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Systemic Science and Multidisciplinarity: New Tools for Facing Complex Problems.
Language: English
One of the main theoretical contributions from Systemics to social science is the consideration that each scientific domain only offers a partial point of view on an object, whose most reliable representations need to take into consideration the findings from a plurality of scientific fields.
While in its early phase, this debate had a merely epistemic relevance -it was just a matter of reliable information among scientific communities-, in the most recent years it has been assuming an important operational meaning. In fact, most of the issues that are affecting the globalized word entail a policy-modeling activity, which need information from many diverse domains; from natural sciences of course (fighting climate change, for example, entails the need for information on geophysics, biology, engineering etc.), but also from social sciences (introducing a green technology into a given territory requires a deep knowledge on that territory’s social and cultural structure, the local élites, the legal existing norms etc.).
This session bases upon the assessment that contemporary sociology holds a double function: on one hand, providing reliable information on the social aspects of global issues; on the other, developing models of systemic management of decision making, coordinating diverse scientific communities and stating communication patterns between science and society.
Theoretical and empirical papers that focus on this double function, are welcome.