Welcome to Issue 15 of SHAPE Journal.
There is no new paper included in this issue of the journal, as our policy of always including a new one has resulted in something of a backlog of the latter instalments of previous papers, so we must pack in more of these before we go on to entirely new papers. There is, of course another instalment of the multi-part series entitled The Demise of Formalism. This instalment is a succinct synopsis of the major issues dealt with in the paper as a whole involving Reductionism, Plurality & Change, and the assumptions we make about them and their unavoidable consequences.

This set of choices is constrasted with a holist approach, which alone tackles Emergent Change. A comparison reveals the major flaws in a solely pluralist approach, which are focussed precisely in the phenomena of emergent, qualitative change, which pluralist methods simply cannot address.

In the following issue, however, we will finally see the short paper From Avalanche to Control, which deals with the transitions from an established and long persisting Stability, via an Emergence, to a wholly New Stability. The crude event of an avalanche is developed to more complex and revolutionary overturns, which we term Emergences. There is an introduction to this about to be posted, along with a couple of reviews of articles in New Scientist on Intelligence and Simulation on our blog at:-

http://www.e-journal.org.uk/shape/blog

Our new policy of regularly producing Reviews on our Blog is continuing with the pieces mentioned above. So this will indeed continue to happen at regular intervals from now on. Read and enjoy, and if moved to do so, react! Send us your views for publication in the Journal. We look forward to such reactions as they inform us of what our readers require. Left to ourselves we will not necessarily produce from our prodigious store of work in the best possible order.

Jim Schofield
NOV 2010