Fábulas da ciência: discurso científico e fabulação especulativa

Abstract

This study presents a new approach to the problem of "two cultures", as originally proposed by C.P. Snow, in 1959. I return to the initial version, when the physicist pointed the increasing gap between the discourses of the exact (or hard) sciences and literature. Based on the concept of narrative, or narrativity, it seeks to understand this gap as a zone of ambivalence between the "analytical-referential" scientific discourse and the literary discourse understood as speculative fabulation. The former is a discourse that covers its objectivity by erasing the traits of the observer and temporality. This discourse also rejects the presence of heterodiscursivity (or Heteroglossia), that is, the discourses from other paradigms. Speculative Fabulation is a fictional discourse that favors the question of knowledge (or cognition) and faces the cognitive problem of other possible worlds, including non-anthropological worlds, as well as the devises of technical-scientific advancement. As a literary discourse, it recovers the presence of the observer through the figure of the narrator, temporality through the Chronotope and the heterodiscourses through the multiple diegetic levels. Based on the "double slit" experiment, the thesis will be divided into four parts. In the first part, with the cracks closed, there is a theoretical chapter in which we present literary and scientific concepts in search of proximity relations, within a heuristic approach. In the second part, with a simple open slit, an analysis of the analytical-referential scientific discourse is carried out as proposed by Galileo in his Dialogue on the systems of the Ptolomaic and Copernican worlds. A stylistic analysis of scientific articles and scientific dissemination literature is also carried out, especially in Marcelo Gleiser's Criação Imperfeita. In the third part, with the other simple slit open, readings of two fictional works of speculative fabulation are performed: Solaris, by Stanislaw Lem, and Frankenstein, the modern Prometheus, by Mary Shelley. In the last part, with the two open cracks, we analyze the mutual interferences between the two discourses in the mental experiments and in the work of Italo Calvino, The Cosmicomics. This thesis concludes with the idea that these interferences are inevitable when it comes to addressing the communicative and social nature of science; the study allows a better understanding of anomalies in the contemporary epistemology of science, such as the criteria of insertion of the observer in discourse (participant observer), the historical nature of science and its coping with discourses without scientific criteria for validation