Communication and comprehensive thought: the essay as a form of expression of scientific knowledge

Abstract

This paper addresses critically the dominant pattern of academic and/or scientific discourses. These discourses should not be boring or hermetic as they often are. They suggest that any lack of substance would not be balanced simply addressing the ideas of truth, certainty and rigor. They suggest that the essay may assume a critical distance from the model hard, universalist and abstract of scientific expression. It rejects the false opposition between scholarship and clarity and takes the essay as the textual genre that derives its power from a cognitive attitude fueled by the sign of understanding.