A talk presented at 18th Annual Conference Association for Integrative Studies, Ypsilanti, Michigan, 3-6 Oct. 1996. The conference talk was given on 4 October 1996. There is no written document of the actual talk. Filename cow061 is a 6-page manuscript containing an abstract and a written presentation proposal which were sent in as a preliminary to conference acceptance AND ALSO a list of ten transparencies and one handout document titled Basic Propositions for Change in Academia which Warfield selected and took to the conference, and used in the talk. Besides that there is no more manuscript. ABSTRACT: Interdisciplinarity often implies the requirement to integrate ideas from several disciplines, when no discipline is separately adequate in the thematic area under study. Frequently complexity is involved, and research on complexity seems very relevant to the integrative activity. There appear to be five schools of thought which overlap only slightly concerning what complexity is and how it should be viewed. The key distinctions among these schools of thought include questions related to the definition of complexity as well as to the underlying formalisms involved (if any). HANDOUT DISTRIBUTED DURING THE TALK: "Basic Propositions for Change in Academia" (pap013) LIST OF TRANSPARENCIES USED DURING TALK: LIST OF TRANSPARENCIES USED DURING TALK: 1. "Myself when young did eagerly frequent…Omar Khayam" (nuw31, p2); 2. "On Metaphors" from James. (nuw35); 3. "Foucalt believes that our own current…"from Harding. (nuw21); 4. "The Observer and the Observed" from Peirce (biw20); 5. "Phyrric Victory"; 6. "Five Indices of Complexity" (cow21a); 7. "Two Examples of the Alberts Pattern" (caw21); 8. "The 'Alberts Pattern'" (cai34.idw); 9. "Systems Education…Alberts Pattern" (cai35.idw); 10. "Seven Ways to Represent Complexity; 11. "Five Schools of Thought About Complexity."; This presentation became the springboard for another paper, an invited article submitted April 1997 to the Journal of the A.I.S. titled: "A Role for Formalisms in Integrative Studies."
