Le complexe fraternel mettant en scène la jalousie participe à l’organisation de la subjectivation de l’individu et préfigure l’intersubjectivation par le biais d’un pacte narcissique de fratrie. Dans des configurations familiales où la problématique de la filiation traumatique est présente, le complexe d’intrusion devient désorganisateur du fait d’un fonctionnement incestuel et de la puissance de l’emprise, engendrant une logique fratricidaire à l’origine de violences. Les auteurs proposent à partir de l’expérience de l’un d’entre eux de revisiter l’expérience fraternelle dans le (...) cadre de la psychothérapie familiale. À travers des exemples cliniques, et en prenant appui sur des moments fondateurs du lien fraternel en thérapie familiale, ils mettent en évidence l’importance de l’espace fraternel comme lieu d’interfantasmatisation permettant une reconstruction des liens de filiation. (shrink)

La relation fraternelle est un domaine encore peu étudié et dont on n’épuise pas le sens et la fonction en la pensant comme n’étant qu’une projection sur les pairs d’une problématique qui se jouerait, en fait, avec les ascendants. La séduction fraternelle peut s’analyser à lueur de la problématique parents-enfants ou à celle de l’identification mentale, les deux axes pouvant, pour un même cas, se trouver intriqués de façon complexe. À partir de cas cliniques, nous montrons qu’il convient de différencier (...) ces deux axes pour mieux saisir le sens et la fonction de la séduction fraternelle dans la construction psychique du sujet, dans la naissance des conflits et dans leur résolution. La séduction fraternelle est à mi-chemin de la découverte de la différence des sexes et de la relation incestueuse, à mi-chemin des jeux sexuels infantiles et de la découverte de la sexualité génitale. En ce sens, elle constitue à la fois un miroir, un révélateur et un enjeu dans la construction du sujet en devenir. (shrink)

On considère souvent que l’apport de S. Freud sur la fratrie est mineur, car trop référé ou rabattu sur le couple parental et le complexe d’Œdipe. Nous montrons que cette idée répandue est en partie erronée : à partir des principales occurrences sur la fratrie et si nous nous préoccupons plus particulièrement de la question de la séduction, une théorie implicite du lien fraternel s’ouvre, donnant des éléments de compréhension essentiels concernant l’enfant et l’adolescent. Ceux-ci concernent notamment l’idée que, chez (...) l’enfant, la séduction est secondaire à la haine primitive ressentie à la naissance d’un puîné; et, au moment de l’adolescence, le frère ou la sœur constitue un viatique vers l’investissement de l’objet sexuel adéquat. (shrink)

Depuis le XIX e siècle, les psychiatres et psychothérapeutes de langue française ont travaillé les souffrances et les « contagions psychiques » induites par les liens. De la folie à deux de Lassègue et Falret en passant par la folie gémellaire de Benjamin Ball, au travail en reprise du concept de folie à deux par Jacques Lacan dans le « double crime des sœurs Papin, nous arrivons aux complexes familiaux écrits deux ans plus tard, premier écrit sur le groupe (...) fratrie. Zazzo à partir du travail sur le couple de jumeau a inspiré l’auteur de l’article qui reprend trente ans plus tard un travail initié sur le lien gémellaire qui induira son choix de devenir psychanalyste familial. (shrink)

Résumé Cet article met en évidence la complexité des enjeux psychiques familiaux et individuels dans différentes cultures. La variabilité de la notion de famille et de celle de parenté fondée sur le tabou de l’inceste consanguin et symbolique introduit ces enjeux complexes. Les enjeux familiaux sont aussi différents selon le rang de l’enfant dans la fratrie, la différence des sexes ne manquant pas d’influer sur les relations fraternelles et les enjeux psychiques individuels.

