enfrentamos a ello. Lo que sí hacemos es mostrar la pirámide de la manera más didáctica posible. Ello, dado que aún bien andado el siglo XXI seguimos en ocasiones padeciendo miopías en cuanto al asunto...
With the relatively recent appearance in the field of science and technology, of "systems theory" it has been tried to dismantle the classic culture of seeing the former through a pyramidal perspective in terms of its disciplinary components, "removing from the sides "everything that is not SYSTEMS, SYSTEMS, SYSTEMS. We are not dealing with it in this article. What we do do is show the pyramid in the most didactic way possible. This, given that even though the 21st century has gone well, we continue to suffer from myopia on the matter at times ...
Normally objective reality (nature and social relations) is presented to us in a disorganized way. Sometimes, even, it is presented to us precisely not as it is but in different ways ... It is presented to us, then, as it is not. Well, such a situation occurs not only with objective reality but with other dimensions that the human being deals with to treat and explain them (such as thought itself, and other aspects that on later occasions we could treat them in some detail).
It must be said without a millimeter of ambiguity that the factor that makes science a very special knowledge is that it presents, in an organized and logical way, reality (natural and socio-relational), the thought-language unit, etc. Yes. He presents them at the point of careful systematization. Science organizes (at the point of investigation and correctly rational exposition) the real and also the thought itself. It organizes what in principle (and circumstantially, "street", circumstantial) is not presented to us in an organized way.
It is that if these dimensions (reality, world of ideas and signs, in short) were presented to us with clarity and organization, in the heat of normal, everyday circumstances, what would be the point of doing science then? Someone told us decades ago that it took a lot of effort to realize that the glass (glass) containing ice water did not sweat! rather, it generated a phenomenon other than sweating ...
It is precisely because of what has been said that the investigative and expository work of science starts from the fuzzy, from the disorganized, from the chiaroscuro. In such a din, the confusing is transcended and little by little becoming aware of the clear, the diaphanous.
As can be seen in the graph that we are presenting here, at the bottom of the pyramid are the notions that are obtained at the described moment of chiaroscuro. Notions are unfinished ideas that, in principle, are had about the object to be studied (be this object: real, cognitive-linguistic, in short). The notions, thus, belong to what linguists call "connotative instance". Connotations are perceptions that one has about the object, characterized by the relative, by the incomplete, by the risky. In psychology, ideas like "temperament", "character" and others are notions. Well different from others such as motivation, personal act of life, job qualification of the worker, aptitude. The latter are no longer notions but categories, as (and the analogy is worth) categories are in political economy labor force, capital, productive forces. The categories belong to the denotative instance; that is, they transcend the connotative. We add ... In physics, speed, space, matter are categories (even with the "flies in the ointment" heuristics that Einstein introduced not long ago with his special theory of relativity). As it is not difficult to see, the categories are plotted on the "second floor" of the pyramid.
Well. When in the realm of the real (also of what is thought and made, language ...) relationships are stabilized between the factors that we call categories, then science chooses to consider such categorical pairs as laws. Yes, as laws.
Under strictly pedagogical, didactic motivation, we quote below some references that account for what a scientific law is ...
- "Energy is neither created nor destroyed, it is transformed." (Law of thermodynamics / Principle of conservation of energy).
- "The change in the acceleration of a movement is directly proportional to the printed motive force and occurs according to the straight line along which such force generates". (Newton's Second Law / Fundamental Law of Dynamics).
- "The difference in money, which raises the salary that the worker generates given the delivery of his labor power to produce a commodity, and the significance obtained by the one who owns the means of production associated with such merchandise, it is what is called surplus value within the capitalist mode of production ". (Law of production of surplus value - pertaining to political economy -; K. Marx).
Then we go to observe in the graph of the pyramid, a black circle that surrounds it as if wanting to signify that the action radiates all the pyramidal content. Yes; In effect, what we mean is that notions, categories and laws do not move in the world of science, in a royal, chaotic, whimsical way. Nerd. For all these pieces to acquire consistency, they have to make life as a whole. Keep in mind that when we use the signifier "consistency" we are denoting: honoring the treated object (be it real; be it thought and signified; in short ...). The object, we said, "does not die" in the specific, but lives in the total. How could we understand a tidal wave in a region X if we did not understand the factors that determined it from contexts far beyond the one that was occasionally and suddenly observed (and made so many human beings suffer)!
///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////With exceptional acuity, Theodor Adorno (German-Jewish philosopher, 1903-1969) told us that it was unthinkable that the classical scientific method, seen with immediate eyes, could offer the conceptual supports according to which reality could be objectively registered, at least , the socio-relational ... "There is no experiment capable of reliably proving the dependence of all social phenomena with respect to the totality, to the extent that the whole, which preforms tangible phenomena, will never be apprehensive through particular test methods" . Then he adds in his work On the Logic of Social Sciences (Grijalbo. México, '78) "The dependence of the social fact or element subjected to observation with respect to the global structure has a much more real validity than that of such or such data verified -isolatedly- ".
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