Chaos As Social Order

substantial rather than cosmetic discontinuities in social process and structure.  Strongly divergent practices in turn form smaller attractors within the larger attractor of the metropolis.  Patterns of homeness and homelessness would then be expected to show a variety of trajectories of practice, such as correlations between incidence of homelessness and existence of soup kitchens, availability of free shelter, locking of house doors, fencing of land, discriminatory zoning, ownership of small arms, or ownership of guard dogs.  On these social sites, the dying out of a transient can be the death of a person, as the dying out of a practice can be the death of a practitioner.  But given that a transient is a trajectory that does not span the attractor long enough or far enough to repeat, then how long or far is enough?  What causes one practice to persist and another to desist?

Prediction and Social Change

            Stating this question in terms of causation hastens the appearance of the issue of prediction which naturally arises in any attempt to apply to social issues a theory grounded and elaborated in numeric and physical experiments.  It is a fact of increasing significance for all branches of science that most of the systems we encounter are non-linear.  The non-linearity of social order may be understood as the interpenetration of contexts discussed in connection with the research of Ott and Sommerer.  This characteristic of interpenetration bears directly and profoundly on the possibility of using chaos theory mathematically to describe social science data.

            Social science data are derived from social phenomena and social phenomena are contextual.  If contexts interpenetrate,

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