BCSSS

International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics

2nd Edition, as published by Charles François 2004 Presented by the Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science Vienna for public access.

About

The International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics was first edited and published by the system scientist Charles François in 1997. The online version that is provided here was based on the 2nd edition in 2004. It was uploaded and gifted to the center by ASC president Michael Lissack in 2019; the BCSSS purchased the rights for the re-publication of this volume in 200?. In 2018, the original editor expressed his wish to pass on the stewardship over the maintenance and further development of the encyclopedia to the Bertalanffy Center. In the future, the BCSSS seeks to further develop the encyclopedia by open collaboration within the systems sciences. Until the center has found and been able to implement an adequate technical solution for this, the static website is made accessible for the benefit of public scholarship and education.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z

AMBIGUITY 3)

The condition resulting from a sign or signal bearing different possible meanings for an observer.

Ambiguity results of the lack of a clearly selective context to allow for the clarification of meaning. It is a perceptive situation, related to languages (spoken, written, pictural or other). E. BUCHBERGER observes that: "Multiple semantic meanings cannot generally been solved in an isolated way and lead to considerable difficulties" (1987, p.57)

Any receiver possesses his/her repertory of interpretations of signals, but this repertory has been formerly learned.

If, for example, we look at the well known young woman, old woman picture, only one of both possible perceptive gestalt intervenes for us at any moment, exclusive of the other. The potential for ambiguity is in the picture, but it reveals itself only through the shifting glance of the observer.

According to A. RAPOPORT: "Even mathematical statements, which most people consider to be absolutely exact, and therefore either absolutely true or absolutely false, have a certain penumbra of ambiguity as they are usually stated. This ambiguity is less characteristic of mathematical statements than of others, but it is there nevertheless because certain qualifications are likely to be tacitly assumed in every statement. It would simply take too long to make a statement irreprochably unambiguous" (1967, p.292)

This problem is obviously related to the need to recurrently resort to metalevels for distinction or validation (GÖDEL's incompleteness theorem)

Categories

  • 1) General information
  • 2) Methodology or model
  • 3) Epistemology, ontology and semantics
  • 4) Human sciences
  • 5) Discipline oriented

Publisher

Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science(2020).

To cite this page, please use the following information:

Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science (2020). Title of the entry. In Charles François (Ed.), International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics (2). Retrieved from www.systemspedia.org/[full/url]


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