Fri, 26 Aug 1994 05:47:39 -0700 for Date: Thu, 25 Aug 1994 16:07:42 -0300 From: Okay so that was a lie Subject: The Edited Version To: 34lpf6t@CMUVM.CSV.CMICH.EDU The presentation below is part of the effort of the Red Feather Institute For Advanced Studies in Sociology to generate an affirmative postmodern philosophy of science with which to approach the knowledge process. I forward it to all grad students on the network for whatever aid it might be in your own work/study. There is a lot more about Chaos/Complexity theory and nonlinear social dynamics available on disk free to grad students in sociology by sending your snailmail address on email. T.R. ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- In the background you can hear "It's Science Friction" by Fifth Column, and you are listening to Science Friction on CKDU 97.5 FM, broadcasting from Halifax. Today on Science Friction I will be reading from an essay called: CHAOS THEORY AND THE KNOWLEDGE PROCESS Explorations in Postmodern Methodology by T. R. Young of The Red Feather Institute in Weidman, Michigan and James Yarbrough of the department of Sociology at the University of North Texas in Denton, Texas. This paper was written in 1993. I found it through a gopher search on the Internet on the word 'chaos'. I have edited it extensively to fit the length of this programme. Although all changes were with the permission of T.R.Young, all errors and simplifications resulting from the editing process remain mine. CHAOS THEORY AND THE KNOWLEDGE PROCESS The central point of this essay is that the ontological basis of the knowledge process has been profoundly and irreversibly altered by the findings of the new sciences of complexity often called Chaos theory. Given the nonlinear dynamics and the nonlinear transformations between dynamic states discussed in detail in the literature of chaos, the methods and mission of American sociology are forever changed. The intent here is to think through with the listener some of the implications of chaos theory for both method and mission of the knowledge process in the social sciences in an affirmative postmodern modality. Perhaps the most profound and most interesting implication for sociological theory is that, given the propriety of nonlinear interaction and fractal geometries for social dynamics, the only possible theory is, henceforth, change theory. If the dynamics of social systems are, in fact, nonlinear, then axioms, propositions and theoretical models can never be permanently true. Whole new methodologies are required which take into account the incredibly complex and interconnected ontos observed in systems with more than three variables. More than that, truth statements about relationships take a fractal value; one must learn to think in terms of regions of certainty and degrees of facticity as well as truth quotients less than one. The findings of chaos theory, most certainly appropriate to human behavior inform us that the task of the social scientist is not, cannot be, the discovery of the immutable laws of society; it is not, cannot be to build grand theory by means of value-free research designed to approach objective reality through the method of successive approximations, it is not and cannot be the identification of ideal and/or essential structures of social organization; if the role of the social scientist is not and cannot be to be the impartial arbiter of that which is natural and normal, of that which is deviant and perverse--then what is it to be? Postmodern sensibility permits any number of answers to such a question however in the postmodern affirmative sociology offered here, in social psychology, in stratification, in criminology as in religious studies, grand theory is decentered while praxis is recentered. In support of a postmodern methodology, we wish to consider with the reader a critique of two major epistemological assumptions which ground the knowledge process in American sociology and in its many reincarnations around the world. The central assumptions which ground the mission of modern science are; 1) objectivity as the methodological stance and 2) general theory as the goal of social science. Both are critiqued for their implications in both modern and postmodern methodology. Theory itself is demoted from the foundational base of postmodern sociology to a convenient stop-over; a thesis becomes an instrument to be used and discarded as new dynamics replace those of the previous dynamic system. The meta-theory suggested by both postmodern sensibiility and the ontology of chaos is that theory itself is time, region and context dependent. Rather than immutable and eternal law, theory becomes transient, local, and conditional. In Seidman's terms (and in the terms of many post- structuralists), theory is reduced to a meta-narrative tied to concrete struggles. These meta-narratives must have reality quotients if they are to serve to ground practical action, but this new science of complexity tell us that truth quotients are fractal rather than binary. The theoretical task of all postmodern social science will be to generate fractally true statements about the changing patterns of transformations through which a social system goes. This task will be twofold: first to identify the key parameters which pushes social systems from near stability into a very deep chaos and, in that deep chaotic regime; to identify that which generates order from disorder. The immediate task at hand is to study large data sets [on crime, divorce, death, bankruptcy, family size or whatever] to find the attractors hidden in them. The next part is to find which of the many parameters in a field push any given system from semi-stable to very unstable dynamics. A second part, for affirmative postmodern methodology, is to enhance and democratize human agency. Chaos theory offers insight into when such agency is feasible and when it is remote. Given the kinds of knowledge above; and given the limited times and regions in which human agency is possible, the political question