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.

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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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LOGIC AND CULTURE 3)4)

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M. MARUYAMA states that different cultures tend to adhere to different types of reasoning (1994, p. 2-4)

As an example: "the logic that is taught in European and NorthAmerican schools is called "Aristotelian logic", or "Cartesian logic" ", named after Aristotle (384-322BC), the Greek philosopher, and Descartes (1596-1650), a French philosopher. It is also called "Von Neumann logic" by computer people. It is based on classification and hierarchical thinking, and it denies the possibility that many things can cause one another". This is of course the root of rigorous lineal causal determinism, which still dominates most of western thought.

However other views exist in other cultures and even within western cultures some individuals share them. Cybernetics for ex., by introducing feedbacks (positive or negative) is bending deterministic causality onto itself, so to say.

More recently determinism has turned "chaotic", when it became clearer that any event is in fact the complex result of a twisted and complex set of causes concurring to shape some present event.

Maruyama writes that the cybernetic view, and other ones have existed and still exist implicitely in various non-western cultures and that in every culture, "in any society at any time there is heterogeneity of logics among individuals"(Ibid). However one specific type of logic normally becomes dominant in a culture.

Nevertheless, the existence of individuals of other types in the culture always opens the way for possible switches.

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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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