Qualitative Complexity: Ecology, Cognitive Processes and the Re-Emergence of Structures in Post-Humanist Social Theory

by John Smith, Chris Jenks

Overview

Offering a critique of the humanist paradigm in contemporary social theory, Qualitative Complexity is the first comprehensive sociological analysis of complexity theory. Drawing from sources in sociology, philosophy, complexity theory, 'fuzzy logic', systems theory, cognitive science and evolutionary biology, John Smith and Chris Jenks present a new series of interdisciplinary perspectives on the sociology of complex, self-organizing structures.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781134327706
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	02/01/2006
Series:	International Library of Sociology
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	320
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

John Smith, Chris Jenks

Table of Contents

Part 1: The Interdisciplinary Field 1. Complexity Theory: A Positioning Paper 2. From Descartes’ Conjecture to Kant’s Subject and the Computo 3. Autopoiesis in Cognitive Biology 4. Emergentism, Evolutionary Psychology and Culture 5. Prigogine’s Thermodynamics, Ontology and Sociology Part 2: Critical Developments 6. Modernism and Determinism: Linear Expectations and Qualitative Complexity Analyses 7. Complexity Theory as a Critique of Postmodernism 8. Cognition and the Renewal of Systems Theory: Redundant Idioms and Disputed Positions 9. The Evolution of Intelligence, Consciousness and Language: Implications for Social Theory 10. Complexity, Language and Culture: Social Systems in Qualitative, i.e. not Formal Terms Part 3: The Fields of Complex Analysis: Contemporary Complexity Theory 11. The Ethics of Pragmatism: Politics and Post-Structuralism in Transition after the Complexity Turn 12. The Topology of Complexity 13. Re-Interpreting Global Complexity as an Ontology: Human Ecology