becomes, as the Lynds put it, Knowledge for Whom? In a richly detailed and intricately connected world, just which regions are we to examine and which parameters do we try to control? Chaos theory instructs us that there are, indeed, regions of order in every chaotic regime and some uncertainty in every stable regime. Indeed, Chaos theory is best understood as the study of the changing mix of order and disorder in both structure and process. In that changing mix, quantity become quality for most natural and social dynamics. While quantification is important in every region of phase-space, it is qualitative methodology which is interesting to the those who prefer order as well as to those who work for change and renewal. Chaos theory is a study of the whole more so than the parts of the whole. If one prefers order theory and runs across these pockets of order in natural systems one is tempted mightily to assert that one's findings are correct and all other findings are error, faulty design, observer bias and such. The reader will note the bias in graduate departments of sociology and other social sciences for findings which yield high measures of correlation and goodness of fit to a normal curve. The bias is in sciences oriented to control; not in natural or social ontologies. Chaos theory confirms what Marx, Mannheim, Madhi, and Seidman have asserted and that which feminists, colonial subjects and excluded minorities have shouted; those who impose order and structure on a society; those who define disorder and deviancy--these persons have a political agenda and use police and science to enforce their own privileged social orders upon others. The foundational assumption of modern science is the existence of discrete objects of study as well as the possibility of impersonal study of these objects in the natural world. In rejection of the pathways to knowledge of premodern times, an intense and highly personal subjectivity, such claims of objectivity, supported by inter-observer reliability in the study of stars, of the geological record, of biological inheritance as well as the thousands of other scientific researches seemed indisputably better than premodern claims to knowledge. However the possibility of objectivity has to be considered in light of the nature of the objects under study. Objectivity, as a methodological stance, requires that discrete objects be found in nature. Objectivity also requires that the observer not intrude to create the object or to affect its dynamics. Part of postmodern science is an understanding that objects are neither whole, discrete, nor bounded in their geometry. Such objects display nonlinear dynamics such that they are not found in a basin of outcomes where linear math would predict. Another part of postmodern science is an understanding that the scientist calls forth the 'object' of research in the measurement of it. A third part, scarcely visible at this writing, is that all objects as well as all knowledge paradigms are constructed out of an infinite universe of parameters and paradigms. Chaos research reveals quite a different geometry of the objects of nature and society. Instead of discrete objects, bounded and self contained, the geometry of natural systems is more like cantor dust, Koch curves, a sierpenski carpet, a menger sponge or the lovely patterns of a mandelbrot set; such forms are riddled with holes and open to the passage of other systems. The possibility of objective research stands as the central issue to resolve in any adequate knowledge industry. There is much from physical and social science which speaks against that possibility. Take quantum physics, which offers its own doubts about objectivity. There is a question whether objects exist as discrete entities. Objectivity as a process in which particles exist as entities to be studied as discrete objects being acted upon by external forces--as independent or dependent particles--is called into question. More than that, for some, quantum physics implies that observation calls forth the 'objects' of observation. In his discussion of the Pauli Principle, Ian Barbour notes that, in newtonian physics, the individual part could be considered on its own and that the laws of nature did not change when parts were assembled in a new configuration. However in post-modern physics, it is frequently necessary to study the behavior of the whole as an emergent, transcendent entity not derivative of a complete knowledge of its parts. In quantum physics, physical particles appear to be intersections of indivisible waves. These emergent 'particles' are stable for a while and then dissolve and recombine to create new entities. >From the perspective of quantum physics, particles do not exist, objectively, as separate entities but rather as interdependent parts of a greater whole. In quantum physics, it is a human choice about which research technique to use. The choice determines whether one finds waves or finds particles in the 'natural' ontology. The object of study varies according to the methodology used to look for it. An analogous situation arises in the social sciences as well. With these reservations about the existence of a distinct object of study in even the purest of the pure sciences, claims of objectivity are weakened. There may be no object as such. However, objectivity in social research could not be grounded on the objectivity of physics and chemistry even if such objectivity were possible since the units which comprise social reality are far more complex, far more interdependent and far more competent to affect their surroundings through sentient activity than are photons, quarks, charms, colors, leptons, muons, ups, downs, tops, bottoms, heavy or light 4th generation neutrinos if they exist. If the particles which make up the physical world are not ontologically, separate objects, the whole notion of discrete objects which grounds the methodology of science and after which social science is modelled, calls into question whether scientists can separate themselves