Abstract
Concerns over extra-scientific abuse of the complex adaptive system have been well-published lately. Such commotion over semantic distortion of scientific concepts appears ill-founded in at least one respect. Its reasoning demarcates scholarly activity against disturbingly unspecified "extra-scientific" realms, and seldomly refers to empirical studies on science and policy. Coarse notions of common sense are invoked instead, that fail to elucidate how science may differ from or correspond with articulation practices in other domains of human activity.
An alternative perspective can be construed that recasts science as one among many other sources to the repository of representational constructs, with which a society organizes and allegorizes a consensus of its members about what they imagine reality to be. Such perspectiveve depicts the usage of concepts and cognitive models as underdetermined and beyond control of their sources.
The analytical repertoire from communication and cognition research can help portray a practice of scientific representation that is by no means uniform. Different language games are seen to be involved, that moreover interact differently throughout the formation process of scientific constructs. This observation suggests an alternative demarcation of (and within) what is generally referred to as "science". It instructively compares one stage in the research process with representation in art, and reconsiders the appeal of cognitive constructs, such as the complex adaptive system, upon that basis.
1. The Ancient Beacon on the Hill
Public perceptions of real-world problems are prone to change. Mankind has increased its power to affect its natural environment. This progress was seen to produce a situation where an arguably large part of the problems is actually created by the act of trying to resolve them, often unwittingly in the course of dealing with other problems [1]. The encompassing nature of the issues that are recognized today no longer assumes genuine solutions that will fix forever the major issues in society. Attention concentrates instead on ways to manage at least those real-world issues of public policy, which, if not managed effectively today, will plague us well into the next century [1,2,3,4]. The need for well-informed policy narratives calls the scientific enterprise on stage. The advice that is sought, however, is often seen to imply matters that reside beyond the experimental-theoretical reach of modern science [5].
Efforts to represent the scope and limits of the scientific results that can be achieved under these constraints [4,6,7,8] are hampered by the beacon, as it were, which over-convincingly illuminates the confines of where science begins and where it ends. The image that the beacon projects was originally there to help scientists define their position on journeys to scientific thruth, and to guide them towards the coast. The light signal from the beacon is supported by a soundtrack, that inscribes an ideal-typical canon of science into the modern Constitution [8]: Man can know reality in an objective way; all individuals come to identical conclusions, irrespective of their social situations and cultural backgrounds; values must not prevent facts to speak for themselves; scientific knowledge is a photographic representation of reality, and language is no more than a medium to built that act of representation.
Travel to the lighthouse for a change of perspective is not unheard of [9]. As to the beacon of science, traveller's reports describe its architecture as neo-positivist. Its surronding territory is appreciated for empirical studies of science. It presents a good spot to measure out distances between the ideal-typical "modern science" projections and the practices that try to meet that image. The beacon here serves as research material, while it continues to direct its students. Several of their reports have modified the common sense demarcations that used to set science entirely apart from other social and cultural endeavors [5]. These were also compiled as anthologies of historical [10] and social [11] studies of science. Scientists' features have been portrayed with disciplined ethnographic [12,13] and psychological [14] detail as well, and have removed more ground to set scholars apart from other humans.
The roots of reflexive activity may have undermined the foundations of the lighthouse, but the ruin still stands there and dominates the scenery. The cracks are not visible, nor relevant for practicing scientists whom the lighthouse of science continues to orient. Debate between those who are located at different distances from the lighthouse nevertheless confounds realist with nominalist understandings of its canon. These differences in perspectives are miscommunicated and strand in the type of controversy that has bothered mankind at least since it was recorded by the scholastics. Then, as now, outcomes lie with a pragmatic attitude, a capacity to shift from realist to relativist interpretations of the canon, depending on the situation and the agenda of the interlocutors:
In her disciplinary practice, that pragmatist may refer to the towering lighthouse as a real construct, and focus on it for guidance. She will relativize that interpretation of the canon, when confronted with scholars in social and cultural studies of science [5,15]. The latter, in their turn, might want to hear salty stories about her disciplinary practice. They expect such insiders accounts to confirm their views that scientists are not exempted from the contingencies that determine social life. Insider's stories are obviously less expedient to tell in the project-financing arena. Here, the pragmatist hopes to meet only interlocutors who voluntarily dispend their disbelieve in the realism of the beacon on the hill of science.
2. Contemporary Constraints on Common Sense
The demarcation between science on one side, and an extra-scientific realm on another, is obviously no longer inspired by the lighthouse from the previous tale only. Aspects of the scientific enterprise have been exposed to the public eye in best-selling accounts of natural science achievements [16,17]. The revolutionary research programs and alliances that these reports propose, suggest that the fruits from experimental-theoretical practice and modelling techniques can be adapted to better cope with complex real-world problems. Their projects revamp the old idea that science is to serve the public good, long after (dubious use of) technological application made it suspicious. The reasoning underlying such resocialization of basic research revives ancient calls to protect its domain from short term political and economic reflexes. Modified and yet confirmed, a rigid conceptual demarcation between science and the wider social environment continues to order debate about the position of science vis-ˆ-vis a wider social setting.
