Determinism, Holism, and Complexity
Fortunato Tito Arecchi (auth.), Vieri Benci, Paola Cerrai, Paolo Freguglia, Giorgio Israel, Claudio Pellegrini (eds.)Determinism, holism and complexity: three epistemological attitudes that have easily identifiable historical origins and developments. Galileo believed that it was necessary to "prune the impediments" to extract the mathematical essence of physical phenomena, to identify the mathematical structures representing the underlying laws. This Galilean method was the key element in the development of Physics, with its extraordinary successes. Nevertheless the method was later criticized because it led to a view of nature as essentially "simple and orderly", and thus by choosing not to investigate several characteristics considered as an "impediment", several essential aspects of the phenomenon under investigation might be left out. The Galilean point of view also contains an acknowledgement of the central role played by the causal nexus among phenomena. The mechanistic-deterministic description of reality - for instance, a la Laplace - although acknowledging that it is not possible to predict phenomena exactly owing to unavoidable measurement error, is based on the recognition of their causal nature, even in an ontological sense. Consequently, deterministic prediction became the methodological fulcrum of mathematical physics. But although mechanistic determinism has had and, in many cases, still has, considerable success in Physics, in other branches of science this situation is much less favourable.