as persons from the roles, societies and other objects of study or from their larger historical and sociological field. Can claims of objectivity be sustained if, in fact, the scientist is shaped and shapes the world in which the knowledge process is located? At the same time, it becomes questionable whether any system or sub-system may be isolated from the whole for study; whether independent or dependent variables can be identified as distinct parts of a distinguishable system. In linear prediction models, the question becomes 'what will be the real effects of the unexplained variance?' given feedback, will this 'error' term contribute to a nonlinear transformation in the nature of solutions to the system? For physicists, the epistemological adequacy of the truth process also centers around indeterminacy; the inability of physicists to know fully and thus predict precisely, the behavior of particle/waves. One can ask from what sources does the inability of physicists to achieve absolute truth about the behavior of wave/particles arise. There are four general explanations for the inability of science to determine, precisely, the behavior of such wave/particles. First, for many in modern physics, indeterminacy is said to arise from the ignorance of the scientist about all the variables at play. In principle, all such variables can be measured at the same time and therefore, in principle, precise prediction is possible. In a letter to a colleague, Einstein put it thusly: The great initial success of quantum physics does not convert me to believe in that fundamental game of dice...I am absolutely convinced that one will eventually arrive at a theory in which the objects connected by laws are not probabilities but conceived facts. With perfect knowledge of all existing variables, one could predict, perfectly, the end state of a particle. For Einstein as for most sociologists today, a fact is possible. In this explanation of the source of undetermined facticity it is from ignorance rather than from nature whence comes indeterminacy. Chaos theory suggests otherwise. A second view, that of the observer inadequacy, is a bit more subtle. This view holds that nature is a seamless totality and that selection of only part of it to study necessarily results in partial knowledge. If we want to know how a particle or a system will behave, we must expand our research design to measure everything; to record more and more of reality until we have it all on paper. The interconnectedness of the universe extends to include the observer and thus, we must measure the effect produced by measurement. In principle, certainty is possible given a research design adequate to cover the cosmos and, as well, include itself. A third explanation called, generically, the Heisenberg effect, explains uncertainty as a result of the experimental activity of the researcher. Nils Bohr explained the Heisenberg effect by saying that when we study an electron or any other particle, we bombard it with a quantum of light which makes it behave differently than it normally does when not studied. There is, still, an objective world that behaves coherently but we introduce a new coherency, a new result when we study the world; an end-state that we, being part of the field in which the electron is studied, help determine. For Bohr, the result of research is a stable fact but one has no way of knowing what fact would have emerged had not the quantum of light been introduced at that moment into the field under study. In the Heisenberg principle of indeterminacy, it is intrinsic that objectivity is impossible since the researcher "...forces one of the many existing potentialities into being, into actuality." As Heisenberg put it, the transition from the possible to the actual takes place during the act of observation. The event studied actually occurs and it occurs as measured but it would have occurred differently or not at all had it not been studied. We can never be certain how the world would have worked had we not chosen this potentiality to measure and thus to create. In the views above, that of the observer intruding to produce effects, that of the ignorance and inadequacy of the research act as well as that of observer inability to measure everything, perfect knowledge is not possible but there is still a stable cosmos that exists out there; that is linear and coherent even if no knowledge process exists or could exist that describes it fully. In a sense, the quotients of knowledge and predictability are inevitably lower than the quotient of actually existing order in physical and social systems. A fourth view, from chaos theory, says that nature is, ontologically, unknowable. When in a chaotic modality, the path of any given event is non-linear, hence unpredictable, unknowable. This understanding is developed at length in the research reported by Gleick and reviewed in Part I of this article. The behavior of a chaotic system in near-to-stable equilibrium describes a trajectory in a pattern called a 'strange attractor.' The pattern is fairly stable, the path of the system is generally, but not precisely, predictable. However, when the periods of the system bifurcate beyond the 4th bifurcation, then the bifurcations cascade, that is, periods enter into completely unpredictable, unpatterned behavior. This cascade of bifurcations spell the end of whatever degree of facticity one might have safely specified in describing the behavior of a system. This world view grounds a post-modern social philosophy which transcends the closed, coherent, mechanical view of social and physical reality to include ceaseless variation in the careers of all events, produces the surprise of discontinuity as well as the transformations found in dialectic models of causality. This chaotic ontology should not be seen as hostile to the human project, for it is doubtful whether any living system could survive without it. All of these views taken individually, have merit. Taken together they bring objectivity into question. Intersubjectivity