Posted by
Roger Critchlow-2 on
Jun 19, 2007; 5:44pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Seminal-Papers-in-Complexity-tp524047p524079.html
On 6/19/07, Michael Agar <magar at anth.umd.edu> wrote:
>
>
> This thread is sliding around some, but still I'd like to add this overlong
> comment in case it's useful. The emails have been good brain food. The
> problem I keep worrying about in my own work is, I use many core concepts
> metaphorically because they work at the human organizational scale in
> powerful and useful ways that I believe respect their scientific origins but
> at the same time allow the human/social world to see and understand and act
> differently. But I also want to be clear on those origins, to know and
> describe when and where and how I'm stretching the concepts. The problem I
> have is, up close the conceptual basis of "complexity" more often than not
> turns to mush.
Stimulating as the discussion is, it's only making me averse to the
whole idea of defining, categorizing, describing, distinguishing this
kind of science. Maybe Wolfram got that part exactly right: New
KInd, and leave it at that.
If this really is another kind of science, then the historians and
philosophers of science will catch on eventually and give it all the
names it deserves.
But for doing this/these kind(s) of science, the categories don't help
do it and they don't help explain it. It doesn't help in the doing
because the (alleged) category hides a large variety of phenomena and
methods of analysis and explanation, which is part of why the category
so stubbornly resists definition. It doesn't help in the explaining
because the (alleged) category becomes another thing to explain above
and beyond the method(s) of analysis and explanation themselves.
People like categories because they allow them to reason about the
categorized things in shorthand and people do a lot of bad reasoning
that way. But even the most careful will be misled if you give them a
bum category to start from.
Anyway, what I'd like to see is a catalog of examples, listing the
phenomena, the traditional method of analysis/explanation, why it
failed, the non-traditional method of analysis/explanation, and why it
succeeded. If you can agree on a subset of examples which are
complexity science, then you can proceed to craft a definition which
will allow further examples to be categorized. The catalog will be
useful whether it leads to a category definition or not. You could
use it to index the papers Owen wanted or the (alleged) properties of
complexity science.
-- rec --