Sustainable Tourism Law

766 SUSTAINABLE TOURISM LAW IV. IS TOURISM A SCIENTIFIC DISCIPLINE? Countless authors participate in this debate. Some authors, from a positivist concept of science, deny the scientific nature of tourism. The dictionary of the Royal Academy of Spanish Language adopts the positivist criterion to define the term Science: “Set of knowledges obtained through observation and reasoning, systematically structured and from which general principles and rules are deduced”. Other authors forecast the future recognition of tourism as a science, expressing: “Since tourism is related to diverse phenomena and as its study implies theories andmethods of other disciplines, tourismis called to assume an interdisciplinary role in the academic world.” 3 . Campodónico and Chalar 4 state that “Tourism is essentially a cross-disciplinary field of knowledge, which currently does not have a defined disciplinary mesh, in the traditional sense of the term...”, “the important thing is... the reconstruction in the transdisciplinary epistemological area”, “which tries to recover a complex vision”. Tourism is transdisciplinary from a scientific viewpoint and must be studied and analyzed from all the dimensions that reality encompasses. V. COMPLEXITY AS A NEW SCIENTIFIC PARADIGM Edgar Morin, in his work “Introducción al pensamiento complejo” (Introduction to complex thinking) 5 where he clarifies his position on complexity which came from the Theory of Systems and Cybernetics, expresses: “… I have always aspired to a multidimensional thought…” “… I have always felt that deep truths, antagonistic to each other, were complementary to each other, as well. I have never wanted to forcibly reduce uncertainty and ambiguity.” 3 Jafar Jafari “El turismo como disciplina científica “(Tourism as a scientific discipline) at Política y Sociedad (Politics and Society), 2005, 42(1): 39-56. 4 Campodónico Rossana and Chalar, Luis at Anales del VI Seminario de pesquisa en Turismo do Mercosur -Caixas do Sul, June 9-10, 2010. 5 Morin, Edgar “Introducción al pensamiento complejo” (Introduction to complex thinking), Editorial Gedisa S.A – January, 2003 – Barcelona.