ABSTRACT
The rise of modern chaos theory opens the prospect of an immense new stage of growth and challenge for psychology as well as all the other social sciences. In the fascinating mating of chaos theory with psychology now underway, however, a problem of critical importance for both parties emerges. It comes from the fact that the concepts and mindset for traditional chaos theory arise from the thinking of natural scientists and mathematicians accustomed to working with data at mainly prehuman levels of evolution. Widely popularized is the view that chaos theory shows us that prediction of the future is impossible. A direct contradiction of the chaos theoretical view of the limits for predictability shows up as early as 1930 in leading behaviorist theorist Clark Hull's careful analysis of prediction in stimulus-response (S-R) theory terms.