At one side of the demarcation, protagonists of basic and applied science are inventorized to represent their own professional activities as opposed to those in extra-scientific institutions. They are seen to ascribe a lower degree of "rationality" to the latter setting [2]. On the other side, policy is taken to have little interest in curing scientists from their assumption that political praxis is confronted with concerns that are "basically irrational". This assumption even legitimates decision-makers in using the recommendations from academic policy-research in a discretionary way [6]. Policy research and the scholars who design its methods of analysis do not always approve of the way recommendations and scientific facts are translated into policy narratives [3,6,18]. In articulating their displease, truthful self-representations of science have to be matched with efforts to probe what scientists situate at "the other side", and think of alternatives for representing science and policy as communities which cultivate incommensurable forms of reasoning [1,7,19].
3. Defining Use and Abuse of Complexity
Murray Gell-Mann's Adventures in the Simple and the Complex [16] qualifies as a respectable candidate to show whether the previous constraints of common sense can be overcome. The author of this exemplary insider's account about the scientific enterprise has had his extra-scientific achievements attested in considerable detail (eg. fund-raising for the complexity research program) [20]. His profile resembles the multi-lingual pragmatist, long expected to come to the rescue of those who are caught in the midst of controversy about science and about how society is to use and steer its output.
Gell-Mann offers a guided tour through scientific achievements in a number of disciplines. All are seen to conclude that the phenomena they study can be considered in terms of complex adaptive systems. Gell-Mann sets out to describe the genesis and migration of this cognitive contruct. He explains that the status of its truth claims has been modified in accordance to the progress made in implementing the research program in different fields. These expanations imply that complexity has been used in more than realist interpretations only. Gell-Mann refers to such use of complexity models and of related terms as metaphorical [21]. This practice is explained to be inevitable in early stages of a research program, until the relevant scientific community agrees that the terms can successfully describe and explain the phenomena under review. If the metaphorical expression is agreed on to be successful, it may become widespread and eventually be perceived as literal. Once literal status is gained in the newly conquered domain, the concept may move on in metaphorical guise to yet other domains [22].
Gell-Mann's description of a science that constructs rather than discovers thruth, all but contradicts empirical studies from around the lighthouse of science [8,10,11,12,13,22]. His account about complexity also adds up to inventories of metaphorical borrowing that have been compiled by historians of ideas and philosophers of science [23,24]. It radically differs from the latters' desintrested descriptions, however, by its author's ambivalence about the metaphorical success of the complexity program. Gell-Mann underlines the necessity of attempts - such as his own - to weigh out processes of cognitive borrowing with the benefit of hindsight. He expresses particular concern about complexity models that are used beyond the scientific realm: even if non-scientists grasp the scientific value of these models, they may still misunderstand metaphorical usage in a number of situations.
Gell-Mann pursues these arguments over meta-scientific ground with some caution, and frames them into a narrow understanding of how science is to interact with a wider social and economic setting. These sections seem to suggest readers suspend what they have just learned about academic language-game variety, and return to the idea of a scientific enterprise that deals in ready-made truths. Only in this way can "truthful" scientific usage of terms be conceived of, that stands as the model, to which policy and users in other domains of human activity must comply. Gell-Mann does not acribe capacities of pragmatic variety of language games to these domains, nor are reflexions offerend about motives that may inspire "erronous" use of scientific products. Non-academic usage of complexity models is consequently seen to lack discernment. "Popular scientific literature" is accused of having attracted policy to the complexity program without explaining the caveat that comes with it.
Gell-Mann denounces erroneous usage of complexity models, without disclaiming the potential these models may have for instructing policy, "were they to be applied in a wise way". He provides examples of non-trivial use in chapters 21 and 22 of his Adventures in the Simple and the Complex, by transposing concerns from the study of complexity onto the wild realm of international political praxis. These concerns are made to conclude that biological and cultural diversity must not disappear, at least not before the treasures and the economic potentials of that diversity have been examined by the scientific enterprise. Gell-Mann expects that this reasoning can support the arguments of international agencies that negotiate for more sustainable management of the biosphere [25,18].
Academics from a wide array of disciplines would consent that complexity and related systemic models can help analyse extra-scientific domains, on condition the terms are strictly reserved for indicating properties and behavior of what is representable as a system [26]. Meticulous inventorization and scrutiny of complexity definitions [27] has cleared the ground for prescriptions of use. The design of new sociological theory within paradigms "that converge towards the sciences of complexity" is nevertheless reported as unsufficiently established to allow for design and management of social policy [28]. These statements, and the impressive quantity of concerns over trivialization of complexity [29], indicate that the temptation is resisted badly to domesticate real-world demons in ill-fitting complex cages, and that the issue is not even a new one [30].
