Chaos As Social Order

then social science phenomena have always already begun, in multiple non-trivial senses, before they are observed, recorded, and quantified in any particular social science sample.  The starting and ending periods of observations are dictated to the social scientist by the available data.  Assumptions can be made about how a particular person or situation got to where it is when observed, but those assumptions cannot give us precise, unique, quantitative conditions.  Since this situation obtains throughout the analysis of social science data, it is impossible to determine initial conditions of such phenomena with the uniqueness and precision necessary to use the established mathematical measures of chaos, such as spectral analysis, Lyapunov exponents, autocorrelation functions, power law distributions, and others (Kiel and Elliot 8-10, 51, 53).  If these calculations are not possible then it is impossible to assert with mathematical certainty and clarity that chaos exists in any particular set of social science data.

            Besides this limitation on the calculability of chaos measures, chaos theory has one other feature which strongly limits its quantitative applicability to social science data:  homogeneity.

            Contained perturbed fluids, amplified electrical charges, atmospheric gases, and chemicals in liquid mixtures all display a homogeneity which is precisely amenable to mathematical description but which is found nowhere in social life.  Mathematical manipulations, such as the construction of the Mandelbrot set and the generation of the Feigenbaum number, also have homogeneity as variations of the symbol system of mathematics.  However, “very rarely, if ever, are social systems

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