domingo, 25 de março de 2012

Does neuroscience embrace all knowledge?

Neuroscience had a huge improvement in the last decades due to great advances in research and technology.
More and more we can understand the correlations between knowledge and brain even in the neurochemical level. 
All that studies make us to think that the only language which can be really used to express knowledge is the language of Neuroscience. 
Neuroscience is necessary to understand knowledge but it is not sufficient to include all the conditions and dimensions of knowledge.
Several other disciplines are usefull to understand knowledge.
Before Neuroscience was created, humankind already had "language". This very old capability of humankind was used to create any branch of science, even Neuroscience. 
Of course someone can talk about method. One thing is a kind of "common language" and other thing is a "scientific language" built with "method". It is true, but even the method used a language that existed before, or elaborated new words from previus languages. 
The languages of Human Sciences, or Humanities, are also very important to understand knowledge. 
Although Neuroscience is very important it can not replace Philosophy.
It cannot replace History, Sociology, Anthropology, etc.
...and, a little more polemicist, it cannot replace Psychology.
Only in a reductionist way of thinking Neuroscience could be sufficient to all knowledge. 
By an inter and transdisciplinary approach among different fields, we can better understand knowledge, even respecting several cultural contexts, without eliminating it.
We know that some tendencies assume to be reductionist, but in "Neuro-Humanities" we don't think so.  

domingo, 18 de março de 2012

The approach to Knowledge: multi, inter, transdisciplinarity.

 The “knowledge of Knowledge”, or the study and understanding of ways and organization of Knowledge is named Epistemology. Epistemology is near Philosophy and Humanities.
We can also approach mechanisms of Knowledge by studies of Psychology, Neurology and Neurosciences.
So, we can see that it is possible to understand Knowledge by the approach of several disciplines.
A discipline is a specific field of Knowledge or Science that was built around specific methods and language that can be partialy shared with other disciplines.
The concern of the relation among disciplines was more present in the academic environment mainly in the second half of 20th century.
Although someone says that “multidisciplinarity” was created with Aristotle thinking, Aristotle himself did not wrote about “multidisciplinarity”.
After the Second World War, it was a “massification” of Universities to improve the development of nations in conditions according to new technologies. If before the War a nation without education could mean “dependence”, after the War this question was more incisive.
So, in universities and publications it was cited that an “interdisciplinarity”, or a better understanding among disciplines, was necessary.
In a general way we can use the concepts below.
Multidisciplinarity (or pluridisciplinarity): each discipline with its own methods and language. There are few exchanges among different fields.
Interdisciplinarity: there are some common methods and languages among disciplines but they still remain as different fields.
Transdisciplinarity: there are almost no boundaries among disciplines. There are three pillars of transdisciplinarity: different levels of reality; complexity; the third included.
In transdisciplinarity the cultural context is also a variable ever considered.