Delta Theory and Other Sciences: Relationships and Opportunities

Many social scientists are wary of drawing on physical science once again for visions of theory and method. On the other hand, had we paid more attention to their science’s development rather than on a fading Newtonian snapshot, all might have profited. My own use of physical science referents is intended as analogue, to allow a visual-conceptual alternative that illuminates certain key features of our domain. I do not suggest that we have – and I am agnostic as to whether we will have – any mathematical understanding equivalent to physical forces and their interplay. Biological rather than physical science models is a more relevant direct source of useful concepts and methods of inquiry.

Issues of Causation

Certainly lessons from the new physics, astronomy, and biology should give us comfort by their more complex view of causation. We have been well prepared for such a change by those in our own traditions, such as John Dewey, George Herbert Mead, and the symbolic interactionists, who decades ago held that causation is a process, and that in the long flow of events, variables and conditions alter their functions so that cause becomes outcome, and outcome cause. This view is indispensable to understanding a developmental process, and clearly influence and change is such.