Sustainable Musicology

(© Sustainable Musicology)

Epistemological Sustainability: A Proposal

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

Speaking of sustainability now almost automatically means speaking of climate, resources, ecological impact. All of this is legitimate, but also highly reductive.

This reduction conceals a deeper and rarely addressed problem: the sustainability of knowledge itself. It is precisely at this point that I propose the concept of epistemological sustainability.

By epistemological sustainability I mean the capacity of a system of knowledge to maintain over time its conditions of clarity, effectiveness, and validity. This is therefore not a “green” extension of epistemology. On the contrary, it represents a shift in perspective.

We live in an age shaped by artificial intelligence, characterized by an overproduction of information, by increasingly short-lived interpretive models, and by narratives that are often ineffective from the outset and therefore bound to become quickly obsolete. In other words, we produce a vast quantity of what appear to be sources of knowledge, without asking whether they are truly sustainable.

Some authors have already touched upon this issue. Gregory Bateson, for example, spoke of an “ecology of mind,” showing how cognitive systems cannot be separated from the contexts in which they operate. 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 criterion, inevitably selective: it is the condition under which knowledge is effective in the present and remains valid over time. It may well become a fully developed theory. For now, it is a proposal. Yet it raises an inescapable question: it is not enough for knowledge to be true, scientific, or academically validated. It must also be sustainable: and today, this is far from guaranteed.