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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ANALYSIS 3)

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"The separation of an intellectual or substantial whole into constituents for individual study" (The American Heritage Dictionary)

One of the most severe and persistent semantic muddle is the careless use of the term "analysis", even by systemists.

When a system is "analyzed", most or all of the nonlineal interrelations among its parts are unwittingly severed. As jokingly stated by J.L. LEMOIGNE, cutting a chicken into slices like a sausage does not yield an intelligible representation of the chicken. (1990)… and it should be quite more difficult to do.

Worse still, many people are not even aware of this problem. And different observers may "slice the chicken" in different ways, none very faithful to the original.

Analysis is perfect on its own (studying the components and at most their linear relations), but, as it generally leads to cutting the more complex interrelations between interacting parts, it is never a satisfactory substitute for the systemic global view, which is also indispensable for the study of complex systems.

Ideally, analysis should always be conjugated with synthesis, i.e. the synthetic view of the whole. Moreover this should also be a back and forth movement: analysis is useful and makes sense only in relation to the synthetic view and synthesis without a good knowledge of the interacting parts does not make much sense because it offers merely empty generalities that do not offer tools for action

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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