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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FRACTIONATION 2)3)4)

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The break-up of a system "into a spectrum of simpler subsystems" (R. ROSEN, 1972, p.53).

This term is used by ROSEN, in correspondence with the reductionist methodology. He rightly states: "Implicit in this are two crucial hypothesis, of a system-theoric character: namely, that any physicochemical system, however complex, can be resolved into a spectrum of fractions such that a) each of the fractions, in isolation, is capable of being completely understood, and, most important, that b) any property of the original system can be reconstructed from the relevant properties of the fractional subsystems. This last hypothesis is demonstrably false for many systems, including most of those of biological interest. A simple physical counterexample is a system of three gravitating masses in space (three-body problem)" (Ibid).

Since ROSEN wrote these lines, new complex models (Catastrophes, hypercycles, deterministic chaos), better adapted to the global study of complex systems, have appeared.

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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