ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on the Tower of Babel and also on the enthusiasm surrounding the advent of chaos and related theories. In psychology, equilibrium also found a linguistic home. In fact, we have a significant heritage of the term in our own social science disciplines, which complicates the picture for us in the modern study of chaos in the social sciences. Equilibrium-based conceptions played a key role in the psychologies of Herbart, Lotke, Freud, Lewin, and Parsons. We all have different intellectual and theoretical heritages from where we entered into chaos theory. We could keep going on and on with each new term being used in nonlinear systems sciences as to how different people mean different things by it. In fact, there is a partial list of the terms that require our immediate semantic attention: complexity, complex, adaptive system, attractor, strange attractor, information, energy, entropy, noise, organization, self-organization, linear, nonlinear.