Steve Smith wrote: > >We all once agreed on what the terms "phlogiston" and "aether" meant... and they were very useful in their time, but I think it has been well over a century since they have been used sincerely. What terms from Complexity may turn out to be like this? Emergence? Self Organized Criticality? Attractors? These all may be very useful terms to describe phenomena we don't understand and may help us to keep a handle on them until we *do* understad them, but I would contend that they are not yet useful for understanding the phenomena which they point at. > >
Though I am increasingly ambivalent on this point, the way I was trained as a scientist (and I believe to an even stronger extent, the way Nick was trained), would say that those concepts are useful exactly to the extent that they 'point at' a clear phenomena. Thus I am inherently suspicious of your claim that they a 'term can be useful, and yet we don't understand the phenomena.' My specific familiarity in B. F. Skinner's career amplifies this more general training: Skinner reports having seen improvements in his thinking, and his success as a researcher, as he eliminated cognitive terms from his vocabulary. From my personal experience this seems like a good strategy, and I think the field of psychology as a whole stopped using deeply confused words like 'memory' and were instead forced to label the phenomenon in question in some less ambiguous way. What ambivalence I have regarding those puritanical decrees, comes from witnessing people doing seemingly productive things with ambiguous terms. Either I am wrong about what is leads to productive science, or I am wrong that those people are being productive. Perhaps my underlying objection relates back to the discussion of mathematical thinking: My problem might not be that the terms are ambiguous, but that there seems to be no efforts (amongst these people) to disambiguate them. For example, a species is 'a collection of organisms capable of reproducing together.' While there ARE cases that reveal deep ambiguity about what is, or is not, a species in biology, every effort is made to eliminate such ambiguity from the vast majority of cases. This seems to me a virtuous development, and I suspect that the term 'species' is useful exactly to the extent that we understand the observed phenomena being referred to, and its boundary conditions. Eric
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