The late 1960s and early 1970s prescribed systems thinking and operations research to policy-making, especially in the area of technological innovation [31]. That era is now understood to have been marked by over-confidence about rational problem-solving and about the extension of methods and tools from one realm - that of military and industrial operations - to the much more ambiguous arena of political and social issues [2]. The expediency of these policy models has been placed under doubt in insiders' reflections [32] and outsiders' assessments alike [30,33,34,35]. Nevertheless, such practices persist in areas for which they were not designed. Complexity constructs, in their turn,, are easily superposed upon the representational registers that have been moulding these extra-academic practices for at least one generation.
4. Two Approaches to Science and Language Use
Philosophies of language assert that proper usage and future applicability of concepts and cognitive models are open-ended and underdetermined by their past usage [36,37,38,39,40]. Science, metaphysics, art and theology have also been described as different realms of discourse within one and the same language [41]. In this semantic categorization, each realm uses symbols differently, but always in a coherent way. In the realm of science, "we can avoid ineptness or emptiness in our assertions only by presenting a model as what it is, an object of comparison - as, so to speak, a measuring-rod; not as a preconceived idea to which reality must correspond" [36].
Description in the realm of science is characterized by a capacity to establish conceptual distance to the object that is described. It seeks to represent these acts of observation and reflection in a rational and transparent way. The history of science illustrates its protagonists' difficulties in combining that demand for rigor with efforts to approximate photographic reproduction quality. Several programs were launched to overcome the problems that ordinary language use imposes upon scientific reasoning. Logico-mathematical alternatives were developed [24]. Amongsst others, these have been crucial to the automatisation of algorithms, which now enables numerical simulation and aids a plethora of statistical tools that support the analysis of eg. complex problems [42]. Nevertheless, formal techniques of representation cannot and aught nog entirely replace other academic endevors to grasp certain real-world processes. Natural language structures that mediate between humans and their world in a given cultural setting have been increasingly highlighted as a basis from which to analyse real world problems and design realistic solutions that are ecologically sound [43]. Such emphasis on natural language and cognition is reminiscent of a notorious former inspirator of logical positivism, who later denounced transcendental "language as such" as a fiction [39], and started to consider the problem of representation from a different angle. He then concluded that "when I think in language, there aren't 'meanings' going through my mind in addition to the verbal expression: the language is itself the vehicle of thought" [36].
Wittgenstein's later approach to the problem of language and science bears witness to a tradition that has inquired into the subtilities of natural language use, rather than contributed to the establishment of logical alternatives. These inquiries have developed into an interdisciplinary enterprise that rest on respectable empirical foundations and has developed impressive theoretical conclusions [37]. It brings together what is known about language and cognition from academic disciplines such as psychology, linguistics, anthropology and computer science, and accumulates evidence against traditional but still widespread objectivist views that hold reason to be only abstract and disembodied, literal and primarily about propositions that can be objectively either true or false [44]. It takes metaphor and other imaginative aspects of reason as central to reason, rather than as a peripheral and inconsequential adjunct to the literal. These conclusions are described as a blend of relativisms and cultural and linguistic determinism [45], and have been awarded "therapeutic" value by epistemological programs in social science and the humanities [36,38,46,47]. These implicate wider segments within the scientific enterprise, and can help explain how academic constructs interact in a wider social and cultural setting.
5. Relativism and Determinism
Seminal work by Ferdinant de Saussure introduced the idea that language operates as a system that enables terms to relate to other terms and objects [48]. Linguistics developed tools to examine the nature, patterns and regularities of such system, but do not explain correspondences between terms and objects, which it ascribes to convention and the product of historical contingencies. Whatever the nature of these correspondences may have been in pre-modern times [49], evidence available from systematic study of language is in favour of l'arbitraire du signe [48].
The relativistic stand is easily emphasized in reflection about language, even if it does not correspond with a perspective that is construed from within a given language. In the latter setting, speakers are seldom seen to communicate thoughts in disrespect of the ways of talk that are taken for granted in the community that has socialized them and where they intend to interact. Their cognitive and communicative acts appear as unreflexive actions that follow from being embedded in a context of practice. This kind of action - and in the argument of some there is no other - "is anything but natural in the sense of proceeding independently of historical and social formations; but once those formations are in place (as they always are), what you think to do will not be calculated in relation to a higher law or an overarching theory, but will issue from you as naturally as breathing" [50].
