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.

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COMPLEXITY (Unorganized) 2)

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The statistical relations between a great number of seemingly not causally ordered elements.

According to I. BLAUBERG, V. SADOVSKY and E. YUDIN: "(Classical science) was chiefly concerned with solving two-variables problems, establishing the causal relations between two phenomena, determining linear causal chains for a relatively small number of objects" (1977, p.200).

As noted by these authors, this was basically deductive science, and could not cope with "… the problem of discovering the diversity of links and relations existing inside the analyzed object and its interactions with other objects" (p.201).

The closest approach to this type of problems was classical statistics, whose laws are basically quantitative and allow merely to tally, classify and extrapolate or interpolate (without much security), i.e. look for some hidden order within "a great number of seemingly not causally ordered elements", as for example in composite systems.

The expression "Unorganized complexity" was coined by W. WEAVER in 1948, and commented by him as referred to problems "… in which the number of variables is very large, and in which each of the many variables has a behavior which is individually erratic, or perhaps totally unknown. However,… the system as a whole possesses certain orderly and anaIyzable average properties".(1948, p.536).

In G. WEINBERG's words such systems being "… sufficiently random in their behavior… are sufficiently regular to be studied statistically" (1975, p.16).

WEAVER observed however that in this way, the enormous domain of systems with more than two, but less than an astronomical number of variables was still left untouched (Ibid). Chaos theory is now progressively covering this ground. (See G. BROEKSTRA, 1994, p.1099).

Categories

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