What do you think?
Rate this book
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.
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.
282 pages, Kindle Edition
Published June 20, 2023
43 people are currently reading
238 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
December 8, 2023
What a massive disappointment. It is clear that with this book, Juarrero is attempting to take advantage of the recent hype in certain philosophical circles about the concepts of “context” and “constraints” without adding anything meaningful to the discussion. Though her previous book, “Dynamics in Action”, had a number of issues, in that text one could at least identify relatively coherent arguments for her claims. Here, the reader is faced with a repetitive, pseudo-poetic network of brute assertions that cannot even be said to obey an internal logic, with Juarrero constantly contradicting her previous assertions to suit her mood and the piecemeal goals of each chapter.
Though she claims to deliver a new metaphysical paradigm in which context is the central focus, Juarrero seems content to dispense with context whenever it serves her. For example, she consistently uses highly technical terms such as “dissipative system” and “order parameter” outside of the limited contexts in which they can be meaningfully defined; this metaphorical application of technical terminology would not be a problem as long as it remained metaphorical, but many times Juarrero seems to forget this and makes claims about her metaphorical targets/tenors which are only applicable to their sources/vehicles.
Each chapter introduces a menagerie of new entities into Juarrero’s ontology, with little indication of their utility or necessity and ambiguous delineations between these novel entities and those introduced earlier. These ambiguities are clearly purposeful, as they enable Juarrero to construct increasingly complicated word salad sentences which perfectly perform their duty: tricking passive and unaware readers into believing that something deep and important has just been revealed.
Interested readers are pointed to Lauren Ross’ 2020 paper for a thoughtful and pragmatic ontology of constraints:
http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/18504/
Additionally, the recent book by Moreno and Mossio offers a rigorous perspective on constraints and their concrete application to problems in biology:
http://mechanism.ucsd.edu/teaching/f1...
Though she claims to deliver a new metaphysical paradigm in which context is the central focus, Juarrero seems content to dispense with context whenever it serves her. For example, she consistently uses highly technical terms such as “dissipative system” and “order parameter” outside of the limited contexts in which they can be meaningfully defined; this metaphorical application of technical terminology would not be a problem as long as it remained metaphorical, but many times Juarrero seems to forget this and makes claims about her metaphorical targets/tenors which are only applicable to their sources/vehicles.
Each chapter introduces a menagerie of new entities into Juarrero’s ontology, with little indication of their utility or necessity and ambiguous delineations between these novel entities and those introduced earlier. These ambiguities are clearly purposeful, as they enable Juarrero to construct increasingly complicated word salad sentences which perfectly perform their duty: tricking passive and unaware readers into believing that something deep and important has just been revealed.
Interested readers are pointed to Lauren Ross’ 2020 paper for a thoughtful and pragmatic ontology of constraints:
http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/18504/
Additionally, the recent book by Moreno and Mossio offers a rigorous perspective on constraints and their concrete application to problems in biology:
http://mechanism.ucsd.edu/teaching/f1...
March 28, 2024
This book made me register and write my first rant review in my life. Very interesting topic ruined by horrific writing.
I didn't read the whole thing because I can only made it to chapter 11 and finally gave up. And the only reason kept me going is because its references points me to some interesting studies.
I'm an engineer by training, and I understand not everyone appreciate precise, technical use of terms with clear definition and scope of application, but this book took it to the other extreme by being way too liberal with how jargons are thrown around without much clarification. Sometimes it problematically gives too much clarification by giving multiple different definition and not-so-coherent analogies scattered in different places so the said term loses meaning altogether. I was even forced to pull out pen and paper trying to reorganize proposed ideas but that's just further descend into madness.
It's quite ironic that a book talking about constraints and coherence can be so unconstrained and incoherent. Sometimes I re-read paragraphs time and times over trying to understand the point and where it's going but ultimately fails. The times I successfully understand(hopefully I'm not making things up in my own mind) where the author is going, I feel the entire thing can be completely rewritten in commonsense language that's actually easy to comprehend.
The chapters feels disorganized because I can't find a core development of ideas that guides me through a trip, instead I felt thrown into a cobweb of piece-wise information puzzle that'll need to be sorted out before consume. Meanwhile, the chapters are entangled in a bad way because I felt what can be called an single idea were butchered and distributed in different chapters so a lot of back-tracking were called for. But hey, I do oppose modular theory of mind/brain so maybe that's the reason it's written this way? lol
When I felt 90% of the energy were spent trying to fight the puzzle but not actually having a conversation with an idea, I just gave up. I got a long reading list anyway.
I didn't read the whole thing because I can only made it to chapter 11 and finally gave up. And the only reason kept me going is because its references points me to some interesting studies.
I'm an engineer by training, and I understand not everyone appreciate precise, technical use of terms with clear definition and scope of application, but this book took it to the other extreme by being way too liberal with how jargons are thrown around without much clarification. Sometimes it problematically gives too much clarification by giving multiple different definition and not-so-coherent analogies scattered in different places so the said term loses meaning altogether. I was even forced to pull out pen and paper trying to reorganize proposed ideas but that's just further descend into madness.
It's quite ironic that a book talking about constraints and coherence can be so unconstrained and incoherent. Sometimes I re-read paragraphs time and times over trying to understand the point and where it's going but ultimately fails. The times I successfully understand(hopefully I'm not making things up in my own mind) where the author is going, I feel the entire thing can be completely rewritten in commonsense language that's actually easy to comprehend.
The chapters feels disorganized because I can't find a core development of ideas that guides me through a trip, instead I felt thrown into a cobweb of piece-wise information puzzle that'll need to be sorted out before consume. Meanwhile, the chapters are entangled in a bad way because I felt what can be called an single idea were butchered and distributed in different chapters so a lot of back-tracking were called for. But hey, I do oppose modular theory of mind/brain so maybe that's the reason it's written this way? lol
When I felt 90% of the energy were spent trying to fight the puzzle but not actually having a conversation with an idea, I just gave up. I got a long reading list anyway.
December 31, 2024
Never clicked for me, unlike her other work
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews