Chaos As Social Order

otherwise intractable to rigorous scientific examination.  However, the success of multiple research efforts in the mathematical, physical, life, and social sciences in identifying various kinds of chaotic dynamics suggests that chaos should be grouped not with metaphors but with known types of order such as linear deterministic, stochastic, and random.

            This grouping emphasizes that I use chaos as a theory not as a model (Harvey and Reed 309).  My use of chaos is therefore theoretic and not semantic (Richards 98).  This grouping also does not deny that the bulk of existing research has regarded chaos as an outcome of changes in parameters of deterministic systems.  Chaos is usually viewed as deterministic chaos.  It affirms, additionally, the discovery of chaotic dynamics in social science data (Kiel and Elliot) where the social situations generating the data cannot be reduced to linear deterministic principles or equations.  From this affirmation seems to flow the possibility that chaos is a kind of order which is not strictly dependent on deterministic systems for its existence.  Indeed, as a type of order, chaos may be the first clear, non-reductionist link between certain specific conditions in numeric and physical systems, such as phase transitions, and a pervasive, spontaneous quality of social reality.  Rather than a fad or a misplaced metaphor, chaos may be a small window into a new and larger way of understanding human life which includes determinism, stochasticity, and randomness.

            Grouping chaos with known types of order frames chaos as a comprehensible form of order rather than as a metaphor for some incomprehensible condition.  Besides being a more useful alignment,

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