Excerpt from the Dao of Complexity
How can we explore the complex world? If the world is complex, then ‘knowing’ that world is best approached with methods that reflect that complexity and capture its contextual, path-dependent, patterned nature. As that complex world is not reducible to ‘things connected by forces’, it cannot in general be captured through objective, rational means.
To aim to make sense of complex situations requires methods that allow for multiple perspectives and draw on our intuition and instinct as well as our rational faculties. Methods must allow for paradox and must allow for situations to shift over time and for new features to emerge. We also cannot assume we are passive observers with no impact on the situations that we are seeking to explore.
Engaging holistically and through narrative – not just relying on hard data and analysis – thus become appropriate ‘scientific’ methods when aiming to know the processual complex world. To use academic language, the epistemology has to mirror the ontology. It is not scientific to analyse a situation as if it operates like a machine when it does not. Methods need more subtlety and need to engage with a sometimes poetic and intuitive sense of what is happening. We are sometimes ‘glimpsing through a glass darkly’ things that are not objectively existent.
