My research centred on topics, such as models of semantic cognition, which then appeared distant from applications of the complexity framework. He gave me the opportunity to meet Prigogine and Thom. In the early 1970s, as a student, my interest in complex systems was sparked by one of the most open-minded Italian physicists of that period, Giuliano Toraldo di Francia, whose courses in Florence treating foundational problems of physics I had the good fortune to follow. It rather points to a theory of Synthetic Indicators as leading parameters of a dynamical system to be precisely defined.Ī personal remark may be telling at this point. If the study of complexity is part of science, it does not justify any shift to a new-style, computer-aided, inductivism (the rumour surrounding Big Data is a case in point), exactly just the appeal to “complexity” does not, by itself, imply a new framework for research in the social sciences, still less one ensuring unprecedented advances. Yet these preliminary remarks already furnish a couple of suggestions for research on “QOL-exity” (i.e., Quality-Of-Life-complexity), namely, (1) there is no direct inference from any plurality of data to “Synthetic Indicators”, (2) the hypotheses used in collecting and organising the data should be explicit and crisply stated. Of course, an adequate account of the scientific method calls for many more details, including the recognition that its features combine in different ways for different subjects therefore, it is hard to prescribe one and only one way of “doing science”.
The present analysis provides warnings against excessive expectations and abuses of the notion resting on an appeal to rhetoric and aims to provide a step towards clarifying the scientific meaning of complexity. Some of these works offered an exact formulation, some did not together they gave rise to lines of research which are still far from convergence on a common theory. To reduce this risk, the manifold faces of complexity will be considered, not so much in a mathematical setting but by going back to a list of seminal works to which its current uses are in debt. Consequently, the expected benefits of its application within the social sciencesbring a growing risk of ambiguity, which hinders the establishment of solid grounds on which to test the use of the notion and evaluate its contribution to the advance of knowledge.
Its motivation hinges on the increasing use of the notion of complexity in social sciences, as if it had one definite meaning, whereas such a meaning is hard to find. Moreover, there will be no impassioned stance (a few personal remarks will be confined to footnotes), but only conceptual analysis. Such issues are examined here only informally. The present chapter deals with some general issues of an epistemological nature concerning the notion of complexity.
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