Warren Weaver's "science and complexity" revisited

Rudolf Seising

pp. 55-87

in: Rudolf Seising, Veronica Sanz González (eds), Soft computing in humanities and social sciences, Berlin, Springer, 2012

Abstract

The mathematician Warren Weaver was an important science administrator during and after World War II. As the director of natural science of the Rockefeller Foundation he was significantly involved in changing the leading sciences from physics to life sciences. In his 1949 article "Science and Complexity" Weaver associates this change with the location of a "great middle region" of scientific problems of organized complexity" between the "problems of simplicity" that physical sciences are concerned with and the "problems of disorganized complexity" that can be solved by probability theory and statistics. Weaver stated that 'something more is needed than the mathematics of averages." To solve such problems he pinned his hope on the power of digital computers and on interdisciplinary collaborating "mixed teams". These quotations sound very similar to statements of Lotfi A. Zadeh's, when he founded his theory of "Fuzzy sets". In this contribution we consider the theory of Fuzzy Sets as an approach to solve Weaver's "problems of organized complexity".