From Formal Machine to Social Colony: Toward a Complex Dynamical Philosophy of Science

Abstract

We are naturalists aiming to ground philosophical notions in real dynamical processes. From our perspective science is better modeled as a dynamical system than as the formal logical (inductive and deductive) machine found in the work of both the rationalists and empiricists (Hooker 1991,1995). We seek a model of science whereby accepted theory, practice and phenomena develop in mutual dynamical interaction; these, in turn, interacting with institutional organisations as well as our normative models of them. Only a dynamical conception of norms, we claim, is able to properly encompass the fundamentally social and historical nature of science while acknowledging the role played by the psychological capacities of individuals, all of which are sundered from it in the usual static formal models. In pursuit of this conception we have elsewhere examined a range of traditional positions to reveal their tacit dynamical implications or implicit underlying models (Herfel and Hooker 1996). The most promising is Kuhn’s (1962) explicitly dynamical account, which is analogous to a re-organisational model of science with constant global ordering rules (normal science) interrupted by sharp, self-organised and disruptive phase transitions in which the ordering rules dissolve and reconstitute themselves in a different global pattern (revolutions). Though useful, the ‘phase transition’ model of scientific revolution is crude, because: (1) Historical changes in science are much more complex (Hooker 1995; Herfel 1990), (2) it is difficult to know how to adapt the physical model to the sociological situation (especially since the physical situation itself is so poorly understood), and (3) phase transition is just one type of phenomenon available within nonlinear dynamical systems. Already in such innocuous inorganic models as the Bénard system we see rich dynamical features and one of us has argued (Herfel 1996) that such nonlinear dynamics are also typical of science, while the other has argued (Hooker 1995) that the science-technology system is a non-linear dynamic system sharing many of the distinctive characteristics of living systems, which centrally display these same features. Before showing how the unique properties of nonlinear dynamic systems prove pertinent to dynamical accounts of science (Section 3), we explore just one such model (for want of space).