Abstract
The last two centuries or so have witnessed the huge success of the reductionist epistemology in modern science in the West. As a painful reflection, many Chinese scholars have attempted to explain how indigenous elements in the Chinese cultural beliefs impede similar advances (“自然辩证法通讯”杂志社; Communications on Dialectics of Nature 1983). However, the high power of modern science and technology also seems to have created an illusion of its omnipotence, whereas in fact it is not without its own pitfalls. In this article, I argue that while modern analytic science has been the engine that has driven new discoveries and inventions for more than two centuries, its shortfalls have also revealed themselves, particularly its inadequacy in accounting for complex, emergent, dynamic phenomena, such as real-time weather changes, complex bio-chemical processes, and social behaviors.
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Dai, D.Y. (2015). Indigenous Chinese Epistemologies as a Source of Creativity. In: Tan, AG., Perleth, C. (eds) Creativity, Culture, and Development. Creativity in the Twenty First Century. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-636-2_3
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