Chaos of Disciplines (review)

Ali Bulent Cambel

From: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine
Volume 47, Number 2, Spring 2004
pp. 303-305 | 10.1353/pbm.2004.0021

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Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 47.2 (2004) 303-305

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Chaos of Disciplines. By Andrew Abbott. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2001.
Pp. xvi + 259. $17 (paper).
This book is not for the fainthearted. It transcends disciplinary boundaries and
requires a background in sociology, as well as a willingness to explore the
applications of the concepts of dynamics to the social sciences. The examples
presented and the many references cited attest to the author's erudition.
Indeed, in his preface, Professor Abbott, Chairman of the Department of
Sociology at the University of Chicago, writes: "I have always been a little too
eclectic. Unable to make up mind if I wanted to be a scientist or humanist, I
learned what I could about both." I applaud him for setting such difficult goals.
Meeting them requires a paradoxical combination of intellectual promiscuity
and scholarly discipline.

The father of modern dynamics was the French polymath Jules Henri Poincar
(1854-1912), who showed that Newtonian mechanics doesn't provide a general
solution to the Earth, Moon, and Sun interplanetary systemthe three-body, or
more generally the n-body, problem. One offspring of such situations is found
in complex problems that involve chaos. Such problems can be represented by
the celebrated Feigenbaum bifurcation diagram, or by the corresponding
Mandelbrot set, which represents a fractal. Fractals, unlike configurations in
Euclidean geometry, have non-integer dimensions, and they are self-similar; for
example, a coastline is not a straight line, and hence its dimension [End Page
303] is between 1 and 2, more than a line, less than an area. Some physicians
apply such considerations in studying nonlinear body traces such as EKGs.
Applications may also be found in economics, although their usefulness in this
context has not been settled yet. In any case, chaos, fractals, and self-similarity
may be potential candidates for further research in the social sciences.

Abbott proposes to consider sociology from a dynamic viewpoint. Interest in

social issues goes back to the Greek philosophers, but it was the French
positivist philosopher Auguste Comte (1798-1857) who gave us the term
sociologie. He had in mind a hierarchy of the sciences where one would
proceed from the simple to the more complex, according to the sequence:
mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, and, at the top,
sociology. Of course, our knowledge has increased immensely since then, so
that Comte's ladder has spawned bifurcations at each rung and there are also
numerous hyphenated fields that we call interdisciplines. Sociology and the
social sciences have experienced a lot of dynamic evolution, namely change
with time and place, and it is quite natural therefore to apply some of the new
techniques to these disciplines. Frequently old problems are best solved with
new methods, and new problems with old methods.

The volume consists of seven chapters that are self-contained essays written
for the most part for different occasions. In this spirit the author has dedicated
each to a different individual. However, common threads run through them,
namely, the dynamic nature of the social sciences, the chaos of disciplines,
fractionization, and self-similarity. The first chapter presents the theoretical
foundations, while the second chapter demonstrates the utility of the fractal
model with reference to the concept of stress. Here the author applies his
theoretical arguments to empiricist sociology from 1965 to 1995, during which
period historical considerations became paramount in a variety of social
science disciplines. The author then addresses constructionist movements,
offering details of definitions, labeling theory and its death, the sociology of
science, and his views on constructionism.

The social sciences are the "hard sciences" because their structure is not
isolated but is impacted by the environment; in many cases we don't even
know what all of the influencing variables are. Further, because of their
dynamic nature, data are hard to come by. Indeed, the traditional manner of
graduate student research with its thesis, isolation of variables, etc., is at times
limiting in dealing with the broader issues. In the fifth chapter, the author
considers social science education in the United States and abroad.
Disciplinarity...