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***** To join INSNA, visit http://www.insna.org ***** I'm convinced that a lot of innovative ideas emerge at the borderline between fields. "Complex network theory" seems to have an understanding that it belongs to complexity theory as an interdisciplinary field rather than to physics although at the same time it forms a strand inside of statistical physics. A lot of claims have been made around universality of laws and for me the question to ask is why this seems to be so important and attractive? By the way - as Moses explained - this is not new, cybernetics and self-organization theories had the same attitude and have been quite successfully traveling around many different disciplines. I think that claims of universality can open up different perspectives in fields. To give an example, if some social networks are scale-free or small worlds what does this mean in terms of content? If it means that one has to look to the mechanisms from which these network topologies are build, what the formal law of preferential attachment means in terms of the social process constituting links in networks. I think that such a play around generalizations on a formal level and re-specification on a concrete level can be a source for new questions also for the social mechanisms behind networks. (see http://www.ascusc.org/jcmc/vol8/issue4/scharnhorst.html ) And sometimes the claim of a "law" as power law distributions can provoke to ask for deviations (see Loet Leydesdorffs remark). By the way among the many network projects recently a project was funded in Europe called "Critical events in evolving networks - CREEN" (www.creen.org web site is in the making, and for a short information http://www.niwi.knaw.nl/en/nerdi2/projects/creen/ ) The project combines social scientists and information scientists studying communication networks, computer scientists developing graph algorithms and visualization and physicists modeling dynamics on/of networks. Andrea Dr. Andrea Scharnhorst NERDI Netherlands Institute for Scientific Information Services (NIWI) KNAW Joan Muyskenweg 25 Postbus 95110 1090 HC Amsterdam The Netherlands Tel: +20 4628 670 www.nerdi.knaw.nl www.wiserweb.org >>> "Carter T. Butts" <[log in to unmask]> 3-2-2005 12:36:38 >>> ***** To join INSNA, visit http://www.insna.org ***** Bettina Hoser wrote: > But about the general laws: physicists have a very long tradition of > finding laws in nature that did not look as though they have anything > in common. Later research found they had thouhg! So maybe it would be > a very good idea to let the physisicst look for general laws, while > the sociologists use the methods to gain mor insight into the > sociological questions. Hmm. But, indeed, there is no reason that sociologists (or anyone else) cannot find general laws, assuming such laws are there to be found. I think that the real question here is not one of physicists vs. sociologists, or lawfulness vs. unpredictability. The question is one of good science vs. bad science: does the particular theory being proposed in this case actually predict the phenomena for which the theory allegedly holds? Not having read the original piece, I cannot speak to that -- the short description of the result posted earlier _sounds_ inconsistent with known observations, but this might be due to miscommunication. (It would seem productive to get a better handle on what is being claimed, prior to having a debate over the truth or falsity of those claims.) Abstract debates over the applicability of the theories/methods of physics (or biology, computer science, etc.) to social science are amusing, but I'm not aware that anything useful has ever come of them. Talk is cheap: if a genuine advance can result from cross-application of ideas, then the way to prove it is to actually make the advance. This has happened before (e.g., the work of Rashevsky's group circa 1950, or the influence of Besag's biostatistical work on modern ERG models), and it will doubtless happen again. Nevertheless, I think the field is better served by a consideration of specific proposals than by sweeping arguments for/against the importation of physical or other ideas. (I'm surprised, in this regard, that no one here has pointed out that ERG/p* models are essentially thermodynamic in character. Recognizing this connection greatly facilitates the interpretation of some of the more unusual behaviors of these models, e.g., phase transitions and degeneracy. These issues are being explored by a number of people on this list, at least some of whom are explicitly incorporating statistical mechanical arguments/results into their work. Cross-fertilization works well in this case, because there is a strong substantive motivation for the modeling framework.) -Carter _____________________________________________________________________ SOCNET is a service of INSNA, the professional association for social network researchers (http://www.insna.org). To unsubscribe, send an email message to [log in to unmask] containing the line UNSUBSCRIBE SOCNET in the body of the message. _____________________________________________________________________ SOCNET is a service of INSNA, the professional association for social network researchers (http://www.insna.org). To unsubscribe, send an email message to [log in to unmask] containing the line UNSUBSCRIBE SOCNET in the body of the message.