Dans une perspective systémique, les auteurs, spécialistes de la psychologie de l’enfant, relèvent toute l’importance de la fratrie et de sa dynamique propre au sein de la famille. Cet article vise à apporter des éléments théoriques sur la dynamique fraternelle, dans le cadre d’un placement fraternel. L’observation d’une fratrie de deux enfants prolonge une réflexion sur le placement fraternel conjoint ou séparé. Il est souligné l’intérêt de réaliser une évaluation avant le placement afin de dégager des indicateurs sur la dynamique (...) de la relation fraternelle. Dans l’étude de cas présentée, un placement fraternel séparé a été privilégié pour favoriser l’individuation et la protection de chacun des enfants. Une évaluation tout au long du placement reste également nécessaire, concernant tant le développement individuel des enfants que l’évolution de la relation fraternelle. (shrink)

Dans une perspective systémique, les auteurs, spécialistes de la psychologie de l’enfant, relèvent toute l’importance de la fratrie et de sa dynamique propre au sein de la famille. Cet article vise à apporter des éléments théoriques sur la dynamique fraternelle, dans le cadre d’un placement fraternel. L’observation d’une fratrie de deux enfants prolonge une réflexion sur le placement fraternel conjoint ou séparé. Il est souligné l’intérêt de réaliser une évaluation avant le placement afin de dégager des indicateurs sur la dynamique (...) de la relation fraternelle. Dans l’étude de cas présentée, un placement fraternel séparé a été privilégié pour favoriser l’individuation et la protection de chacun des enfants. Une évaluation tout au long du placement reste également nécessaire, concernant tant le développement individuel des enfants que l’évolution de la relation fraternelle. (shrink)

Cet article propose une réflexion sur les liens fraternels dans le cadre d’une thérapie familiale à partir des conceptions théoriques sur le fraternel de R. Kaës, sur l’illusion groupale de D. Anzieu et sur les notions de transgénérationnel dans une famille. L’objectif est de montrer la pertinence d’une approche de thérapie familiale psychanalytique à partir d’un cas d’une fratrie de quatre garçons dont l’aîné est le porteur des traumatismes parentaux et considéré comme le « bouc émissaire » de la (...) famille. Plusieurs hypothèses sont proposées qui permettent de comprendre l’importance du traumatisme en fonction de la place qu’occupe chacun des enfants de la fratrie, un « pacte dénégatif » pouvant s’être instauré comme organisateur des liens entre les frères. La thérapie familiale souligne la nécessité du travail de métabolisation de la famille et de différenciation entre les frères, au prix dans le cas présenté, d’une autonomisation réelle d’un des membres de la fratrie. (shrink)

Standard semantic theories predict that non-deictic readings for complex demonstratives should be much more widely available than they in fact are. If such readings are the result of a lexical ambiguity, as Kaplan (1977) and others suggest, we should expect them to be available wherever a definite description can be used. The same prediction follows from ‘hidden argument’ theories like the ones described by King (2001) and Elbourne (2005). Wolter (2006), however, has shown that complex demonstratives admit non-deictic interpretations only (...) when a precise set of structural constrains are met. In this paper, I argue that Wolter’s results, properly understood, upend the philosophical status quo. They fatally undermine the ambiguity theory and demand a fundamental rethinking of the hidden argument approach. (shrink)

An analysis of two heuristic strategies for the development of mechanistic models, illustrated with historical examples from the life sciences. In Discovering Complexity, William Bechtel and Robert Richardson examine two heuristics that guided the development of mechanistic models in the life sciences: decomposition and localization. Drawing on historical cases from disciplines including cell biology, cognitive neuroscience, and genetics, they identify a number of "choice points" that life scientists confront in developing mechanistic explanations and show how different choices result in divergent (...) explanatory models. Describing decomposition as the attempt to differentiate functional and structural components of a system and localization as the assignment of responsibility for specific functions to specific structures, Bechtel and Richardson examine the usefulness of these heuristics as well as their fallibility—the sometimes false assumption underlying them that nature is significantly decomposable and hierarchically organized. When Discovering Complexity was originally published in 1993, few philosophers of science perceived the centrality of seeking mechanisms to explain phenomena in biology, relying instead on the model of nomological explanation advanced by the logical positivists (a model Bechtel and Richardson found to be utterly inapplicable to the examples from the life sciences in their study). Since then, mechanism and mechanistic explanation have become widely discussed. In a substantive new introduction to this MIT Press edition of their book, Bechtel and Richardson examine both philosophical and scientific developments in research on mechanistic models since 1993. (shrink)

