The Unknown Before Discovery

Starting from the most important conquests of contemporary post-positivistic epistemology and from its authors such as Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, and Edgar Morin and going through Gadamer's hermeneutics or Wittgenstein and de Mandeville's approaches to scientific and social paradigms, this article focuses on the limits of scientific dogmas and on the overbearing rationalism that claims to explain everything, marginalizing many aspects of human life which cannot be rationalized. The scientific approach cannot be just conceptual. It must be opened to images and unusual connections. The scientist must concentrate his or her attention on limit-matters that are often unpredictable and go beyond the logical-philosophical field toward the metaphysical one. “I did not know I did not know” realized von Foerster, and aware of that, the scientist should become the specialist of the unknown, moving along the border-figures of science and philosophy.