Why complexity can be too simple in translation research

A talk by Anthony Pym for the University of Leicester, May 23, 2023.

[@InsideInterpreting]

My biggest question with all this is whether complexity theory actually adds something. My smaller question is whether the unceasing importation of theories from other fields (sometimes as they're going out of fashion) is that helpful. It might be useful to try to do some deductive theorisation, on the basis of the data we have and findings that have been repeated and then work up from there.
That might give us something that could be exported to other disciplines rather than TIS interdisciplinarity meaning that we've imported ideas and theories from elsewhere.

[@AnthonyPym]

Or interact with data through empirical research (using theories that come from anywhere -- if it helps solve a problem, use it!).

[@InsideInterpreting]

@@AnthonyPym That's pretty much it. I do wonder whether we can solve more problems just by creating theories from existing data than we think.

[@Liliquan]

@@InsideInterpreting There's a rather fallacious assumtion here. That the theories are being imorted for the sake of being imported rather than being impoted because they help explain the data. Here the idea would be Occam's Razor whereby if a theory already exists that explains the data but belongs to another feild then it makes more sense to import it rather than create a new theory to explain the same phenomenon. This atitude of "i'm really the empirical data driven one who only ever uses theory when it accords preciesly with the exact data I find relevant and you guys are just theory lovers trying to be sophisticated with your complicated but ultimately epmty techinical terms...." is teenage level anaylsis.

[@InsideInterpreting]

@@Liliquan Firstly, it's bad faith to start lobbing insults at people or at an analysis. Having been around academia for a while, I think it's entirely legitimate to query whether theories have become fashionable for empirical factors or social ones.
Precisely the point of my response was to query how much complexity actually explains. This point was clear in the video too. It is a vital part of science to ask such questions and to question the wider tendency to import top-down theories from elsewhere, rather than building bottom-up local theories.

[@Liliquan]

@@InsideInterpreting
"the unceasing importation of theories from other fields (sometimes as they're going out of fashion)" is a thinly vieled accusation not a query.
"It might be useful to try to do some deductive theorisation, on the basis of the data we have and findings that have been repeated and then work up from there." is impyling that that isn't already being done and that therfore the importation of theories is merely an attempt not to do that. Whilst you, the heroic thinker questions whether or not we should think before blindly importing. Well, congratulations to you my good sir. Think away.