Theories of language acknowledge this sense of determinism as well, while they also try to explain why languages change. Description of the individual's experience of language, at a given moment of time, and confined by the set of professional and other registers within his language competence, is therefore complemented with yet another level of analysis. It brings into view language (langue) as an entity that is held in collective ownership of a verbal community [48]. This perspective allows for conjectures about the mechanisms of social and historical formation of language, that are however hard to transpose to the perception of individual speakers, for whom semantic evolution goes largely unnoticed.
According to these models, formations of language proceed from a process whereby different groups within societies conceive of "ways of speaking" about particular social, political or cultural phenomena that they are (beginning to be) aware of. Such discourse problematizes, questions, interprets and thereby turns perceptions into realities [46,51,52,53]. In this view, innovation must be accompanied by a process whereby speech communities settle their disputes [1], including those as to the appropriateness of their articulation strategies for referring to these phenomena. Discursive formations then solidify, and transform into the authorized way of talking. Social and many other phenomena are thereafter literally hard to conceive of, independently of the discourse that articulates them.
In one interpretation, new concepts and cognitive models are introduced into a language community by ideolectic use of a sociolect. The sociolect is defined as "language, not just as lexicon and grammar, but also as the repository of myths and stereotypes with which a society organizes and allegorizes a consensus of its members about what they imagine reality to be" [54]. Language users articulate their experience with objects, events, and processes that are evident in their environment at a certain time. They use a relatively stable set of linguistic and cognitive tools, but have a margin of freedom in how to use these tools [55].
Articulation practices are conceived of as driven by an urge to reconcile contradictory interpretations of experience, and fill in gaps about many aspects of the world that are not open to direct observation [4]. Accounts must be sufficiently coherent, and allow to anticipate experiences with that world in the near future. In this way, they direct individual and communal actions in that world. Accounts ought to be left sufficiently tentative, to smooth over discrepancies in daily experiences and interpretations. Concepts, accounts, theories, narrative procedures, discourse [55], sociolects [54], world views [1,56], and the historical trancendental [42] can be considered as different dimensions of the idealized cognitive models [44] by means of which we organize knowledge and structure perception.
6. Grammar and Convention
Transformation of cognitive organization has been compared to natural language formation [42,55]. The organization of cognitive material in a given culture may be represented in analogy to a grammar that orders words in sentences in a given language. New concepts, frames of reasoning and narrative forms are consequently described as different dimension of grammatical innovation. Such type of acts can be envisaged as a language game, in the sense the term is used in Wittgenstein's loosely-defined analytical toolkit [36]. The making of consensus about the relevance and wider social usage of these innovations can be covered by the same system of description. The agent of a language game that settles convention of usage is then inferred as "society at large".
The last part of the model is transposed with difficulty onto the standard conception of science. That enterprise is held to settle the disputes that are triggered by its own innovations, preferably in an empirical way. Correspondences with an observable real-out-there, rather than social expediences, constitute the basis for its procedures of falsification. And yet, "truth" does not concludingly determine the rise and fall of research programs and theories, and definitely not their social appeal and impact. This awareness can be explained better in shifting from positivist prescription to empirical social studies of science. The latter have illuminated how scholars interact in the making of convention in the fields of expertise where they seek to innovate [12].
The analytical perspective may be widened further, so as to bring into view how non-academic groups of language users become involved after cognitive products are disclosed into a wider social setting. The entire language community would be seen to settle various disputes about what they imagine different parts of reality to be, and mould the discourse that articulates that reality as they go along. In the course of that process, different groups may adopt (and occasionally adapt) interpretations that are expedient to their concerns. They take into account social, ethical and esthetical issues, which exercices in scientific reasoning are urged to omit [3,6,51]. In this frame of reference, indications of disrespect for proper, "truthful" usage of scientific constructs are conceived of differently, than as an anomaly that science can but denounce in impotence.
"Doesn't the analogy between language and games throw light here? We can easily imagine people amusing themselves in a field by playing with a ball so as to start various existing games, but playing many without finishing them and in between throwing the ball aimlessly into the air - chasing one another with the ball and bombarding one another for a joke and so on [...] And is there not also the case where we play and - make up the rules as we go along? And there is even one where we alter them - as we go along" [36].
If this semantic portrait were to be examined in close-ups, it reveals that games are played fairly autonomously from one other, each with its own rationale and rules. Players are versatile in several language games. They shift from playing one to playing the other, and do so with ease. Their occasional involvement in one rather than the other game does not characterize them. Different professional and other activities, by contrast, have constant compositions of language games. Certain activities involve only one type of game. Science, by contrast, is characterized by an intricate mixture of innovation and settlement. Its composition of language games also differs at different departments within the scientific enterprise, and at different stages in their research programs. Areas of the wider social landscape are more instructively compared with departments within science that are confined by a particular language game composition, than with an undifferentiated common sense representation of the enterprise at large.
