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Five theses on complexity reduction and its politics
Mälardalen University, School of Education, Culture and Communication. Mälardalen University, School of Education, Culture and Communication, Educational Sciences and Mathematics. Stirling Institute of Education, University of Stirling, United Kingdom. (SIDES)ORCID iD: 0000-0001-8530-7105
2010 (English)In: Complexity theory and the politics of education / [ed] D.C. Osberg & G.J.J. Biesta, Rotterdam: Sense Publishers , 2010, p. pp 5-13Chapter in book (Other academic)
Abstract [en]

In his monumental study The mechanization of the world picture (Dijksterhuis, 1961), Eduard Dijksterhuis has documented how, in the 16th and 17th century, a mechanistic worldview emerged in modern science through developments in astronomy, mechanics, physics, chemistry and natural philosophy. Dijksterhuis marks the start of this process with the publication of Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium in 1543 and sees its culmination point in the publication of Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Math matica in 1687. In the worldview of modern science physical reality is depicted as a deterministic mechanism operating according to causal laws. Many have taken the success of modern technology as evidence of the truth of the mechanistic worldview of modern science (see, for example, Gellner, 1992 and, for a critical discussion, Latour, 1987), on the assumption that it is the knowledge about the laws that govern the causal connections within the clockwork universe that makes prediction and control of physical reality possible. Some have even gone so far as to argue that the mechanistic worldview of modern science sets the standard for what is real and what is rational (on this way of thinking and the problems it has caused see Dewey, 1980; Biesta, 2009). Developments in such interrelated fields as complexity theory, dynamic systems theory and chaos theory have challenged both the accuracy and dominance of the mechanistic worldview. They have done this first of all by highlighting phenomena that cannot be captured as deterministic, linear processes, and secondly by developing vocabularies and ways of thinking that are able to make sense of such phenomena and talk about them in more productive ways.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Rotterdam: Sense Publishers , 2010. p. pp 5-13
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Social Sciences History of Science and Ideas
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Didactics
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URN: urn:nbn:se:mdh:diva-11448DOI: 10.1163/9789460912405_003Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-85142848996ISBN: 9789460912405 (print)OAI: oai:DiVA.org:mdh-11448DiVA, id: diva2:388633
Available from: 2011-01-18 Created: 2011-01-18 Last updated: 2025-10-10Bibliographically approved

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