The Importance of being Nonlinear

In the preceding section we have sketched some of the dominant styles of thought used in the understanding of complex events in natural philosophy. In our discussions we stressed the dependence of these schema on the notion of linearity. The motivation for these presentations was to uncover the often implicit and obscure dependence of these schema on linear ideas. We are now in a position to examine the limitations of some of these ideas in describing a number of familiar, but all too often ill-understood phenomena. We maintain that these processes can be understood by determining the proper nonlinear descriptions to replace the inadequate linear ones. As the title of this section indicates, we focus on the reasons why a nonlinear perspective is to be preferred over a linear one.