7. Fact, Fiction and Research Programs
Whether performed in academia or elsewhere, fact-finding in support of policy-making presents a case where grammatical innovation is relatively scarce. Policy research is also hard to distinguish from journalism, but factual reports of real-world problems are distinct from practices where representation is "deliberately" mediated. The latter case is exemplified by literature (at least, by literature before and after social realism). Its formal make-up is characterized by an ascendancy of grammatical innovation. This description also befits the activities which eg. Gell-Mann ascribes to several of his colleagues, who design and help disseminate complexity models [16].
The complexity program can be taken to exemplify patterns that recur in scientific innovation, and resemble practices that are generally ascribed to poets and other artists. The latter are understood to articulate perceptions of a changing world that cannot, at that time, be seen-and-therefore-talked-about (and vice versa) with the representational repertoire that is available. The narrative constructs which they develop to overcome that difficulty are often understood to refer to the real-out-there in a metaphorical way, rather than in a literal one. The contents of their stories are thereby situated in a fictive universum, a practice that resembles the epistemic distance implied by representational regimes in the realm of science.
In the understanding that the truth of a narrative does not necessarily derive from or depend upon the truth of its constituent parts or contents [3], so-called "non-referential" texts relate to the social and cultural setting of their authors. This link is established by the narrative and other organisational schemes of their creations [55,57]. In innovating narrative procedures, perceptions about social processes and relations are articulated in a way that is more truthful, albeit on a different level. The form of a text is assumed to bear witness to the presentiments that its author may have about the expediences of her time, culture and social situation.
Literary scholarship, amongst others [58], has sought to appreciate the impact of representational structures upon the social imagery of their time and cultural locations. It does not expect the maker of a literary product to consciously direct her actions to the expediences which will only later clear out as the culture evolves of which she, and her work, are a tiny fraction. The ways in which the artist can impact upon the (re)organization of cognitive material, situates her alongside contemporary public relations strategists, scientists [58], and other intellectuals [53]. The appeal that literary and scholarly products may gain in the long run, as a consequence of a lengthy procedure of social reception, had therefore better be distinguished from the concious intentions of their makers. There are few reasons to doubt that the latter are inspired by truthfulness, whether "narrative" or other.
Representational strategies in several social science branches and the humanities have already been compared with those in art [50,59,60]. These analyses have focused on techniques for describing how representation in science is mediated by conventional organizational registers. Analyses of natural sciences articles have resorted to interpretative scholarship from the humanities as well [61]. Such endeavors have favored structuralist approaches, which proved less helpful to explain discursive formations [59] and to diagnose social dimensions of cognitive constructs [62]. Non-structuralist scholarship has been more explicit in foregrounding ties between texts, discursive practices and socio-cultural practices [55]. Critical discourse analysis considers formal textural properties as sensitive indicators of sociocultural processs, relations and change. This type of analysis assesses whether and how ideolectic achievements, whethr literary or other, alter authorized ways for thinking about the phenomena they describe and eventually reorganize the cognitive maps of the contexts in which these phenomena are embedded [54,59]. The common sense conceptual barrier between fact and fiction is thereby suspended. Concepts, methods and insights from studies of literary and other types of fiction may as well be made to examine formal components within the manufacturing process of scientific facts.
8. Complexity as Narrative Procedure
If research into complex adaptive systems is a scientific discipline, then it is not the type that has appropriated a field of phenomena of its own, that observes these phenomena with great patience, and that interprets the observations afterwards. Instead, complexity operates as if it were a narrative procedure. It frames the observations about a set of phenomena as (aspects of) a complex adaptive system. A field of inquiry that employs its terms for describing systems properties and behavior gains access to a pool of mathematical, statistical and computational techniques. The introduction of the narrative procedure of complexity consequently reorganizes observations and interpretations from that field, and summarizes them into innovative accounts [63]. Reorganizations are successful when they prove to accomodate observations which did not fit into the accounts (or theories, theories, language) that organized the cognitive material of that field before. Innovations of this type may alter strategies whereby observations and interpretations of phenomena are established as facts. They do not engender new observations or facts by themselves.
Interdisciplinary transfers of concepts and of analytical tools are a proven ruse to gain cognitive ground [22,23]. The less specific the tool, the wider may prove its applicability. In this sense, construction of new perspectives on reality is understood to impose new constraints elsewhere [45]. In the case of complexity, the width over which the narrative has spread, and its introduction into policy debate and other extra-scientific territory, does not always concur with an increase in depth. Systemic reformulation covers a limited portion of the achievements from meticulous disciplinary inquiry, but compensates that loss on a meta-level. Here, the function of the narrative of complexity is best appreciated with the linguistics concept of pidgin, a plain form of language that ensures communication between speakers from different linguistic communities. Concurrently, a discipline that manages to formalize the phenomena that it investigates with the aid of the systemic pidgin, can communicate its conclusions to scholars from other disciplinary communities, and to those interested in comparing, juxtaposing and presenting overviews of the findings of different fields. Complexity presents a more elaborate formalism as compared to older manifestations of evolutionary schemes and systems thinking that propagated through scientific disciplines [29,30,34]. It claims greater descriptive accuracy with respect to how social, ecological, economic and political phenomena self-adapt to change in their environment. Complexity further incorporates state-of-the-art insights on nondeterminism, and represents them by a form of reasoning that is fluently repeated beyond the realm of science (correctly or ill-informedly).
