This popular quote from Hamlet might be recast as “There are more things in science than are dreamt of in our philosophies”. And many of those things are unfamiliar to scholars in the field of communication science. This article will review new and strange ideas about how the natural world is organized that come out of complexity science. These strange ideas, like deterministic, but unpredictable systems, have a great deal in common with many communication phenomena that our field has traditionally had difficulty studying. By reviewing these areas, we hope to add a new, compelling and useful way to think about science that goes beyond the current dominant philosophy of science employed in communication. Though the concepts reviewed here are difficult and often appear at odds with the dominant paradigm; Highlights
• There is a third paradigm of science, commonly referred to as complexity science.
• It provides analytic methods that will facilitate the study dynamic and interactive communication processes.
• Though the complexity science paradigm is not well-known to communication scientists, it has facilitated important
discoveries in most other branches of science.
• The complexity paradigm focuses on how simple rules (e.g., basic laws of evolution) generate highly complex-appearing
systems (e.g., all life on Earth).
• The characteristics of communicative interaction processes are a strong fit with criteria for complex systems.
• Communicative interaction can be modeled and tested using a computer simulation.
• Complexity will require researchers to integrate existing knowledge into a very different paradigm, slowing
broad-based adoption in the field