Abstract
After the chapters on rethinking interaction and rethinking causality, we have to make another step before we are able to rethink the concept of complexity in use in the social sciences and humanities. For this ambitious goal, we need to rethink the unit of study as the subject of study in the social sciences. Only then, we can make the step of building a new science with a new focus on complexity as the subject of study in the social sciences.
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Notes
- 1.
Referred to by and in Metcalf and Urwick 1941, p. 15; emphasis added.
- 2.
This term is somewhat confusing because recursive is derived from re-cur, which can mean again, or back. See http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/recur The focus here, in this symbol, is on both back and again! For this reason, we prefer the term reciprocal relationship.
- 3.
It is not possible to find these formulae in the regular books about the causal framework. Only Hayduk gives a reduced version of these formulae, in Hayduk (1996).
- 4.
Although it goes a little bit far to connect our way of conceiving of complexity, based on causal loops, with that of Wolfram (2002), the parallels with his concept of causal networks and causal interaction and generative functions are exciting but not so easy to understand. But, most importantly, he addresses the problem of the unit of study correctly as a fundamental problem in his approach of physics as a new kind of science.
- 5.
- 6.
This goal may be recognized as the study of autopoetic systems, with its origins in the nineteenth century (Kant) and put on the agenda of social (cognitive) science by the original thinkers Maturana and Varela.
- 7.
- 8.
We think it is not by chance that he became aware of this at the end of his life. This is a moment that one realizes that “life happens when you are making other plans” (John Lennon).
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Annex 12.1 Information about the “Sleeping Beauty”
Annex 12.1 Information about the “Sleeping Beauty”
Sleeping Beauty 2006 | Nadine Sterk
Where there is light, there is life. When you switch on the lamp, it provides you with light. You provide it with the generating power it needs to grow.
Similar to living organisms, this lamp contains all the essential “mechanisms” that will enable it to develop. All it needs is energy and it starts creating its own lampshade. It knits it slowly around the lamp, pausing only when the light is off. Its growth places it beyond the bare utilitarian necessity of artificial light. The lamp becomes an animate part of space, an existence in its own right.
text Theodora Antonopoulou
photography Paul Scala
collection gallery Kreo
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Jörg, T. (2011). Rethinking the Unit of Study. In: New Thinking in Complexity for the Social Sciences and Humanities. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1303-1_12
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