Collapse of Determinism

Neo-Environmental Determinism and Agrarian "Collapse" in Andean Prehistory

Introduction: neo-environmentalism in Andean archaeology In early anthropology, environmental determin-ism was used to explain race, human demography , material culture, cultural variation and cultural change. As anthropological interpretation evolved, simplistic reductionist thinking was replaced with more complex socio-cultural explanations. Despite these theoretical advances, environmental d...

Defining Determinism

The article puts forward a branching-style framework for the analysis of determinism and indeterminism of scientific theories, starting from the core idea that an indeterministic system is one whose present allows for more than one alternative possible future. We describe how a definition of determinism stated in terms of branching models supplements and improves current treatments of determini...

On Determinism

The notion of deterministic execution of concurrent systems has appeared in many guises throughout Edward A. Lee’s œuvre, but few really grasp how powerful, important, subtle, and flexible the concept really is. Determinism can be thought of as an abstraction boundary that delineates where control is passed from a system designer to the implementation. This paper surveys some of the many forms ...

Biological determinism.

Rhetorical Determinism

Economists included knowledge their models to improve their explanatory accuracy. A major step was to describe the production of knowledge as well as its exploitation as an internal part of economic models. Politicians prefer to talk about a new kind of economy so they can sustain the myth of progress. Rather than explain economies using a new model they try to leave economic history intact whi...