at all levels of physical and social dynamics is given credibility. Post-modern physics does not, and can not speak for post-modern social phenomena. The dynamics are different; the units of social organization can think, can intend, can refuse to comply to the laws of nature while atoms and stars must follow the mechanics and thermodynamics of their kind. Post-modern physics can, however, discredit and disenfranchise the hegemony of objectivity as a grounding assumption in social research. Without the cachet of the hard sciences to justify objectivity, theoretic room for reflecting upon the relationship between observer and observed can be found. In addition to the difficulty with which social scientists have in adopting the putative objective character of the ontological entities from physical science, there are also problems of conceptualization and utilization which subvert claims of objectivity. Let us think about the fractal nature of concepts with which we slice up reality in order to study it. From the very act of thinking about nature and society to the selection of concepts with which to grasp their features to the choice of research topics to the adoption and integration of findings, every scientist works within a socio-cultural formation. Those who do research on weather would have a much richer inventory of concepts with which to analyze solid state H2O were they to work out of the conceptual richness of Eskimo culture. Those who research physics would have a very different set of concepts with which to grasp physical reality were they to speak Navajo. The space in between concepts of snow or molecules or citizens or Black children takes discrete intervals in modern science and modern sociology. If a meteorologist were Innuit, s/he would design research to examine the dynamics of some 20 different kinds of snow. If a meteorologist were European, s/he would use five or six such concepts. An Innuit meteorologist would be horrified at the ways in which European meteorologists collapse categories. In order to study the 'real' climate, the Innuit would insist that the conceptual tools of the European be junked and those of the Innuit be adopted. Just as we disaggregate data to ascertain offsetting trends, such a meteorologist would insist that the concept of snow be disaggregated, fragmented. In chaos studies, fractal concepts are possible. Cantor dust, Sierpienski carpets, Koch curves and Mandelbrot sets have fractal dimensions. In postmodern sociology, the integral concepts of social research have to give way to fractal concepts which intersect topologically and interactively rather than being pure independent or intervening or dependent variables. In the case of the Afro-American children above, if the concept of race is seen to be a biological fact, the researcher has serious problems. She or he must disaggregate the concept. If there are 100 billion four-part terms in the DNA molecules of 23 chromosomes of the human species and if 99 billion 999 million 990 thousand such terms are identical as between those conceptualized as Anglo and those conceptualized by the social scientists as Afro-American, then it is appropriate to ask about the boundaries of the concept...does one use the genes for pigmentation, muscle articulation, cross section of hair, attachment of ear lobes to skull or what? If the genetic distribution is worth anything at all, its worth is registered in fractals rather than integers. More than that, is the distribution of all relevant genes which make up an individual person the same for all persons conceptualized as Anglos or Afro-Americans? The more likely case is that in any given population of 250 million people, the distribution of genes takes such a wide variety of combinations that one is using one's own subjective understanding in making a call about whether each person is white or black, yellow or brown, black or yellow, yellow or white. Subjective understanding of a concept is not shaped by the ontological features of the research object; it is shaped by the socio- cultural complex in which one lives and learns. The categories we have become comfortable using and relating actually show infinite detail, self-similarity and difference, both within and between. Categorization, while perhaps hinted at in nature, is ultimately human activity, fraught with subjective vagrancy and imperfection. If such conceptualization of membership in race, or gender, or social class or ethnicity has variable validity, then the research based upon putative membership is unreliable; that is unless, one takes the position that such 'scientific' work is part of the process by which social status categories are created, called race, and used to include or exclude people from jobs, housing, health care, compassion or other similar constructs. The term used to refer to such a construct is racism; not race, while the process used to generate such concepts is better called symbolic interaction than scientific endeavor. Science is, then, part of the reality-creating process. Postmodern sociology takes the position that all social research operationalism is, in an important sense, more poetics than empirics. Since our concepts are buried in the long history of our language and our interest is in surviving an often hostile world, those concepts are just one set with which sociologists could slice up social reality and make visible some of its workings. The essence of poetics is that it uses an analogous set of concepts from one behavioral domain to explore and to explain another domain of activity. Modern sociology uses the same poetics in its research categories. Thus the language of war is used to make clear the dynamics of politics; or the language of sport is used to garner insight into the dynamics of sexual encounters just as the language and dynamics of theatre are helpful to verbalize the dynamics of the marketplace. In sociology, the languages of Southern Europe are used as a poetics with which to operationalize social phenomena. As does the medical