The Contributory Revolution

1The Major Dualities in How Things are Perceived

The term conception is used here in the sense of the “way of perceiving” a reality, an idea or a system. It is an act of creating intelligibility, in the etymological sense: “intus legere”, to connect the interior. It allows the human brain to memorize and apprehend a perceived reality by inserting it into a system of mental representations, a reality on which thought locates and operates rules, concepts and classifications.

The notion of system here refers to a set of entities that interact with each other, producing a collective or “systemic” phenomenon correlated to this interaction. The act of bringing intelligibility or the “way of observing” will then be exercised by conferring to the system a structure of forms and operating principles, describable within a set of norms and formal concepts conveyed by a language (the system of representation). Particuarly in the field of science, major dualities appear in the ways of conceiving these objects, especially those that make up a “system”.

From a structural point of view, there are two opposing conceptions. On the one hand, the corpuscular or atomistic conceptions (in entities, in places, in identified objects with minimal stability, with a membrane, with a well-differentiated inside and outside) and, on the other hand, the tissue conceptions, diffuse, non-localized or structures of links (vibrations, energy, waves). The notions of scale and the position of the intervening party ...