Scientific Milieu, Multi-disciplinary Science and Creativeness

Abstract

Western science has always been intrinsically a social enterprise. How the population of scientists organises itself to produce knowledge, though, has changed enormously during the last 150 years. Generally, these changes occurred instinctively and spontaneously, being rarely, if at all, planned beforehand or investigated a posteriori. The result of this process is that the actual organisation of the scientific society is being considered far from optimal to face the gigantic and complex challenges lying ahead. In inquiry domains aiming to understand problems of organised complexity it is even inadequate, although it is often difficult to state why and to identify where inadequacies lie. Grounding on organisations, a generalisation of the system concept, on the in-formation concept induced by them and on the ground-breaking achievements of the science of generic systems in the last century, I tentatively sketch a description of the scientific milieu and its social arrangements that allows for questioning about agonistic, antagonistic, and synergistic situations and patterns of interaction, collaboration, and knowledge-creation.