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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ARGUMENT (Ad hoc) 3)

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An hypothesis or conjecture introduced to solve an hitherto insoluble problem.

One wonders if some hypotheses very far away from common sense and not verifiable, introduced for example in some scientific theories, are not simply a way to "get out of the trouble". Changing the basic conditions of some phenomena and/or theories does not seem a very satisfactory option. (See John BARROW: "Is nothing sacred?", 1999).

These doubts were already aired by the french philosopher and epistemologist G. BACHELARD (1884-1962) ("La Philosophie du Non", 1949).

It is however doubtless that the very different abduction (PEIRCE)(1839-1914) is highly valuable in terms of creativity. Without the resulting "educated guesses", knowledge in general, and science in particular, would remain finally bogged down into static conservatism.

The difficulty is to differentiate abduction at its incipient state from useless imagination.

An example of genial abduction was WEGENER's (1880-1930) idea of continental drift, whose value was only recognized various decades later.

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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