What Is Complexity Science? Thinking as a Realist about Measurement and Cities and Arguing for Natural History". Emergence 3(1

One of the more attractive developments in contemporary“science studies ” is the inductive turn. In other words,the nature of science is established not only, and perhapsnot at all, by the abstract specification of “the scientific method. ” Instead, workers in “science studies ” employ the frames of ref-erence of history, sociology, and other social sciences in empirical investi-gation of the actual work of “scientists. ” My effort at answering the question set for this special issue is going to take that form, albeit in what the polite might call a reflexive and the blunter identify as a solipsist fash-ion. In other words, I am going to engage in self-examination and seek to identify the nature of complexity science by reflecting on my own practice. I work on and with complexity. When I say I work on complexity, I mean that a large part of my intellectual activity is methodological and technique oriented. That is to say, it is concerned with how we can under-stand complex systems given a specification of their nature1—the methodological issue set—and with how, given that form of understand-ing, we might develop a set of tools enabling us to grasp something use-ful about the nature of complex systems and the range of their possibl