Toward 'Complexics' as a transdiscipline

Abstract

The proposed transdisciplinary field of ‘complexics’ would bring together all contemporary efforts in any specific disciplines or by any researchers specifically devoted to constructing tools, procedures, models and concepts intended for transversal application that are aimed at understanding and explaining the most interwoven and dynamic phenomena of reality. Our aim needs to be, as Morin says, not “to reduce complexity to simplicity, [but] to translate complexity into theory”. New tools for the conception, apprehension and treatment of the data of experience will need to be devised to complement existing ones and to enable us to make headway toward practices that better fit complexic theories. New mathematical and computational contributions have already continued to grow in number, thanks primarily to scholars in statistical physics and computer science, who are now taking an interest in social and economic phenomena. Certainly, these methodological innovations put into question and again make us take note of the excessive separation between the training received by researchers in the ‘sciences’ and in the ‘arts’. Closer collaboration between these two subsets would, in all likelihood, be much more energising and creative than their current mutual distance. Human complexics must be seen as multi-methodological, insofar as necessary combining quantitative-computation methodologies and more qualitative methodologies aimed at understanding the mental and emotional world of people. In the final analysis, however, models always have a narrative running behind them that reflects the attempts of a human being to understand the world, and models are always interpreted on that basis.