Context Changes Everything: How Constraints Create Coherence
From the influential author of Dynamics in Action, how the concepts of constraints provide a way to rethink relationships, opening the way to intentional, meaningful causation.

Grounding her work in the problem of causation, Alicia Juarrero challenges previously held beliefs that only forceful impacts are causes. Constraints, she claims, bring about effects as well, and they enable the emergence of coherence. In Context Changes Everything, Juarrero shows that coherence is induced by enabling constraints, not forceful causes, and that the resulting coherence is then maintained by constitutive constraints. Constitutive constraints, in turn, become governing constraints that regulate and modulate the way coherent entities behave. Using the tools of complexity science, she offers a rigorously scientific understanding of identity, hierarchy, and top-down causation, and in so doing, presents a new way of thinking about the natural world. 

Juarrero argues that personal identity, which has been thought to be conferred through internal traits (essential natures), is grounded in dynamic interdependencies that keep coherent structures whole. This challenges our ideas of identity, as well as the notion that stability means inflexible rigidity. On the contrary, stable entities are brittle and cannot persist. Complexity science, says Juarrero, can shape how we meet the world, how what emerges from our interactions finds coherence, and how humans can shape identities that are robust and resilient. This framework has significant implications for sociology, economics, political theory, business, and knowledge management, as well as psychology, religion, and theology. It points to a more expansive and synthetic philosophy about who we are and about the coherence of living and nonliving things alike.
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Context Changes Everything: How Constraints Create Coherence
From the influential author of Dynamics in Action, how the concepts of constraints provide a way to rethink relationships, opening the way to intentional, meaningful causation.

Grounding her work in the problem of causation, Alicia Juarrero challenges previously held beliefs that only forceful impacts are causes. Constraints, she claims, bring about effects as well, and they enable the emergence of coherence. In Context Changes Everything, Juarrero shows that coherence is induced by enabling constraints, not forceful causes, and that the resulting coherence is then maintained by constitutive constraints. Constitutive constraints, in turn, become governing constraints that regulate and modulate the way coherent entities behave. Using the tools of complexity science, she offers a rigorously scientific understanding of identity, hierarchy, and top-down causation, and in so doing, presents a new way of thinking about the natural world. 

Juarrero argues that personal identity, which has been thought to be conferred through internal traits (essential natures), is grounded in dynamic interdependencies that keep coherent structures whole. This challenges our ideas of identity, as well as the notion that stability means inflexible rigidity. On the contrary, stable entities are brittle and cannot persist. Complexity science, says Juarrero, can shape how we meet the world, how what emerges from our interactions finds coherence, and how humans can shape identities that are robust and resilient. This framework has significant implications for sociology, economics, political theory, business, and knowledge management, as well as psychology, religion, and theology. It points to a more expansive and synthetic philosophy about who we are and about the coherence of living and nonliving things alike.
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Context Changes Everything: How Constraints Create Coherence

Context Changes Everything: How Constraints Create Coherence

by Alicia Juarrero
Context Changes Everything: How Constraints Create Coherence

Context Changes Everything: How Constraints Create Coherence

by Alicia Juarrero

eBook

$31.99 

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Overview

From the influential author of Dynamics in Action, how the concepts of constraints provide a way to rethink relationships, opening the way to intentional, meaningful causation.

Grounding her work in the problem of causation, Alicia Juarrero challenges previously held beliefs that only forceful impacts are causes. Constraints, she claims, bring about effects as well, and they enable the emergence of coherence. In Context Changes Everything, Juarrero shows that coherence is induced by enabling constraints, not forceful causes, and that the resulting coherence is then maintained by constitutive constraints. Constitutive constraints, in turn, become governing constraints that regulate and modulate the way coherent entities behave. Using the tools of complexity science, she offers a rigorously scientific understanding of identity, hierarchy, and top-down causation, and in so doing, presents a new way of thinking about the natural world. 

Juarrero argues that personal identity, which has been thought to be conferred through internal traits (essential natures), is grounded in dynamic interdependencies that keep coherent structures whole. This challenges our ideas of identity, as well as the notion that stability means inflexible rigidity. On the contrary, stable entities are brittle and cannot persist. Complexity science, says Juarrero, can shape how we meet the world, how what emerges from our interactions finds coherence, and how humans can shape identities that are robust and resilient. This framework has significant implications for sociology, economics, political theory, business, and knowledge management, as well as psychology, religion, and theology. It points to a more expansive and synthetic philosophy about who we are and about the coherence of living and nonliving things alike.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780262374781
Publisher: MIT Press
Publication date: 06/20/2023
Sold by: Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format: eBook
Pages: 296
File size: 2 MB

About the Author

Alicia Juarrero is President and co-founder of VectorAnalytica, Inc., and a research associate at the University of Miami. She is the author of Dynamics in Action (MIT Press).

Table of Contents

I
1 What Went Wrong? The Backstory 3
2 The Path Forward 21
II 
3 Constraints: An Introduction 35
4 Context-Independent Constraints 49
5 Why Context Matters--An Interlude 59
6 Context-Dependent Constraints 67
7 Catalysts, Loops, and Closure 87
8 An Abundance of Constraints 103
9 Persistence--Delaying the Second Law 129
10 Sedimentation and Entrenchment 143
11 Many-to-One Transitions, Effective and Analog Control 155
12 Of Holons, Holarchy, Heterarchy, and Hierarchy 177
III
13 The Backstory, Today 197
14 Multiple Realization and Supervenience: A Philosophical Case Study about Constraints 211
15 Empirical Research on Delayed Response: Neuroscience Case Studies about Constraints 223
16 Concluding Remarks 233
Notes 239
References 247
Index 263

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Wholes and aggregates, context and history, causes and effects: these axes are at the heart of identity and mental causation, as Alicia Juarrero demonstrates in this illuminating book showing how constraints underlie possibility. Highly recommended.”
—George Ellis, Professor Emeritus of Applied Mathematics, University of Cape Town
 
“Systems thinking at its finest! Juarrero clearly shows how context-dependent constraints ‘change the go of things’ as informational causes in complex systems.”
—Kevin Mitchell, author of Free Agents: How Evolution Created the Power to Choose and Innate: How the Wiring of Our Brains Shapes Who We Are

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