We cannot hope for a more reasonable method than one that...

We cannot hope for a more reasonable method than one that prepares us to face what is new and unforeseeable, the extraordinary[^15] , what nobody knows or has ever seen. Only prudence protects the way to the realization of truth, to the discovery that is made. Of course, this way of taking prudence does not identify it with inaction. On the contrary, the custody of our freedom and creativity obviously requires actions of all kinds advised by prudence.

But we know little of the roots of creativity, prudence only tells us - and without any guarantee - how to ensure its conditions here and now. Pierre Duhem comments with irony that whoever things that an idea comes to the scientist out of nowhere, as if by magic, is like the child who sees the chick come out of its shell and thinks that it all happened in that instant, without imagining for a moment the complexity of a long period of gestation[^16] .

The scientist usually prepares the ground through study, meditation, progress in the correct formulation of the problem, conversation, observation, reading, etc. Despite everything the hypothesis, according to Duhem, ‘must germinate in him without him’[^17] . And, once he has an idea, again his ‘free and laborious activity must come into play’ to ‘develop it and make it bear fruit’[^18] .

We say of our idea that they occur to us, not that ‘we occur them’, but we freely take care of the conditions in which they might arise. Knowledge, as the human action that it is, is then two-sided. On the one hand it is the fruit of human creativity, while on the other it responds to the reality of things. It is objective and subjective.

We are not mere mirrors of nature, yet on the other hand relativist epistemologies will never be able to explain the nature of error, they will never be able to tell us what happens when reality simply says no. The two sides of human knowledge, which discovers reality at the same time as it creates it, is perfectly summed up in the expression ‘creative discovery’ or, as Prigogine beautifully puts it, ‘poetic listening’.

But it is one thing to have a suitable formula for talking about human knowledge and it is another to endow that formula with content, with a content that will avoid its paradoxical aspect. From my point of view, a good way of carrying out such a task is to relate the formula to the Aristotelian concept of practical truth.