Chaos Theory

To assess whether chaos theory is a good theory one must first do two things - define chaos theory itself and then define what one means in general as a good theory. The initial proposition is the easier of the two, and so is taken up first in this paper.

Chaos theory is in fact a broader-ranging set of ideas than is usually described by the title "theory", for it puts forth not a proposition about a particular and specific set of events (such as in the case in something like the theory of angular momentum) but instead makes a rather sweeping generalization about the way the natural - as well as perhaps also the social - world is put together. Chaos theory is in fact a sort of meta-theory, the basic ideas of which can be extracted and applied in a variety of situations. Some of these applications are fairly narrow and straightforward, such as attempts to predict possible interactions between global weather systems and local weather patterns or to create models for the way disruptions occur in a rising column of smoke. Others are substantially broader and even rather metaphorical, such as attempts to explain wide-ranging social changes.

In the most formal sense, chaos theory is the body of mathematical theory that is used to examine and explain the breakdown of ordered systems into chaotic ones - or into systems in which no single ordered system holds sway. (These chaotic systems may alter regroup to ordered systems; in fact, this is ooften the case if one is refe

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ry or practice and most probably at the level of theory. A corollary of the idea of replicability is the concept that theories must be falsifiable. In other words, if one researcher repeats an experiment precisely as someone else has done the work, then the results must be precisely the same. It should have already become clear that these criteria for the goodness of a theory are going to be problematic as far as the scholar engaged in social scientific research is concerned. Many social scientists have thought deeply and intelligently about how to produce rigorous, insightful social science, and yet it remains clear to those engaged in social science research that social and cultural variables produce universes that are so complex that it is difficult to discern what exactly (for example) the idea of parsimony might mean. The social order is replete with variables that are both so fluid and so complex that they can never be exactly defined. And social situations are both so intricate and so deeply affected by unique historical events that any conclusions drawn from theories about them can never be re-tested and replicated. So much for theory. Or rather, social scientists might well be inclined to throw out the whole idea of the

Category: Psychology - C