Resumo

MORALES-JASSO, Gerardo. The category of “environment”. An epistemological reflextion about their use and their standardization in Environmental Sciences. Nova scientia [online]. 2016, vol.8, n.17, pp.579-613. ISSN 2007-0705.

The present article analyzes three meanings about “environment” and shows the ephistemic tensions implied by two of them. The goal is to propose the adoption of one of those meanings into the environmental sciences and with this, decrease the epistemic tensions of their polysemy. In order to do so, the article differentiates among "environment" and categories such as habitat, nature and ecosystem. In which, through an epistemological argumentation, it generates a proposal for the environmental science where environment is redefined in a systemic sense. Such redefinition proposes the questioning of dualist ideas that generate tensions that can only be resolved basing on paradigms which exceed the mechanistic disyunctivism proper of the dualistic epistemology that have the social sciences and the natural sciences.

Palavras-chave : milieu; environment; dualism; complexity; epistemology.