system, we use Latin, Sanskrit and Greek to create the dramaturgical impression of objectivity; of the correspondence of concept to empiric reality. Everywhere Greek and Latin combining forms are used to discuss social dynamics as if basic Anglo-saxon, Swahili, Ainu or Hopi terminology were, somehow, less scientific. There are many more linguistic practices that serve to create a false impression of neutrality; of the correspondence between the ontological fact and the epistemological construct. Putting a statement into the passive form instead of an active voice helps create the impression of eternality and objectivity. The use of dry and dusty language styles with which to report horrible things or delightful events gives a false impression of impartiality. The use of recipes and formulae in reporting research makes it appear that one has transcended one's own creativity and intentionality. We cannot think without concepts and we must either use the concepts given to us over our social history or we must make up new concepts. If we make up concepts, we have to endow them with meaning. The endowment of meaning arises from our location in the social order and from our cultural heritage in the anthropological order. The endowment of meaning arises from the web of group relationships we sustain and the stability of terminology we learn to respect in the socialization process. Out of these relationships and heritages come the range of desires which impel our quest for knowledge and concept; security, status, service, or whatever the culture values. What is missing in modern sociology is the understanding that it is inevitable that epistemology and ontology will, whatever linguistic system we use, collapse into each other. The very choice of terms; the very selection of topics, the very use of results all enter back into the ontological base to shift it, to move it, to shape it or to defeat it. The respectable thing to do is to accept the interconnection between epistemology and ontology and, thus, accept our moral responsibility for the world we shape and misshape. Parables, metaphors, similes, and allusions all enrich and extend the knowledge process. In the denial of such borrowings and such transfers, the knowledge process is mystified and occluded. In that denial, the dynamics of the world we overlay upon empiric reality are denied and thus we deny our own agency. The most bizarre of such alienated uses of language is, of course, the use of numbers to benumb the richness and complexity of social life. Once again, such a use of concepts from one domain to another is often helpful but denial of the transfer always alienative. Numbering systems can parallel the richness of social life in some rough and imprecise way but in the confounding of social dynamics with the transformations of numbers in equations and formulae lay much mischief. Quantification is, itself, just another poetic into which the language of life may be fitted. When the poetics of mathematics are confused with empirics of actuality, a major political prolapse occurs which gives a false sense of objectivity. Objective science becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy in which the subjective capacity of both researcher and researched is minimized and thus, alienated from both. To be fully human is to be fully involved in the creation of the social life world in which one must live out one's days. To be fully human is to accept moral responsibility for the world one helps create. If modern sociology and its claims of objectivity are insupportable, the task of some postmodern sociologists is to frame a sociology that is value-full. By value-full, it is simply meant that the researcher acknowledges the value agenda from which concepts are selected and research is done. We may not share the same set of values in every sociological enterprize; indeed it would be most surprising were that the case, however, in the postmodern epoch, sociology must face up to its partisan and its creative nature. The attempt to hold on to modernist assumptions, and to organize social research as if its findings were universal in time and space means that such social scientists who use them are engaged in an effort to create a social life world in which such assumptions are valid--rather than merely to report upon it. Any research effort, in its wide-spread reach and in its most profound depths, which helps develop theory that describes a fixed, linear, coherent set of social laws transforms modern sociology into a political tool by which the managerial needs of its sponsors, the legitimacy needs of its home society, the preferences of its leading figures comprise the agenda of sociology. This agenda bespeaks a political goal not a quest for objective truth. In such an enterprize, knowledge and science are harnessed to the ideological needs of an era. Post-modern sociologies offer alternative ways to harness the scientific process; some hostile to the human condition, some more supportive. What these very different sociologies have in common is that they assume the infinite variety of social forms as end-states of social processes. They do not assume the closed, stratified, unilateral evolution of society toward pure form nor do they assume the functional necessity of any given set of social structures for that pure form. They do not privilege a given social form as natural across all societies. They do not label alternative social life forms as deviant, primitive, disorganized or degenerate. Post-modern sociology recognizes the political character of social theory. I have been reading from a paper entitled, "Chaos Theory and the Knowledge Process: Explorations in Postmodern Methodolgy" by T.R. Young and James Yarbrough. The complete text of this paper including references can be found on the internet by doing a gopher search on the title. You are listening to CKDU 97.5 FM, broadcasting from Halifax. Next is the high-life and jump-up sounds of the African Diary. This has been Science Friction. Thank you for listening.