Structures, Diagrams, Rules, Together With Flows

When nosotros elevate to the construction of about complex entity, nosotros oftentimes intend to capture i of the next ideas: the parts to...

When nosotros elevate to the construction of about complex entity, nosotros oftentimes intend to capture i of the next ideas:

• the parts together with their arrangements
• the parts together with their interactions
• the time period of content -- information, money, value, ideas -- through a laid of interconnected parts

Clouds together with monads lack construction -- monads because they own got no internal parts, together with clouds because at that topographic point are non orderly relations amid the constituents (water droplets).

In each instance it is pregnant that at that topographic point is mostly a diagram that serves equally a at nowadays together with legible agency of capturing the claims nosotros desire to express. This appears to live on a deep fact close the stance of structure: structures own got factor parts that are arranged inwards pregnant relationships to each other, together with diagrams serve to correspond the analysis of purpose together with whole.

Here are about potent examples of the occupation the stance of construction together with associated diagrams.

1. Chomsky's Syntactic Structures --

Sentences are structures (ordered arrangements of syntactic particles), together with grammars are structures (sets of generative rules that dictate how the syntactic particles combine to cast sentences).

2. Levi-Strauss's The Elementary Structures of Kinship --

Levi-Strauss's ideas likewise tin live on represented equally diagrams of synchronic relations amid individuals inwards a hamlet or social setting, together with Levi-Strauss is also interested inwards the rules that generate these arrangements, the rules of menage unit of measurement formation together with kinship.

3. Wassily Leontief's matrix of input-output relations inwards a marketplace economic scheme inwards Input-Output Economics --

4. Castell's model of the The Rise of the Network Society --

5. Freud's representation of the construction of the human heed inwards The Ego together with the Id --

6. Marx's theory of the class construction of capitalist lodge inwards Capital: Volume 1: Influenza A virus subtype H5N1 Critique of Political Economy. 

7. G. William Skinner's analysis of the core-periphery construction of the lower Yangzi region.

These examples are largely synchronic representations of stable arrangements of parts inside wholes. There are 2 associated ideas that postulate to live on incorporated equally well. One is the stance of time period or transmission across the nodes of a given structure. Income flows from proletarians to the bourgeois class; products of i sector time period through multiple other sectors earlier emerging equally a finished good; ideas together with emotions time period from subconscious to witting levels of the mind. Influenza A virus subtype H5N1 static diagram tin correspond a time period amid elements of the structure, represented yesteryear directional arrows equally represented inwards Charles Minard's famous nineteenth century maps.

Influenza A virus subtype H5N1 instant characteristic of complex wholes is the fact of change. Structures are non fixed inwards time; rather, they sometimes undergo processes of change, evolution, or abrupt alteration. Influenza A virus subtype H5N1 static diagram doesn't move good to correspond the dynamics of change. But this is an unimportant characteristic of the printed page. We tin correspond a construction inwards a procedure of dynamic alter yesteryear introducing fourth dimension into the representation -- yesteryear using a simulation or animation that provides a serial of snapshots of the terra firma of the relationships amid the parts together with the changing characteristics of the parts themselves.

Here is a simulation yesteryear Burt Simon of the development of cooperative groups inwards extended contest amongst non-cooperative groups (link). The simulation succeeds inwards depicting the changing construction of this population of pocket-sized groups over time, from all groups possessing a high bulk of defectors to a large laid of groups that own got a bulk of cooperators.

So peradventure at that topographic point is a elementary heuristic nosotros tin convey to behaviour to the chore of interpreting claims close social structures: what is the diagram or animation that corresponds to the claim? If nosotros cannot render such a sketch, together with thus peradventure the claim is likewise indefinite to live on taken seriously.