Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

Enactivism
CHAPTER 56
Complexity Science, Ecology, and
Enactivism
BRENT DAVIS AND DENNIS SUMARA
COMPLEXITY SCIENCE: THE STUDY OF EMERGENT AND STRUCTURE
DETERMINED SYSTEMS
Complexity science is a nascent field of study that defines itself more in terms of what
it investigates than how it investigates. It focuses on the question of how relatively simple
components in a system can come together into more sophisticated, more capable unities—and
how, in turn, those grander unities affect the actions and characters of their components. One
intertwined set of examples includes cells that cohere into organs that cohere into bodies that
cohere into social groupings that cohere into societies.
Complexity science first arose in the confluence of very diverse fields, many of which had begun
to appear in the physical sciences in the mid–twentieth century, including cybernetics, systems
theory, artificial intelligence, and nonlinear dynamics. More recently, complexity theories have
come to be taken up and developed in the social sciences in many and various ways, ranging from
the highly technical, philosophical, narrative, and more recently the applied. In fact, interest in
what are now described as complex phenomena pre-date the emergence of complexity science by
more than a century. Complex sensibilities were well represented in Charles Darwin’s studies of
the intertwined evolutions of species, in Frederich Engel’s discussions of social collectives, and
in Jane Jacobs’ characterization of living (and dying) cities. Many dozens of examples could be
cited, in both the physical and the social sciences.
There are some important qualities that are common to all complex forms. Most important,
complex phenomena are emergent: they self-organize. Coherent collective behaviors and characters
emerge in the activities and interactivities of individual agents. Such self-organized forms
can spontaneously arise and evolve without leaders, goals, or plans. This quality of transcendent
collectivity—of being “more than the some of the parts”—is useful for drawing a further distinction
between analytic science and complexity science. Complexity science does more than argue
for a new category of phenomena; it asserts that reductionist analytic methods are not sufficient to
understand such phenomena. Complexity scientists (or complexivists) contend that unpredictable
behaviors and new laws arise as more complex systems emerge, and those systems must thus