UNDERSTANDING THE WORLD AS A HETEROGENEOUS WHOLE - INSIGHTS INTO SYSTEMS FROM WORK ON IRRIGATION

Both social systems and physical systems are complex enough that they are usually considered separately. This article deals with their conne ctedness in both operational and analytical terms. It starts with the transformation of an irrigation system in Sri Lanka, where the social system and the physical system obviously and necessarily interacted. T his particular system was much deteriorated in both social and physica l terms over the past 30 years. Even so, production and cooperation we re increased there much more rapidly than anyone anticipated. The auth or found the prevailing concepts and explanations offered by contempor ary social science inadequate to account for this change. This was due in large part to their being influenced by images of reality from cla ssical 18th century (Newtonian) physics. The social dynamics and outco mes observed can be better understood by drawing, mutatis mutandis, on ideas put forward in emergent theories of physical science in this ce ntury - relativity, quantum and chaos theories, and now also complexit y theory. There is enough similarity between physical and social pheno mena and relationships that social systems can be illuminated by consi dering how 'post-Newtonian' physical sciences conceive and understand their subject matter. This means taking less mechanistic and determini stic views of social realities, focusing more on their contingence tha n on their essences.