I have two aims for the present paper, one narrow and one broad. The narrow aim is to show that a class of data originally described by Lynsey Wolter empirically undermine the leading treatments of complex demonstratives that have been described in the literature. The broader aim of the paper is to show that Wolter demonstratives, as I will call the constructions I focus on, are a threat not just to existing treatments, but to any possible theory that retains the (...) uncontroversial assumptions that relative clauses always form a constituent with the nouns they modify, and that semantic composition proceeds sequentially and locally, with the inputs to interpretation having the structure syntax tells us they do. (shrink)

Here, for the first time, development studies encounters the set of ideas popularly known as 'Chaos Theory'. Samir Rihani applies to the processes of economic development, ideas from complex adaptive systems like uncertainty, complexity, and unpredictability. Rihani examines various aspects of the development process - including the World Bank, debt, and the struggle against poverty - and demonstrates the limitations of fundamentally linear thinking in an essentially non-linear world.

This article introduces and defends the “pathological complexity thesis” as a hypothesis about the evolutionary origins of minimal consciousness, or sentience, that connects the study of animal consciousness closely with work in behavioral ecology and evolutionary biology. I argue that consciousness is an adaptive solution to a design problem that led to the extinction of complex multicellular animal life following the Avalon explosion and that was subsequently solved during the Cambrian explosion. This is the economic trade-off problem of having to (...) deal with a complex body with high degrees of freedom, what I call “pathological complexity.” By modeling the explosion of this computational complexity using the resources of state-based behavioral and life history theory we will be able to provide an evolutionary bottom-up framework to make sense of subjective experience and its function in nature by paying close attention to the ecological lifestyles of different animals. (shrink)

Complexity science has proliferated across academic domains in recent years. A question arises as to whether any useful sense of ‘generalized complexity ’ can be abstracted from the various versions of complexity to be found in the literature, and whether it could prove fruitful in a scientific sense. Most attempts at defining complexity center around two kinds of notions: Structural, and temporal or dynamic. Neither of these is able to provide a foundation for the intuitive or generalized notion when taken (...) separately; structure is often a derivative notion, dependent on prior notions of complexity, and dynamic notions such as entropy are often indefinable. The philosophical notion of process may throw light on the tensions and contradictions within complexity. Robustness, for instance, a key quality of complexity, is quite naturally understood within a process-theoretical framework. Understanding complexity as process also helps one align complexity science with holistically oriented predecessors such as General System Theory, while allowing for the reductionist perspective of complexity. These results, however, have the further implication that it may be futile to search for general laws of complexity, or to hope that investigations of complex objects in one domain may throw light on complexity in unrelated domains. (shrink)

Introduction -- Elucidating complexity theories -- Complexity in the natural sciences -- Complexity in social theory -- Towards transdisciplinarity -- Complexity in philosophy: complexification and the limits to knowledge -- Complexity in ethics -- Earth in the anthropocene -- Complexity and climate change -- American dreams, ecological nightmares and new visions -- Complexity and sustainability: wicked problems, gordian knots and synergistic solutions -- Conclusion.

How does the complex nature of ecological systems affect ecologists' ability to study them? This Element argues that ecological systems are complex in a rather special way: they are causally heterogeneous. The author presents an updated philosophical account with an optimistic outlook of the methods and status of ecological research.

Complexity and Postmodernism explores the notion of complexity in the light of contemporary perspectives from philosophy and science. The book integrates insights from complexity and computational theory with the philosophical position of thinkers including Derrida and Lyotard. Paul Cilliers takes a critical stance towards the use of the analytical method as a tool to cope with complexity, and he rejects Searle's superficial contribution to the debate.

