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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CATEGORIES FORMATION 3)

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According to D. BOHM and F.D. PEAT: "… categorizing involves two actions: selection and collection. According to the common latin root of these two words, select means "to gather apart" and collect means "to gather together"…

"The second phase of categorization is that some of the things that have been selected (by virtue of their difference from the background) are collected together by regarding their differences as unimportant while, of course, still regarding their common difference from the background as important" (1987, p.112).

All dogs are selected in the animal taxonomy, possibly together with cats and horses, as distinct from, let us say, marine mammals. Thereafter, we collect them in the family canidae, and more specifically in the species canis, in order to distinguish them from any other mammals.

Systemic categorization, while essentially the same, may be used in an inverse way: we abstract very general categories, that can be used to launch transdisciplinary bridges. The hypercycle, for instance, as a generalized systemic model of catalysis, may be observed as a process in numerous systems of very different classes: cyclical chemical reactions, enzymatic reactions in living systems, complex autopoiesis in social systems.

→ "Structural differential".

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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