Abstract

The proposed transdisciplinary field of ‘complexics’ would bring together allcontemporary efforts in any specific disciplines or by any researchersspecifically devoted to constructing tools, procedures, models and conceptsintended for transversal application that are aimed at understanding andexplaining the most interwoven and dynamic phenomena of reality. Our aimneeds to be, as Morin says, not “to reduce complexity to simplicity, [but] totranslate complexity into theory”.New tools for the conception, apprehension and treatment of the data ofexperience will need to be devised to complement existing ones and toenable us to make headway toward practices that better fit complexictheories. New mathematical and computational contributions have alreadycontinued to grow in number, thanks primarily to scholars in statisticalphysics and computer science, who are now taking an interest in social andeconomic phenomena.Certainly, these methodological innovations put into question and againmake us take note of the excessive separation between the training receivedby researchers in the ‘sciences’ and in the ‘arts’. Closer collaborationbetween these two subsets would, in all likelihood, be much moreenergising and creative than their current mutual distance. Humancomplexics must be seen as multi-methodological, insofar as necessarycombining quantitative-computation methodologies and more qualitativemethodologies aimed at understanding the mental and emotional world ofpeople.In the final analysis, however, models always have a narrative runningbehind them that reflects the attempts of a human being to understand theworld, and models are always interpreted on that basis