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

COMMUNICATION as CONTEXT depending 1)2)

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BATESON bluntly states: "… without context, there is no communication" (1973, p.378) and explains his view through an example: "A phoneme exists as such only in combination with other phonemes which make up a word. The word is the context of the phoneme. But the word only exists as such – only has 'meaning' – in the larger context of the utterance, which again has meaning only in a relationship" (Ibid). He could have added:"… and in a specified language".

D. BOHM and F.D. PEAT express a very similar idea when they write: "In communication, meaning unfolds in the structure of the language, and meaning unfolds into the whole community and unfolds from the community into each person… "The explicate form of all this is the structure of society, and the implicate form is the content of the culture, which extends into the consciousness of each person" (1982, p.185).

This could indeed be considered a general ecological principle: nothing makes sense or has survival value without properly defined connection and communication with a specific context.

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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