New Thinking in Complexity for the Social Sciences and Humanities: A Generative, Transdisciplinary Approach

✍ Scribed by Ton Jörg (auth.)

• Publisher: Springer Netherlands
• Year: 2011
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 334
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This book focuses on the development of new thinking in complexity and on the tools needed for this new thinking, i.e. the development of a new language for complexity. This new language is very much about how a nonlinear complex reality is part of real-world complexity. We can start thinking in complexity about the complex topics of our social sciences and humanities by making use of this new language. With the new tools and the new language, it will be possible to deal with the complexity of real-world complexity and to show the promise of harnessing complexity, by turning complexity into effective and advantageous complexity for our social sciences and humanities. It is the very potential of complexity as self-potentiating which makes complexity so beneficial for viewing and doing social sciences. The new tools and the new thinking in complexity may be considered to be the warp and woof of a new science of complexity.

✦ Table of Contents

Front Matter....Pages i-xii
Mission of the Book....Pages 1-9
Introduction....Pages 11-15
The Crisis in the Social Sciences....Pages 17-41
Giving Birth to a New Science – Setting the Agenda....Pages 43-51
A New Agenda for the Social Sciences....Pages 53-68
On Becoming Reflective About Our Viewing and Doing Science....Pages 69-84
The Reality of Reality....Pages 85-114
New Ways of Knowing About the Complexity of Reality: The Epistemological Problem....Pages 115-136
An Introduction to the Chaps. 10–12....Pages 137-146
Rethinking Interaction....Pages 147-154
Rethinking Causality....Pages 155-177
Rethinking the Unit of Study....Pages 179-196
The Complexity of Complexity....Pages 197-206
The Complexity of Human Interaction....Pages 207-235
Summary and Conclusions....Pages 237-265
Back Matter....Pages 267-321

✦ Subjects

Methodology of the Social Sciences;Complexity;Interdisciplinary Studies