These are terms whose significance is often equated, leading to a fatal error that gives rise to many others (such as the “Great Mistake” of delegating carte blanche to technology in educational processes), whereas complicated systems, which are artificial, are completely different from complex systems, which are living, unpredictable, uncontrollable, interdependent, interactive, emergent, and self-organizing systems.
Published in Chapter:
Anatomies and Dynamics of the Society-Mechanism: Among Myths of Simplification, Facilitation, and Disintermediation
Piero Dominici (CHAOS International Research and Education Programme, University of Perugia, Italy)
Copyright: © 2024
|Pages: 32
DOI: 10.4018/979-8-3693-2125-6.ch001
Abstract
It was post-modernity that first told us that facts were now to be considered interpretations, whereupon the value of theorization diminished to the point where theories became little more than opinions. As a reaction, the reductionisms and determinisms that had previously been dismantled by a novel, non-Newtonian perspective returned as a “tyranny of concreteness,” foreshadowing tomorrow's post-normality. So, what then is “normality”? Human societies have always been wrapped in chaos, complexity, and contradictions: this is normal for all living beings and for all living systems. A volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) world, therefore, has always existed, and as such is perfectly normal and natural. Therefore, a science based on “post normality” should take into account that normality itself implicates unpredictability, uncertainty, and the impossibility of controlling or managing complexity, including the unexpected events called “black swans,” which are simply intrinsic features of the complex adaptive systems we inhabit.