Abstract
Although complexity research takes its origins from its applications in physics, chemistry and mathematics and the ‘hard’ sciences, undergoing its formative development in the early and mid-twentieth century, during the second half of the twentieth century it has exerted an effect on the social sciences as well.
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Notes
- 1.
My own work has promoted writers like Nietzsche and Foucault as representing a ‘third-way’ between Kant and Hegel in philosophy.
- 2.
Including John Stuart Mill, Alexander Bain, C.D. Broad, Samuel Alexander, Friedrich Hayek, Friedrich Nietzsche, Charles Babbage, George Herbert Mead, Charles Sanders Pierce, Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and John Maynard Keynes.
- 3.
Always providing that Humean scepticism can be offset by the specification of the appropriate operational force—which enlightenment science was quick to do!
- 4.
If a film can represent motion running backwards in the same way as running forwards, then it is said in physics that time is reversible. The rotation of the hands of a clock is reversible, whereas tearing a piece of paper is irreversible. Prigogine does not deny that time reversibility has relevance but wishes to add that in many areas including life itself time is irreversible.
- 5.
The amount of time taken for repeatability is known as ‘Poincare cycle time’.
- 6.
This is the phenomenon of ‘strong mixing’ (see Footnote 10 for a definition).
- 7.
The main idea of the ‘consistent histories’ approach in Prigoginian physics is that new knowledge must connect with already consistent histories of possibilities to be taken as valid. It therefore is not just the results of ‘measurements’ as it was for the quantum theorists. Rae (p. 123) says that it thus “has the advantage of being more general as well as more objective”. “The consistent-histories approach claims that we have reached the point where a purely mathematical map is unable to give a unique description of the physical universe. It can, however, provide a map book containing all possible histories and their probabilities. Perhaps this is the best we can expect to achieve” (p. 127). Prigogine, says Rae (p. 126), is also more materialist in that he is not simply concerned with how the world can be observed, but how it can be.
- 8.
‘Strong mixing’ refers to the effect of influences or instabilities on a system, which is frequently chaotic, small and arbitrary.
- 9.
In 1931, Kurt Gödel, a 25-year-old mathematician, presented his ‘incompleteness’ theorem which demonstrated the mathematical inability to predict future events. Alan Turing’s basic claim was that decisions regarding methodology in mathematics were always in excess of the programme or algorithm that generated them, and hence could not be determined axiomatically from such an algorithm. Turing also reiterated a point made by Heisenberg that “when we are dealing with atoms and electrons we are quite unable to know the exact state of them; our instruments being made of atoms and electrons themselves” (Turing, cited in Hodges 2000, p. 497). This means that there are limitations to what it is possible to compute and to know (Hodges 2000, pp. 493–545).
- 10.
At times Prigogine appears to suggest that the limitation is fundamentally epistemological, and concerned with measurement, as it was for Heisenberg. But, at other times, he notes that as fluctuations and perturbations occur in open environments are theoretically without limit in terms of their reinvestment within a system, the indeterminism is also ontological, not in the sense of there being no antecedent conditions, but in terms of there being alternative options available which can be determined by contingent variables. In this ‘ontological’ view, he seems to follow Neils Bohr.
- 11.
Kauffman (2008, p. 34) also refers to “epistemological emergence”, which he defines as “an inability to deduce or infer the emergent higher-level phenomenon from underlying physics”.
- 12.
In physics, the reductionist programme maintained that all social, biological, chemical and physical reality could be explained by physics, ultimately reducing to particles and laws.
- 13.
Kauffman (2008, Chaps. 3–5) cites a ‘quiet rebellion’ within existing physics, and science more generally, as to adherence to reductionism. He notes various Nobel Laureates, such as Philip W. Anderson, Robert Laughlan, and Leonard Susskind, who all argue for versions of emergentism and against reduction to physical laws in order to explain life processes, biology or forms of social organisation.
- 14.
In Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, Joseph Schumpeter says that while we must reject the classical conception of good, of old, there is nothing to “debar us from trying to build up another and more realistic one” (pp. 252–253). Despite his antagonism towards the classical doctrine of good, Schumpeter sees nothing amiss with representing aggregate human interests in history as common collective interests, by which he means “not a genuine, but a manufactured will. And often this artifact is all that in reality corresponds to the volonté géneralé of the classical doctrine” (p. 263).
- 15.
He brings in a moral judgement, so un-gratuitous, that he maintains throughout his perils.
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Olssen, M. (2017). Complexity and Learning: Implications for Teacher Education. In: Peters, M., Cowie, B., Menter, I. (eds) A Companion to Research in Teacher Education. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-4075-7_34
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