The latter cognitive or narrative assets do not run counter to the expectation that complexity is alluring to recent articulation of concern over the problematic pace of current global change, which has been heard to call for radically new strategies to manage contemporary society and its problems [1,2,3,6]. Some interpreters additionally ascribe "a profound sense of disorientation" to contemporary man who faces these changes. They assume his need to overview the fragments of the specialized scientific knowledge that is available to him, and console his conclusions with interpretations about the real-out-there that are cultivated by other domains of human activity. This rationale is offered in support of loud calls for construction and dissemination of integrated world views [64]. The project is explained to resume aspects from the Wiener Kreiss' unified science program, but is more explicit about its ambition to have extra-scientific praxis benefit from more coherent overviews of state-of-the-art scientific activity. It implies discursive practices can be shifted as part of the engineering of social and cultural change. The origin of the latter aspiration can be traced back to the craddle of modern intellectual ideology [24,42,53]. It is much more difficult to console with the approach to language, thought and their interaction with socio-cultural practices that has been discussed at length.
The program to wrap state-of-the-art cognitive achievements into new world views constructs also presents an explicit manifestation of concerns that others have expressed before and in tentative ways. Some of these older sources have been inventorized and commented upon rather rigorously [7,65]. These studies tend to suspicion about complaints over a new kind of unsurveyability [66], and perceptions that critical analysis of modern society and culture (postmodernity) signal a "deep crisis of contemporary culture". In Feyerabend's relativist and historicist perspective, cultural diversity is a natural and healthy state of mankind. Science, art, religion and politics have been observed as realms that are rather apathic to one another [41], for reasons that are less problematic than interesting to probe in an empirical way. The heart of the problem may not be that our times are becoming more complex, but that our ability to resolve conflicts fails with a loss of cultural vigour and upon confrontation with different cultures [1]. Complaints about unsurveyability are also assumed to occlude from view (and even be instrumental to) a process that systematically wipes out variety on modern Western culture [42], and progresses rapidly towards a state of global monotony [64].
Feyerabend's attempts to relativize the complaints of his intellectual companions thereby place that source of concern at the same geographical, cultural, and social location as the scientific enterprise's complexity workers and the consumers of their product. His polemics also imply that cultural "fragmentation", for better or for worse, ranks among the concerns that are expedient there and today. His paranoia that contemporary Western unease will result in even stronger attempts to enforce an enlightened global intellectual order, and the powers to transform culture ascribed to formalist artefacts [42], are significant in a different sense. Perceptions that diversity is becoming scantier are actually corrobated by Gell-Mann's engagements to maintenance of cultural diversity [16]. "Conscious intentions" that motivate Gell-Mann's arguments in these sections, are thereby contradicted by (the usage made of) the complexity formalism that articulates these concerns. Naturally, the anxieties of an era contribute to moulding its discourse. That discourse may in its turn prompt non-scientific realms to appropriate cognitive constructs in a way that runs counter to the usage intended by the academic authors of those constructs.
Bibliography
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[12] Laboratory workers have been represented in anthropological descriptions, from the late 1970s onwards, eg. Latour, B. & Woolgar, S., Laboratory Life. The Construction of Scientific Facts, (2nd ed.), Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1986; Latour, B., Science in Action. How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society, Harvard University Press, Cambridge Ma., 1987; Lynch, M., Art and Artifact in Laboratory Science: A Study of Shop Work and Shop Talk in a Research Laboratory, Routledge, London, 1985.
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[15] On the impact of differences in contextual location on scientists' repertoires, cf. Mulkay, M., Potter, J. , & Yearly, S., Why an Analysis of Scientists' Discourse is Needed, in Knorr-Cetina, K & Mulkay, M., (eds), Science Observed: Perspectives on the Social Study of Science, Sage, Beverly Hills, 1983, pp. 171-204.
[16] Gell-Mann, M., The Quark and the Jaguar. Adventures in the Simple and the Complex, Little, Brown and Co., London, 1994 (availabe as Abacus paperback since 1995). The option to study Gell-Mann's work in the following sections entails no claims that complexity is a more revolutionary, authorative or interesting research program than chaos, autopoiesis, self-organization, or others.