La recherche sociologique réalisée auprès de 23 jeunes résidents de villages d’accueil de l’association SOS Villages d’Enfants, qui a pour vocation l’accueil d’enfants placés en fratries, a été un cadre spécifique pour examiner la diversité des expériences, de liens et de sentiments fraternels. Au-delà d’un état de la question du fraternel, une réflexion a pu être menée sur les attentes et l’idéalisation à l’égard de leurs germains, de leurs demis et/ou des enfants avec qui ils vivent au quotidien. C’est (...) aussi dans ce vivier de pairs familiers, ce potentiel de lien social, que les jeunes acteurs choisissent certains individus pour affirmer des liens privilégiés. La cohabitation est le creuset de proximités affinitaires permettant le maintien des liens de germanité et l’avènement de liens fraternels. (shrink)

Complexity theory attempts to explain, at the most general possible level, the interesting behaviors of complex systems. Two such behaviors are the emergence of simple or stable high-level behavior from relatively complex low-level behavior, and the emergence of sophisticated high-level behavior from relatively simple low-level behavior; they are often found nested in the same system. Concerning the emergence of simplicity, this essay examines Herbert Simon's explanation from near-decomposability and a stochastic explanation that generalizes the approach of statistical physics. A more (...) general notion of an abstract difference-making structure is introduced with examples, and a discussion of evolvability follows. Concerning the emergence of sophistication, this essay focuses on, first, the energetics approach associated with dissipative structures and the fourth law of thermodynamics, and second, the notion of a complex adaptive system. (shrink)

Introduction -- The nature of a complex world -- Unpacking complexity -- Have we thought like this before? -- The complexity of complexity theories -- Complexity and the social world -- Complexity and management -- Complexity and strategy -- Complexity and international development -- Complexity and economics -- Final reflections: what we hope you take away from this book.

In _Complexity and Postmodernism_, Paul Cilliers explores the idea of complexity in the light of contemporary perspectives from philosophy and science. Cilliers offers us a unique approach to understanding complexity and computational theory by integrating postmodern theory into his discussion. _Complexity and Postmodernism_ is an exciting and an original book that should be read by anyone interested in gaining a fresh understanding of complexity, postmodernism and connectionism.

An accurate classification of bacteria is essential for the proper identification of patient infections and subsequent treatment decisions. Multi-Locus Sequence Typing (MLST) is a genetic technique for bacterial classification. MLST classifications are used to cluster bacteria into clonal complexes. Importantly, clonal complexes can serve as a biological species concept for bacteria, facilitating an otherwise difficult taxonomic classification. In this paper, we argue for the inclusion of terms relating to clonal complexes in biomedical ontologies.

"Complexity" is a catchword of certain extremely popular and rapidly developing interdisciplinary new sciences, often called accordingly the sciences of complexity. It is often closely associated with another notably popular but ambiguous word, "information"; information, in turn, may be justly called the central new concept in the whole 20th century science. Moreover, the notion of information is regularly coupled with a key concept of thermodynamics, viz. entropy. And like this was not enough it is quite usual to add one more (...) at present extraordinarily popular notion, namely chaos, and wed it with the abovementioned concepts. It is my aim in this paper to critically analyse this conceptual mess from a logical and philosophical point of view concentrating on the concepts of complexity and information and the question concerning the true relation between them. (shrink)

The theme of this book is formed by a pair of concepts: the concept of formal language as carrier of the precise expression of meaning, facts and problems, and the concept of algorithm or calculus, i.e. a formally operating procedure for the solution of precisely described questions and problems. The book is a unified introduction to the modern theory of these concepts, to the way in which they developed first in mathematical logic and computability theory and later in automata theory, (...) and to the theory of formal languages and complexity theory. Apart from considering the fundamental themes and classical aspects of these areas, the subject matter has been selected to give priority throughout to the new aspects of traditional questions, results and methods which have developed from the needs or knowledge of computer science and particularly of complexity theory. It is both a textbook for introductory courses in the above-mentioned disciplines as well as a monograph in which further results of new research are systematically presented and where an attempt is made to make explicit the connections and analogies between a variety of concepts and constructions. (shrink)

According to Leibniz’s infinite-analysis account of contingency, any derivative truth is contingent if and only if it does not admit of a finite proof. Following a tradition that goes back at least as far as Bertrand Russell, several interpreters have been tempted to explain this biconditional in terms of two other principles: first, that a derivative truth is contingent if and only if it contains infinitely complex concepts and, second, that a derivative truth contains infinitely complex concepts if and only (...) if it does not admit of a finite proof. A consequence of this interpretation is that Leibniz’s infinite-analysis account of contingency falls prey to Robert Adams’s Problem of Lucky Proof. I will argue that this interpretation is mistaken and that, once it is properly understood how the idea of an infinite proof fits into Leibniz’s circle of modal notions, the problem of lucky proof simply disappears. (shrink)

