ABSTRACT

We live in a world that favours high levels of specialisation, divides knowledge into artificially defined “disciplines”, isolates objects, and separates problems instead of understanding their complementary and multidimensional aspects. Professionals working in restoration are used to satisfying the demands of all the different fields of specialisation involved: various skills and various professions are necessary to work on one single study case. Due to unachievable multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, trans-disciplinary projects, we often have to deal with extremely different viewpoints, where “heretic” and “orthodox” approaches can assume profoundly different and contradictory meanings. Communicating and sharing data and information is essential in bringing these approaches together, but unfortunately not sufficient enough. When the awareness that exhaustive knowledge cannot be achieved prevails and that "doubts" are considered as allies, “the yeast of all critical activities”, an orthodox approach forces us to analyse and give value to each apparently insignificant detail, bearing in mind its countless possible interpretations and its expressive richness. When the will/necessity to provide specific answers prevails, it is necessary to implement experiments based on the simplification of reality, which is essential to investigate one aspect at a time. In this case, models become vital and need to be structured correctly in order to evaluate answers. An orthodox approach consequently means identifying the representativeness of every single part and simplifying, by omitting details, without the object losing its meaning. The studied object, which apparently stays the same, is actually dissembled and reassembled so to become something different in the eyes of the various competent experts. The challenge is to mature a global vision of the project, trying to approach the complexity of both reality and restoration through progressive operations of analysis and synthesis among the various disciplines. Each discipline provides heretic or orthodox answers using respectively heretic or orthodox languages, which often lead to incommunicability. Parole chiave/Key-words: specialisation, discipline, reflective viewpoint, scientific viewpoint, modelling.