(GWAVA: SPAM) What have the Romans - sorry - complexity done for us?

Posted by Robert Holmes on Jul 24, 2006; 2:55pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/What-have-the-Romans-sorry-complexity-done-for-us-tp522232p522234.html

You beat me to it Mike. I was re-reading Kuhn this morning because I'm
pretty darn sure that complexity science is failing to establish itself as a
paradigm, and I wanted support for this contention from someone a whole load
cleverer than me. I'll report back on my readings...

Just as a starter, Kuhn suggests that a field's history is largely
represented in the new textbooks that accompany the paradigm shift. I'm
thinking that if we don't have the textbooks (see Owen's thread), it's hard
for us to even claim that a new paradigm exists ("there's no there there").

Robert

On 7/24/06, Michael Agar <magar at anth.umd.edu> wrote:

>
> Well, there's the roads, yeah, and then there's the...
>
> Romans are the right metaphor, since much of what's happened in the
> last X years has been diffusion of ideas--ideas, not measures--into
> numerous different domains. Like Kuhn said...
>
> Mike
>
>
> On Jul 24, 2006, at 7:21 AM, Robert Holmes wrote:
>
> > Hi all,
> >
> > I really enjoyed Joe's post and it set me thinking - exactly what
> > has complexity science achieved? IMHO, one measure of a field's
> > health is that the field moves forward (radical, huh?). If I look
> > at particle physics, they now know stuff that they didn't 15 years
> > ago (neutrino mass for example); if I look at high-temperature
> > superconductivity, Tc moves ever upwards. If I look at string
> > theory they ask (and occassionally answer) ever more abstruse and
> > unlikely questions that might not bear any relation to the real
> > world but are at least based on what was asked before.
> >
> > So here's the question: in the field of complexity science, exactly
> > what can we do now that we could not do 15 years ago?
> >
> > Robert
> > ============================================================
> > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> > lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
>
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
>

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