A sort of rubber math is available with which to find patterns and to ground truth claims but with considerable less precision than now required in social science for a valid truth claim. The utility of Newtonian Dynamics. Newtonian dynamics are very smooth, very regular, very precise. Order is the name of the newtonian game. Disorder is seen as enemy to truth claims and seen to be the result of bad theory, poor instrumentation, observer bias or just plain bad research design.
Postmodern science sees a changing mix of order and disorder in every complex system.
Order is not set as the basis of truth claims nor is dis-order dispised as enemy to the knowledge process. The unidirectionality of Causality. In the modern science graduate students in sociology are now taught, one is to use the concepts of independent and dependent variable with the intervening variable used to explain why it is that a tight connection between variable A and variable B does is not always observed. Then there is nonlinear feedback which does very strange things indeed and set aside all of the assumptions above as irrelevant. Nonlinear feedback loops.