Abstract
This chapter provides basic definitions of self-organization and the terms most frequently associated with it within the theory from which it originated: Complexity theory. Using these definitions, I draw out the consistent meta-theoretical assumptions on which the assertions and practice of complexity theory in the natural sciences have been based. One in particular is highlighted: the causal relation between elements and relations between relations. This, I argue, is a crucial ontological premise of self-organization. In relating self-organization and morphogenesis, I concentrate on this broadly shared meta-theoretical assumption, showing that the causal social relation has also been consistently important as an ontological premise in morphogenesis. The chapter concludes that only through philosophical analysis of the possibility of a meta-theory underpinning the concepts of both naturalistic complexity and social science can self-organization be successfully integrated into social science.
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Notes
- 1.
For a critical realist, much of the work on complexity speaks only to the empirical domain. There also exist the domains of the actual and real. Observations and remarks limited to the empirical domain fail to examine questions about mechanisms—or ‘laws’—which would question the intransitive ‘reality’ of what is experienced, or to give the transitive experience an intransitive referent. The failure to examine this essential area of the production of knowledge is highlighted briefly in a later section, but to discuss it in-depth would constitute a separate paper.
- 2.
Traffic studies in complexity are enduring examples, from mentions in Sterman’s paper Learning about Complex Systems (1994, p. 299) to Chowdhury et al. (2000), Statistical physics of vehicular traffic and some related systems to numerous mention in Boccara (2003) Modeling Complex Systems. This object of study precedes any mention of it in the social science literature, where it is frequently used as a link to justify application to social phenomena, a justification that is erroneous based upon these studies that are purely mathematical.
- 3.
Note also the lack of claim about large, overarching ‘systems’.
- 4.
Mainzer (2007) points out that there are two kinds of self-organization: Dissipative and conservative. It is dissipative with which this chapter is concerned and which are more often referenced in the complexity literature.
- 5.
Bak’s self-organizing critical systems are essentially systems in the process of self-organizing, no finer understanding is necessary here.
- 6.
Note physics and not complexity, an illustration that the propositions of self-organization were becoming more accepted.
- 7.
The property of self-similarity underlies power-law relationships.
- 8.
I make no refutation of the necessary condition.
- 9.
Here Galam refers to Sokal’s ‘hoax’ paper ‘Transgressing the boundaries: toward a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity’, and the subsequent books by Sokal and Bricmont (1998, 1999) in which they detail the misunderstandings of physics that have been used in postmodern social science in this manner.
- 10.
Do not denote any importance to the use of the word complexity in this quote, I make no insinuation that Archer is talking of the same thing that I am.
- 11.
Although, as should by now be apparent, its claims to be a theory are somewhat tenuous.
- 12.
See Miller and Page (2007), in particular Sect. 9.6 in which we are not only invited to see parallels between general assertions and detailed mathematical models, but also to reverse the philosophical rationale for applying models at all.
- 13.
Though in saying this I make no claim that the nature of the relation between these different objects will be the same.
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Forbes-Pitt, K. (2013). Self-Organization: What Is It, What Isn’t It, and What’s It Got to Do with Morphogenesis?. In: Archer, M. (eds) Social Morphogenesis. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6128-5_6
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