Understanding complexity, challenging traditional ways of thinking

This paper discusses the historic evolutionary process of thinking patterns since modern science, which can be divided into three stages: modernism, systems thinking and postmodernism. The paper proposes that the main form of thinking pattern of modernism is mechanism which accompanies modern science. Systems thinking set its aim on holism, but its approach is still inseparable from division and reduction. Both the thinking patterns of modernism and systems thinking are of the category of constitutive theory. However, the rise of complexity sciences has brought great changes to thinking patterns and moved toward postmodernism that has the characteristic of generative theory. In this paper, the function of both convergent and divergent patterns of thinking in the evolution of holistic thinking is interspersed.