Space and the scientific communities. A survey at the University of Lecce

The perception of space, according to Kant, has a pre-eminent role in the transformation of experience into knowledge: together with time it is an a priori representation that makes it possible to order the amorphous mass of subjective perceptions. It is an absolute space, which can be represented via pure intuition, but is not the fruit of a simple mental construct: the objects and their geometry exist per se and represent the assumption on which the intuition is based. Even today we may find traces of this way of looking at space in all fields of knowledge, as well as in daily individual experience, but tendencies towards more complex models are evident and frequent. As early as in the twentieth century, according to an authoritative literature, the shift in the very paradigm of knowledge from the Modern to the Post-Modern initiated a phase of profound transformation, which also had important effects on the concept of space. What seems to be broadly accepted is that this concept depends largely on the sociocultural context of the individual that constructs it and uses it. In the following pages I propose to investigate the popularity of this concept and the use that is made of it in the scientific community of the University of Lecce. In the first section I will try to provide an outline of the conception of geographical space (social and systemic) adopted in this study, starting with a few reflections on the limits of the traditional spacecontainer and the reasons for its use. In the subsequent sections I will present the survey carried out in the field: the concept of space that seems to emerge from the various experiences of life and research is systematically compared to the parameter constituted by the concept of geographical space defined in section 1; the ultimate objective is to identify clusters of disciplines that share the same idea (or the same ideas) of space, and to attempt to evaluate the distance between them, in terms of complexity. The survey also provides information on the epistemological evolution (or "trajectories" we might say) of certain disciplines, revealing analogies, in some cases unexpected, between fields of research that have traditionally been held to be quite distant from each other, and prompting a few considerations on the way in which the interviewees interpret the great cultural changes of the last century.