The prevailing naively reductive, dogmatic science (or “scientism”) wants to keep fitting reality into its mechanistic vision for science. But real science would not allow preconceived ideas to fashion the picture of the world. Rather, science allows the essence of the world to fashion the nature of our concepts. “Complexity,” dealing by its very nature with multifaceted systems allowing a plethora of levels of description, has made such a radical change not just possible, but imperative. Never before has the need for such a qualitative change in science been so apparent and pressing. As we shall see, this calls for a radically new kind of science and a new kind of scientist, fearless of self-reflection, concerning themselves not only with the study of nature, but equally with the nature of their study.