This monograph focuses on two major themes of current interest---those of complexity and emergence. Neither of the two concepts is, in the very nature of things, precisely defined or easily comprehended. Complexity is all around us while the sciences often analyze entities and events by making simplifications. But the fault lines in the latter get exposed over larger spans of space and time. Complexity entails emergence that involves discontinuity and novelty in the evolution of complex systems, based on the appearance (...) of distinctive spatial and temporal structures. Underlying an occurrence of emergence is an instability involving the transition from one stable regime to another, where distinct space-time scales acquire relevance across the transition. The structures on the two sides of the transition are characterized by distinct sets of state variables where, on one side of the transition, collective variables make their appearance. -/- Complexity and emergence are viewed in this book in the context of the Kantian noumenal-phenomenal divide. The noumenal reality is the repository of all the complexity that there is, while the phenomenal reality emerges from the noumenal in the process of our perception, interpretation, and inference. The noumenal exists in itself as a self-determined whole, and reveals itself to us in fragmentary patches as skewed projections that we assemble to form our phenomenal world that keeps on emerging ceaselessly. Our own biological evolution and the evolution of our phenomenal world occurs in a mutually consistent process, that can be referred to as co-evolution. -/- We seek regularities in the phenomenal world by means of our scientific theories which are often successful, but that success is fragile as, over larger spans of space and time, anomalies make their appearance, giving a lie to the simplicity and regularity previously presumed to have been unearthed. Simplicity, regularity, and harmony are only fleetingly located in the phenomenal world by means of our theories as these keep on being revised endlessly and often radically, thereby generating a mosaic of theories that becomes ever more complex, indicating a pervasive complexity of the noumenal world from which the phenomenal emerges by way of strictly limited projections. The foundational metaphysics on which this book is based tells us that reality is fundamentally complex, while tiny islands of simplicity, regularity, and harmony are embedded in it in isolated space-time domains. (shrink)

Qualitative Complexity offers a critique of the humanist paradigm in contemporary social theory. Drawing from sources in sociology, philosophy, complexity theory, 'fuzzy logic', systems theory, cognitive science and evolutionary biology, the authors present a new series of interdisciplinary perspectives on the sociology of complex, self-organizing structures.

Molecular vibrations and quantum tunneling may link ligand binding to the function of pharmacological receptors. The well‐established lock‐and‐key model explains a ligand's binding and recognition by a receptor; however, a general mechanism by which receptors translate binding into activation, inactivation, or modulation remains elusive. The Vibration Theory of Olfaction was proposed in the 1930s to explain this subset of receptor‐mediated phenomena by correlating odorant molecular vibrations to smell, but a mechanism was lacking. In the 1990s, inelastic electron tunneling was proposed (...) as a plausible mechanism for translating molecular vibration to odorant physiology. More recently, studies of ligands’ vibrational spectra and the use of deuterated ligand analogs have provided helpful information to study this admittedly controversial hypothesis in metabotropic receptors other than olfactory receptors. In the present work, based in part on published experiments from our laboratory using planarians as an experimental organism, I will present a rationale and possible experimental approach for extending this idea to ligand‐gated ion channels. (shrink)

This is a comprehensive discussion of complexity as it arises in physical, chemical, and biological systems, as well as in mathematical models of nature. Common features of these apparently unrelated fields are emphasised and incorporated into a uniform mathematical description, with the support of a large number of detailed examples and illustrations. The quantitative study of complexity is a rapidly developing subject with special impact in the fields of physics, mathematics, information science, and biology. Because of the variety of the (...) approaches, no comprehensive discussion has previously been attempted. This book will be of interest to graduate students and researchers in physics (nonlinear dynamics, fluid dynamics, solid-state, cellular automata, stochastic processes, statistical mechanics and thermodynamics), mathematics (dynamical systems, ergodic and probability theory), information and computer science (coding, information theory and algorithmic complexity), electrical engineering and theoretical biology. (shrink)

Une recherche sur l’insertion adulte après un placement a été menée auprès de cent vingt-trois personnes dans le cadre d’un village d’enfants SOS. Sont présentés ici les résultats concernant les relations fraternelles pendant le placement et aujourd’hui. Si les liens avec la fratrie biologique restent privilégiés, la cohabitation a modifié les représentations du lien fraternel et a permis d’acquérir de nouvelles ressources relationnelles. L’écart d’âge entre fratries, les troubles du comportement et les fortes disparités éducatives initiales jouent un rôle déterminant (...) sur les relations. Ces résultats soulignent l’importance d’une évaluation préliminaire fine et pluridisciplinaire, explorant les caractéristiques individuelles de chaque enfant mais également la dynamique relationnelle de la fratrie. (shrink)

The “language-communication-society” triangle defies traditional scientific approaches. Rather, it is a phenomenon that calls for an integration of complex, transdisciplinary perspectives, if we are to make any progress in understanding how it works. The highly diverse agents in play are not merely cognitive and/or cultural, but also emotional and behavioural in their specificity. Indeed, the effort may require building a theoretical and methodological body of knowledge that can effectively convey the characteristic properties of phenomena in human terms. New complexity approaches (...) allow us to rethink our limited and mechanistic images of human societies and create more appropriate emo-cognitive dynamic and holistic models. We have to enter into dialogue with the complexity views coming out of other more ‘material’ sciences, but we also need to take steps in the linguistic and psycho-sociological fields towards creating perspectives and concepts better fitted to human characteristics. Our understanding of complexity is different – but not opposed – to the one that is more commonly found in texts written by people working in physics or computer science, for example. The goal of this book is to extend the knowledge of these other more ‘human’ or socially oriented perspectives on complexity, taking account of the language and communication singularities of human agents in society. (shrink)

Several complexity theorists draw a sharp and ontologically robust distinction between (merely) complicated systems and (genuinely) complex systems. I argue that this distinction does not hold. Upon fine-grained analysis, ostensibly complicated systems turn out to be complex systems. The purported boundary between the complicated and the complex appears to be vague rather than sharp. Systems are complex by degrees.

Throughout most of the 20th century, analytical and reductionist approaches have dominated in biological, social, and humanistic sciences, including linguistics and communication. We generally believed we could account for fundamental phenomena in invoking basic elemental units. Although the amount of knowledge generated was certainly impressive, we have also seen limitations of this approach. Discovering the sound formants of human languages, for example, has allowed us to know vital aspects of the ‘material’ plane of verbal codes, but it tells us little (...) about significant aspects of their social functions. I firmly believe, therefore, that alongside a linguistics that looks ‘inward’ there should also be a linguistics that looks ‘outward’, or one even that is constructed ‘from the outside’, a linguistics that I refer to elsewhere as ‘holistic’ though it could be identified by a different name. My current vision is to promote simultaneously the perspective that goes from the part to the whole and that which goes from the whole to the parts, i.e., both from the top down and from the bottom up. This goal is shared with other disciplines which recognize that many phenomena related to life are interwoven, self-organising, emergent and processual. Thus, we need to re-examine how we have conceived of reality, both the way we have looked at it and the images we have used to talk about it. Several approaches now grouped under the label of complexity have been elaborated towards this objective of finding new concepts and ways of thinking that better fit the complex organisation of facts and events. (shrink)

This book explains the relationship between intelligence and environmental complexity, and in so doing links philosophy of mind to more general issues about the relations between organisms and environments, and to the general pattern of 'externalist' explanations. The author provides a biological approach to the investigation of mind and cognition in nature. In particular he explores the idea that the function of cognition is to enable agents to deal with environmental complexity. The history of the idea in the work of (...) Dewey and Spencer is considered, as is the impact of recent evolutionary theory on our understanding of the place of mind in nature. (shrink)

‘Complexics’ denotes the meta-transdisciplinary field specifically concerned with giving us suitable cognitive tools to understand the world’s complexity. Additionally, the use of the adjective ‘complexical’ would avoid the common confusion caused by the adjective ‘complex’, which belongs to everyday usage and already has its own connotations of complication and confusion. Thus, ‘complexical’ thinking and ‘complexical’ perspective would provide clearer terms, be freer of confusion, and refer more precisely to epistemic elements in contrast to the ‘complexity’ typical of many phenomena of (...) reality. In short, the world would be ‘complex’, but our way of looking at the world would be ‘complexical’. As a meta-transdiscipline, ‘complexics’ would carry on the perspective of cybernetics: “Cybernetics deals with all forms of behaviour insofar as they are regular, or determinate, or reproducible. The materiality is irrelevant… The truths of cybernetics are not conditional on their being derived from some other branch of science. Cybernetics has its own foundations” (Ashby, 1956:1). Thus, it has a distinctly transdisciplinary mission to provide concepts, schema and possibilities of thinking and representation able to express the multidimensional and systemic interwovenness and interdependence of the many, highly significant phenomena of reality that have these characteristics. On the level of theory, complexics needs to provide a set of principles, concepts and conceptual landscapes that can be applied transversally to distinct areas of knowledge and phenomena of reality, enabling us to gain a much firmer grasp of the complex aspects of their existence than we currently have. For this reason, our aim needs to be, as Morin says, not “to reduce complexity to simplicity, [but] to translate complexity into theory” (1994:315). (shrink)

Some things look more complex than others. For example, a crenulate and richly organized leaf may seem more complex than a plain stone. What is the nature of this experience—and why do we have it in the first place? Here, we explore how object complexity serves as an efficiently extracted visual signal that the object merits further exploration. We algorithmically generated a library of geometric shapes and determined their complexity by computing the cumulative surprisal of their internal skeletons—essentially quantifying the (...) “amount of information” within each shape—and then used this approach to ask new questions about the perception of complexity. Experiments 1–3 asked what kind of mental process extracts visual complexity: a slow, deliberate, reflective process (as when we decide that an object is expensive or popular) or a fast, effortless, and automatic process (as when we see that an object is big or blue)? We placed simple and complex objects in visual search arrays and discovered that complex objects were easier to find among simple distractors than simple objects are among complex distractors—a classic search asymmetry indicating that complexity is prioritized in visual processing. Next, we explored the function of complexity: Why do we represent object complexity in the first place? Experiments 4–5 asked subjects to study serially presented objects in a self‐paced manner (for a later memory test); subjects dwelled longer on complex objects than simple objects—even when object shape was completely task‐irrelevant—suggesting a connection between visual complexity and exploratory engagement. Finally, Experiment 6 connected these implicit measures of complexity to explicit judgments. Collectively, these findings suggest that visual complexity is extracted efficiently and automatically, and even arouses a kind of “perceptual curiosity” about objects that encourages subsequent attentional engagement. (shrink)

This book offers insights on the study of natural language as a complex adaptive system. It discusses a new way to tackle the problem of language modeling, and provides clues on how the close relation between natural language and some biological structures can be very fruitful for science. The book examines the theoretical framework and then applies its main principles to various areas of linguistics. It discusses applications in language contact, language change, diachronic linguistics, and the potential enhancement of classical (...) approaches to historical linguistics by means of new methodologies used in physics, biology, and agent systems theory. It shows how studying language evolution and change using computational simulations enables to integrate social structures in the evolution of language, and how this can give rise to a new way to approach sociolinguistics. Finally, it explores applications for discourse analysis, semantics and cognition. (shrink)

We present a minimum message length (MML) framework for trajectory partitioning by point selection, and use it to automatically select the tolerance parameter ε for Douglas-Peucker partitioning, adapting to local trajectory complexity. By examining a range of ε for synthetic and real trajectories, it is easy to see that the best ε does vary by trajectory, and that the MML encoding makes sensible choices and is robust against Gaussian noise. We use it to explore the identification of micro-activities within a (...) longer trajectory. This MML metric is comparable to the TRACLUS metric – and shares the constraint of abstracting only by omission of points – but is a true lossless encoding. Such encoding has several theoretical advantages – particularly with very small segments (high frame rates) – but actual performance interacts strongly with the search algorithm. Both differ from unconstrained piecewise linear approximations, including other MML formulations. (shrink)