[17] Ruelle, D., Chance and Chaos, Princeton University Press, 1991 (published in Penguin Books in 1993); Prigogine, I. & Stengers, I., La nouvelle alliance. MŽtamorphose de la science, Gallimard, Paris, 1979.
[18] The difficulty to represent different sorts of uncertainty and translate these into policy debate on eg. biosphere management is studied in depth in Global Warming as Analytic Tip, Roe, E., Narrative Policy Analysis. Theory and Practice, Duke University Press, London & Durham, 1994, pp. 108-125. Roe finds evidence of scholars who assist decision-makers in concocting "narrative certainties" which correspond better to the policy-makers agenda's and to expectations of publics, even if these contradict their theoretical understandings.
[19] Wingens, M., Toward a General Utilization Theory. A Systems Theory Reformulation of the Two-communities Metaphor, Knowledge: Creation, Diffusion, Utilization 12 (1), 27-42, 1990.
[20] Waldrop, M., Complexity. The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1992.
[21] eg. on page 319 in the Abacus paperback edition, Gell-Mann, M., The Quark and the Jaguar. Adventures in the Simple and the Complex, Little, Brown and Co, London, 1994 .
[22] Stengers, I., (red), D'une science ˆ l'autre. Des concepts nomades, Seuil, Paris, 1987; Schlanger, J. & Stengers, I., (reds), Les concepts scientifiques. Invention et pouvoir, La dŽcouverte, Paris, 1988. I reinterpret Gell-Mann's account here, in the terms used by Isabelle Stengers
[23] Hesse, M., Models and Analogies in Science, Notre Dame University Press, 1966; Schlanger, J., Les mŽtaphores de l'organisme, Vrin, Paris, 1971; Vroon, P. & Draaisma, D., De mens als metafoor: over vergelijkingen van mens en machine in filosofie en psychologie, Ambo, Baarn, 1985.
[24] Serres, M. Herms I. La communication, Minuit, Paris, 1968;
[25] Other interpreters are less convinced that negotiations about international commons management have as yet resorted to "reasonable arguments", eg. World Resources Institute, Greenhouse Warming: Negotiating a Global Regime, World Resources Institute, Washington D.C., 1991. Similar conclusions are offered throughout summaries and interpretations of the Rio Earth Summit in Sachs, W., (ed), Global Ecology. A New Arena of Political Conflict, Zed Books, London & New Jersey, 1993.
[26] Throughout 1995, the ontological status of complexity was discussed extensively by the Principia Cybernetica Project, PRNCYB-L%BINGVMB.bitnet@c.c.Binghamton.edu.
[27] Edmonds, B., A Hypertext Bibliography of Complexity Measures, URL: http://www.fmb.mmu.ac.uk/ ~bruce/combib, 1994.
[28] Geyer, F., The Challenge of Sociocybernetics, Kybernetes 24 (4), 6-32, 1995.
[29] Horgan, J., From Complexity to Perplexity, Scientific American 272 (6), 74-79, 1995.
[30] Bowker, G., How to be Universal: Some Cybernetic Strategies 1943-1970, Social Studies of Science 23 (1), 107-128, 1993.
[31] eg. Hetman, F., Society and the Assessment of Technology. Premises, Concepts, Methodology, Experiments, Areas of Application, OECD, Paris, 1973.
[32] Porter, A. & Rossini, F., Technological Forecasting, in Singh, M., (ed), Systems & Control Encyclopedia. Theory, Technology, Applications, Pergamon, Headigton Hill, 4823-4828, 1989.
[33] Tribe, L., Technology Assessment and the Fourth Discontinuity: The Limits of Instrumental Rationality, Southern California Law Review 46, 617-660, 1973.
[34] Lilienfelt, R., The Rise of Systems Theory. An Ideological Analysis, John Wiley, New York, 1978. Systems thinking is here presented as a new "root metaphor" that has develeoped into the most authoritative (hence "ideological") way to organize knowledge in different fields of scientific and other professional activity.
[35] Hoos, I., Systems Analysis in Public Policy. A Critique, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1972.
[36] Wittgenstein, L., Philosophical Investigations / Philosophische Untersuchungen (3rd ed.), Blackwell, Oxford, 1984 (1st ed. 1953). The quotes, in order of appearance here, are from ¤131, ¤329, and ¤83.
[37] Putnam, H., Words and Life, Harvard University Press, Cambridge Ma, 1994.
[38] Bloor, D., Wittgenstein. A Social Theory of Knowledge, Macmillan, London, 1983.
[39] Hallet, G., A Companion to Wittgenstein's "Philosophical Investigations", Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1977.
[40] More interpretations of these aspects in Wittgenstein's observations in Barnes, B., Interests and the Growth of Knowledge, Routledge Direct Editions, London, 1979; Barnes, B., On the Conventional Character of Knowledge and Cognition, in Knorr-Cetina, K & Mulkay, M., (eds), Science Observed: Perspectives on the Social Study of Science, Sage, Beverly Hills, 1983, pp. 19-52.
