In response to Jay's comments about the different disciplinary takes on
complexity and emergence:
Jay contrasts physics and biology, noting that biology is less reductionist
and has a better understanding of complexity. I agree with that.
In my experience most of the complexity approaches to social systems appear
to be influenced most of all by economics. You get this at the Santa Fe
Institute, for example. Economics being reductionist and methodologically
individualist, this results in the same problems that Jay cautions against.
This is one of my critiques of computational modeling of emergence in
societies in the "Artificial societies" paper.
Jay wrote:
>There is an unfortunate
>tendency for physics to always want to define the paradigm of science.
>Physics makes complex systems approaches look bottom-up, and it is this
>version that too many philosophers and others pay too much attention to.
>Physics is neither typical nor general as a scientific method anymore. One
>of the major claims of complexity theory is that its principles are
>domain-independent. This is only true if the principles are derived from
>the study of the most realistically complex systems, as in biology, not if
>they are derived from the most simplified, idealized, abstracted systems as
>in physics.
R. Keith Sawyer
http://www.keithsawyer.com/
Assistant Professor
Department of Education
Washington University
Campus Box 1183
St. Louis, MO 63130
314-935-8724
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