Reacting to Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science

M uch media attention has been directed to the May 2002 release of Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science. What has not been particularly highlighted is that this book is the latest shot in an ongoing dispute between the hard physical sciences and the " soft " social sciences such as sociology, anthropology, and other observation-based studies of human affairs. Wolfram (2002: 9) writes: One will often have a much better chance of capturing fundamental mechanisms for phenomena in the social sciences by using instead the new kind of science that I develop in this book based on simple programs … Indeed the new intuition that emerges from this book may well almost immediately explain phenomena that in the past have seemed quite mysterious. He goes on to suggest that " most of the core processes needed for general human-like thinking will be able to be implemented with simple rules … once one has an explicit system that successfully emulates human thinking " (Wolfram, 2002: 629–30). He continues: " no doubt as a practical matter this could be done … by large scale recording of experiences of actual humans " (Wolfram, 2002: 630).