[41] Urban, W., Language and Reality, George Allen & Unwin, London, 1939.
[42] LŽvy, P., La machine univers. Calcul, cognition et culture informatique, La dŽcouverte (sciences et sociŽtŽ), Paris, 1987. LŽvy presents an exhaustive genealogy of the 'universal language' idea. He underlines its crucial role in the making of contemporary society, which he characterizes as an 'anthropological' transformation.
[43] Wright, W., Wild Knowledge. Science, Language and Social Life in a Fragile Environment, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1992. Similarly, Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Northvale N.J., J. Aronson Inc., 1987 (First edition 1972).
[44] Lakoff, G., Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. What Categories Reveal about the Mind, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1990.
[45] Sinha, C., Language and Representation. A Socio-Naturalistic Approach to Human Development, Harvester Wheatsheaf, New York, 1988.
[46] Foucault, M., L'ordre du discours, Gallimard, Paris, 1971.
[47] Latouche, S., Le procs de la science sociale. Introduction ˆ une thŽorie critique de la connaissance, Anthropos, Paris, 1984.
[48] de Saussure, F., Cours de linguistique gŽnŽrale (1908-1909 & 1910-1911, Ždition critique prŽparŽe par Tullio de Mauro), Payot, Paris, 1982.
[49] Foucault, M., Les mots et les choses. Une archŽologie des sciences humaines, Gallimard, Paris, 1966.
[50] Fish, S., Doing What Comes Naturally. Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1989. The quote is taken from page 3.
[51] Habermas, J., Communication and the Evolution of Society, Beacon Press, Boston, 1979.
[52] Berger, P. & Luckmann, T., Die gesellschaftliche Konstruktion der Wirklichkeit: Eine Theorie des Wissenschaftssoziologie, Fisher, Frankfurt, 1982.
[53] Legislators and Interpreters. Culture as the ideology of intellectuals, in Bauman, Z., Intimations of Postmodernity, Routledge, London, 1992, 1-22.
[54] Riffaterre, M., Fear of Theory, New Literary History 21 (4), 930, 1990. The definition of language is stretched to a point where it overlaps the philosophical notion of historical transcendental.
[55] Fairclough, N., Critical Discourse Analysis, Longman, Harlow, 1995.
[56] World views as defined in eg. Aerts, D., et al., World Views. From Fragmentation to Integration, VUBPress, Brussels, 1994.
[57] This interpretation recurs throughout non-structuralist literary scholarship, eg. Bakhtin, M. & Medvedev, P., The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship. A Critical Introduction to Sociological Poetics, John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1973 (original Russian edition first published in 1928); Bloch, E., Brecht, B., Lukˆcs, G., Benjamin, W. & Adorno, T., Aestetics and Politics, London, NLB, 1977; Goldmann, L., Pour une sociologie du roman, Gallimard, Paris, 1964; Macheray, P., Pour une thŽorie de la production littŽraire, Franois Maspero, Paris, 1971.
[58] Cf. Korzybski, A., Science and Sanity. An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics (Fourth Edition), The International Non-Aristotelian Library Publishing Company, Lakeville, Conn, 1958 (1st Edition 1933).
[59] McCloskey, D., The Rhetoric of Economics, Wheatsheaf, Sussex, 1986; Samuels, W. (ed), Economics as Discourse: An Analysis of the Language of Economists, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Boston, 1990.
[60] Goodrich, P., Legal Discourse. Studies in Linguistics, Rhetoric & Legal Analysis, Macmillan, London, 1992.
[61] Franoise Bastide and Bruno Latour inventorized the analysis of scientific articles in such fields in the past 15 years to have proceeded from "l'application de mŽthodes empruntŽes ˆ l'histoire, ˆ la critique littŽraire, ˆ la rhŽtorique, ˆ la sŽmiotique et finalement ˆ la microsociologie des sciences et des techniques", in L'opŽra du rein - mise en scne, mise en fait, Latour, B., La clef de Berlin, La dŽcouverte, Paris, 1993, pp. 83-99 (cf. other sections in Latour's chapter on 'le dur mŽtier des travailleurs de la preuve').
[62] The incompatibility between structuralist models and social critique is explored in eg. Dews, P., Logics of Disintegration. Post-structuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory, Verso, London, 1987.
[63] The description of complexity in terms of a narrative procedure here approximates what studies of science infer as a paradigm.
[64] Aerts, D., et al., World Views. From Fragmentation to Integration, VUB Press, Brussels, 1994.
[65] Feyerabend, P., Farewell to Reason, Verso, London & New York, 1987.
[66] The expression is ascribed to Habermas, J., Die neue UnŸbersichtlichkeit, Frankfurt, 1985.