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The Charms of Catastrophe (1978)
If white and black blend, soften, and unite A thousand ways, is there no black and white? —Pope, An Essay on Man "All things," said Charles Peirce, "swim
Catastrophists are busy investigating psychological phenomena of the sort stressed by the Gestalt school: reversals of perspective in optical illusions, explosions of anger, bursts of tears, quick decisions to get married or divorced, nervous breakdowns, the “aha” reactions in creative thinking. CT models have been applied to stock market crashes, union decisions to strike, abrupt shifts of public opinion about anything, panic behavior of crowds, revolutions, alterations of social status by marriage, the fall of Rome. We find that the proponents…systematically make fundamental mathematical errors, reach conclusions that are either false, or vague, or meaningless, or trivial, and often misrepresent empirical evidence.” A long and detailed attack on applied CT, by Sussmann and Zahler, will appear in the forthcoming (Volume 37) issue of Synthèse.
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