Sustainable Musicology

(© Sustainable Musicology)

Epistemological Sustainability: A Proposal

In recent years, sustainability has been progressively reduced to a single dimension: the environmental one.

To speak of sustainability is almost automatically to speak of climate, resources, ecological impact. All of this is legitimate — yet ultimately reductive.

This reduction conceals a deeper issue, one that is rarely addressed: the sustainability of knowledge itself. It is precisely here that I propose the notion of epistemological sustainability.

By epistemological sustainability I mean the capacity of a system of knowledge to preserve, over time, the conditions of its own validity — without collapsing, contradicting itself, or exhausting the context that makes it possible. This is not a “green” extension of epistemology. Rather, it implies a shift in perspective.

The question is no longer whether knowledge contributes to environmental sustainability, but whether it is sustainable as knowledge. The issue is not application, but validity.

We live in an age shaped, among other things, by artificial intelligence — an age marked by an overproduction of information, by interpretative models with ever shorter life cycles, and by narratives that are effective in the short term yet rapidly become unstable or obsolete. In other words: we produce knowledge, but rarely ask whether it is structurally sustainable.

Many contemporary cognitive systems are highly “performant,” yet not sustainable. They function as long as their context supports them, but tend to collapse under pressure, requiring constant correction and adjustment.

It is important to stress that epistemological sustainability may have indirect consequences for the environment, but it neither originates in that domain nor is it reducible to it. One might even argue the reverse: without epistemologically sustainable forms of knowledge, environmental sustainability itself remains fragile, intermittent, and reversible.

Some thinkers have already approached this problem. Gregory Bateson, for instance, spoke of an “ecology of mind,” highlighting the inseparability of cognitive systems from their contexts. Similarly, complexity theory has exposed the limits of reductionist models. Yet these approaches largely remain tied to systemic or environmental frameworks.

What is still missing is a further step: to treat sustainability as an internal property of knowledge, rather than as an external application.

To speak of epistemological sustainability is to introduce a new — and inevitably selective — criterion. A system of knowledge is sustainable if it does not consume its own premises, if it does not rely on continuous exceptions, if it does not produce effects that undermine its long-term validity, and if it remains operative even as its context changes. From this perspective, much contemporary knowledge appears epistemologically extractive: it generates value in the short term while compromising its own long-term stability.

Epistemological sustainability is the condition under which knowledge remains valid over time without destroying its own premises.

It may eventually develop into a full-fledged theory. For now, it is a proposal, a criterion, a possible shift in paradigm. Yet it already introduces a question that can hardly be avoided: it is not enough for knowledge to be true, scientific, or useful. It must also be sustainable over time.

And today, this is far from self-evident.