http://www.santafe.edu/sfi/events/colloquiaAbstracts*** SFI COLLOQUIUM Thursday July 1, 3:30pm ***
Location: Noyce Conference Room
Title: "The Natural Sciences and the Social Sciences: Where Historians Fit"
Speaker: John Lewis Gaddis
Affiliation: Yale University, History Department
Abstract:
One unexpected consequence of the emergence of complexity science over
the past quarter century has been to give historians a language with
which to characterize what they already do. We have always known about
path dependency, self-similarity across scale, self-organization, and
certainly complex adaptive systems. We have written at length about how
these phenomena have manifested themselves throughout human history.
Until recently, though, we had no good terms for what we were writing
about: we explained these things anecdotally, but not conceptually. As a
result, we were ill-equipped to respond to charges from our social
science colleagues that we?d been ?unscientific.? Complexity science has
now given us a means of defense; even better, it has allowed us to take
the offensive by pointing out the methodological impoverishment of the
social sciences, where the quest for parsimony and predictability too
often sweeps complexity aside altogether, thereby detaching these
disciplines from the world with which they seek to deal. So who is
really being ?scientific? these days?
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