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

TRANSITIVITY 2)

"Relation of two parts through a middle part" (after J. FEIBLEMAN & J. FRIEND, 1969, p.32).

A typical transitive relation is: If AC, nothing precise can be said about the relation of A to C.

FEIBLEMAN and FRIEND give the following example: "… The parts of an apple are transitive, for if the skin… encloses the flesh, and the flesh encloses the seeds, then the skin encloses the seeds". Conversely "An aggregation of three grains of sand is intransitive, since the extreme parts are not related to each other by a middle part" (Ibid).

It is possibly not that simple. In composite systems, we find a kind of global statistical transitivity. The set of the grains of sand, or the set of gregarious locusts has an influence on the individuals, whose behavior become oriented. And the set is obviously composed of these same individuals who acquired some collective properties, due to their aggregation.

This is one of these cases where an abstract definition of a concept must be carefully scrutinized, in order to avoid semantic pitfalls.

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]


We thank the following partners for making the open access of this volume possible: