Artykuł stanowi krótkie omówienie zagadnienia złożoności w naukach społecznych i politycznych. Zawiera refleksję dotyczącą paradygmatycznych wyzwań, przed jakimi stoi dyscyplina nauk społecznych, które zostały zaprezentowane w Raporcie Komisji Gulbenkiana na rzecz restrukturyzacji nauk społecznych. Postuluje on przełamanie przestarzałego podziału pomiędzy naukami przyrodniczymi i społecznymi oraz wprowadzenie bardziej holistycznego, interdyscyplinarnego podejścia do badanych zjawisk, struktur i procesów. W artykule staram się dowieść, że jest to możliwe do osiągnięcia dzięki szerszej adaptacji paradygmatu złożoności. Zostały przedstawione podstawowe założenia teorii złożoności, zwłaszcza w kontekście jej relacji z teorią chaosu, oraz cechy węzłowe systemów złożonych. Ponadto zarysowano także pewne wątki złożoności obecne w badaniach politologicznych.

System-based research remains an important yet usually outdated and internally contradictory approach in political science and international relations. Based on concepts borrowed from physiology, cybernetics, and general system theory, the system-based approach popularised in the 1960s was cast away as outdated and ill-focused. Despite those systems, the theory was developed in natural sciences, eventually creating a paradigm more applicable to domestic and international politics. The weakest element of past systems (like the one proposed by D. Easton) was that they did not allow for a sudden and catastrophic transformation and lacked emergence. This paper aims to present a model that would allow for the system’s ordinary and catastrophic transformation. The complex adaptive system features were defined using relevant literature on a paradigm of complexity. Connecting it with the propositions of D. Easton, R. Axelrod, and M. Cohen, as well as R. Jervis, such a model was constructed. The theoretical introduction is supplanted with a general case study of the early phases of the Arab Spring in Tunisia. The model mirrors the complex systems’ dynamics, considering the agent-structure problem.

Complexity of the System of Past Tenses: Comparison of Italian and Bulgarian

Comparative studies of complexity have recently provoked the growing interest of linguists. In this paper, we compare the grammatical structures for the expression of past actions in Italian and in Bulgarian, based on the theories of linguistic complexity. The linguistic structures’ complexity is generally examined from two main points of view: 1) absolute complexity and 2) user or relative complexity. The research on absolute complexity aims to measure linguistic structures with objective criteria, while the studies based on the second meaning of the term investigate the subjective perception of individuals speaking or studying one or more languages; this latter approach is related primarily to language teaching. Even if each individual study generally favours only one of the two perspectives, we believe the correlations between the degree of structural complexity and the difficulties for the user should be considered and measured. The proposed analysis, consequently, is based on the comparison between the grammatical structures for the expression of the past but also involves an empirical study on the translation work from Italian into Bulgarian. Contrastive work consists in the isolation and measurement of units, such as the number of tenses, modes, and rules in the two languages, and is based on the students’ translation practices in Italian philology at Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski and the difficulties they experience when translating the past tenses.