Chaos As Social Order

it competition between a chief and a sub-chief over who was the best provider for the group?  Suppose that the latter was taken as the initial condition that accounted for the group settling in a particular cave.  In what sense, then, was that the initial condition?  Does calling it an “initial condition” imply that it had no history?  Isn’t it possible that the chief allowed the sub-chief to select that particular cave at that particular time because the chief had already decided to retire from active leadership, or because the sub-chief had promised certain material rewards?  In either case, there is another condition behind, before, prior to, or folded into the initial one.  Indeed, how is it possible to give any kind of precise meaning to the term “initial” in such a situation?

            There is a pervasive silence in the literature on the fundamental question of how to adequately and effectively translate the notion of initial conditions from physical and numeric experiments to social science observation, sampling, and description.  The appearance of chaos in mathematical simulations using quantitative social science data must therefore be viewed with extreme caution.  Certainly dynamics with chaotic characteristics can be generated from many different kinds of quantified social science data.  But is the chaos an artifact of the simulation or is it an explanation of the lived reality of social life from which the quantitative data are extracted?

            This kind of consideration has led Harvey and Reed to assert the following rule as their number one caveat about applying chaos theory to social science:

            1.  Predictive, statistical, and iconological modes of

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37