First, complex systems theory has very little vocabulary/ideas of their own. What few they do have (e.g. “emergence”) are not especially useful yet, because there’s not much substantive theory backing them up yet. They’re basically just pattern matching, but we don’t yet know whether the patterns correspond to any common underlying structure.
Second, because complex systems theory draws from so many other areas, it is useful as a gateway into a bunch of other fields. In studying the vocabulary/ideas of “complex systems theory”, you’ll mostly be studying tools from other fields which aren’t really specific to complex systems, but those tools are really general and interesting. It’s especially useful in that complex systems theory tends to draw on the most general tools from other fields, so you’ll end up learning tools with quite wide applicability.
Two answers to this.
First, complex systems theory has very little vocabulary/ideas of their own. What few they do have (e.g. “emergence”) are not especially useful yet, because there’s not much substantive theory backing them up yet. They’re basically just pattern matching, but we don’t yet know whether the patterns correspond to any common underlying structure.
Second, because complex systems theory draws from so many other areas, it is useful as a gateway into a bunch of other fields. In studying the vocabulary/ideas of “complex systems theory”, you’ll mostly be studying tools from other fields which aren’t really specific to complex systems, but those tools are really general and interesting. It’s especially useful in that complex systems theory tends to draw on the most general tools from other fields, so you’ll end up learning tools with quite wide applicability.