Abstract
The debate on the nature of complex systems, their functioning and fragile aspects, plays a crucial part in contemporary theoretical reflections, both in philosophy and in the sciences.
Starting from an interdisciplinary analysis of the notions of robustness, resilience and vulnerability (and of a family of related notions, such as stability, variability, adjustment and compensation), the research group intends to investigate the implications of various approaches to complex systems, especially with respect to different kinds of crises and ruptures.
The project will thus:
1) discuss and compare different approaches to complex systems (cognitive, social, political and economic ones) and build a trans-disciplinary toolbox at the crossroad of epistemology and philosophy of science, economics and political sciences, neuropsychiatry and epidemiology, in order to identify the different underlying theoretical frameworks and their conceptual intersections;
2) enquiry on the mutual relations connecting different kinds of systems, and investigate how such relations impact on ruptures and on strategies of intervention to re-establish previous behaviours of the systems at stake.
The research group has a very strong interdisciplinary character and aims to integrate expertise from scholars in philosophy of science, economics, organization analysis, cognitive science, neuropsychiatry and epidemiology. The group composition will allow to address not only the peculiar features of specific complex systems (e.g. cognitive systems, political and economic systems during crises, neuropsychiatry pathologies, …), but also what occurs and the interface of different sorts of systems.
In other terms, the interdisciplinary discourse will allow to tackle how different degrees of stability/instability of a system and different capacities to re-adjust, and, at the same time, warrant the outputs the system is expected to bring about, can affect the stability/instability of the larger system it is inserted in, or that of the systems it interacts with (e.g. cognitive system / neuropsychiatric disorder – overall socially accepted behaviour; political-economic crisis – incidence of mental disorders; ...).
A first stage of critical reflections will prelude to a second, more practice-oriented one. The latter will highlight how different theoretical approaches to systems’ robustness/variability and their re-organizing skills in unprecedented situations can support different views on interventions/avoidance of intervention when (temporary or permanent) crises occur – that is, how different conceptions of resilience and inter-connectivity affect economic politics, therapies or preventive strategies, modeling practices when dealing with cognitive and social systems.