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

BLACK BOX METHOD 2)3)

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"A strategy for investigating a complex object without knowledge or assumptions about its internal make-up, structure or parts" (K. KRIPPENDORFF, 1986, p.7)

The general idea of this method is to send inputs into the system and to monitor the resulting outputs, making conjectures about the internal processes within the system that can explain how a specified input produces a specific output. In general, systems are "grey" boxes, i.e. entities about which at least something is known.

The black box method is widely applied in engineering, biology and other sciences, because of its heuristic value.

However, as stated by KRIPPENDORFF: "The isomorphism between the black box and its model, which the method aims to establish, does not imply structural correspondences between the two" (Ibid). One should thus be careful and not extract unwarranted conclusions from experiments that could be incomplete or ill interpreted.

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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