This will then force us to face up to and spell out the methodological implications of world-systems analysis: that neither nomothetic nor idiographic modes of knowing in fact exist and that the only epistemology that is plausible lies in the swampy middle ground of the concept of an historical system. That is to say, our knowledge is about structures that reproduce themselves while they constantly change and consequently never reproduce themselves. We may discover the rules by which the cyclical rhythms seem to operate, except that they never describe any given empirical situation. The science of the complex is the science of the optimal description of the inherently imprecise.