The complexity of human societies of the past few thousand years rivals that of social insect societies. We hypothesize that two sets of social “instincts” underpin and constrain the evolution of complex societies. One set is ancient and shared with other social primate species, and one is derived and unique to our lineage. The latter evolved by the late Pleistocene, and led to the evolution of institutions of intermediate complexity in acephalous societies. The institutions of complex societies often conflict with (...) our social instincts. The complex societies of the past few thousand years can function only because cultural evolution has created effective “work-arounds” to manage such instincts. We describe a series of work-arounds and use the data on the relative effectiveness of WWII armies to test the work-around hypothesis. (shrink)

Résumé La situation interculturelle des jeunes issus de familles d’origine nord-africaine installées en France pose les problèmes de l’identité et des liens qui unissent les membres de la fratrie. À travers l’expérience d’une psychothérapie familiale et quelques résultats d’une étude menée sur les stratégies identitaires utilisées par les jeunes nés de parents nord-africains, l’article témoigne des différences qui existent dans la gestion des apports culturels entre les garçons et les filles dans les familles maghrébines, de l’importance de la fratrie comme (...) espace de médiation potentiel et des liens fraternels à mobiliser dans les dispositifs thérapeutiques familiaux. La création d’un dispositif de soin prenant en compte des approches diachroniques et synchroniques a ainsi permis d’appréhender et de dénouer les conflits dans la fratrie confrontée à la complexité des situations interculturelles. (shrink)

Résumé La situation interculturelle des jeunes issus de familles d’origine nord-africaine installées en France pose les problèmes de l’identité et des liens qui unissent les membres de la fratrie. À travers l’expérience d’une psychothérapie familiale et quelques résultats d’une étude menée sur les stratégies identitaires utilisées par les jeunes nés de parents nord-africains, l’article témoigne des différences qui existent dans la gestion des apports culturels entre les garçons et les filles dans les familles maghrébines, de l’importance de la fratrie comme (...) espace de médiation potentiel et des liens fraternels à mobiliser dans les dispositifs thérapeutiques familiaux. La création d’un dispositif de soin prenant en compte des approches diachroniques et synchroniques a ainsi permis d’appréhender et de dénouer les conflits dans la fratrie confrontée à la complexité des situations interculturelles. (shrink)

The SRL of King is a sound, complete and decidable logic designed specifically to support formalisms for the HPSG of Pollard and Sag. The SRL notion of modellability in a signature is particularly important for HPSG, and the present paper modifies an elegant method due to Blackburn and Spaan in order to prove that – modellability in each computable signature is 1 0 – modellability in some finite signature is 1 0 -hard, and – modellability in some finite signature is (...) decidable. (shrink)

What enables individually simple insects like ants to act with such precision and purpose as a group? How do trillions of individual neurons produce something as extraordinarily complex as consciousness? What is it that guides self-organizing structures like the immune system, the World Wide Web, the global economy, and the human genome? These are just a few of the fascinating and elusive questions that the science of complexity seeks to answer. In this remarkably accessible and companionable book, leading complex systems (...) scientist Melanie Mitchell provides an intimate, detailed tour of the sciences of complexity, a broad set of efforts that seek to explain how large-scale complex, organized, and adaptive behavior can emerge from simple interactions among myriad individuals. Comprehending such systems requires a wholly new approach, one that goes beyond traditional scientific reductionism and that re-maps long-standing disciplinary boundaries. Based on her work at the Santa Fe Institute and drawing on its interdisciplinary strategies, Mitchell brings clarity to the workings of complexity across a broad range of biological, technological, and social phenomena, seeking out the general principles or laws that apply to all of them. She explores as well the relationship between complexity and evolution, artificial intelligence, computation, genetics, information processing, and many other fields. Richly illustrated and vividly written, Complexity : A Guided Tour offers a comprehensive and eminently comprehensible overview of the ideas underlying complex systems science, the current research at the forefront of this field, and the prospects for the field's contribution to solving some of the most important scientific questions of our time. (shrink)