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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CONCEPT (Context-dependent) 3)

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M. KUBAT comments: "In the real world, concepts are usually not crisp but, rather, tend to change (more or less) their meaning with context" (1992, p.392).

L. THAYER explained this by the existence of what he called "epistemic communities", each with a specific understanding of every concept, obtained by a (progressively shifting) consensus (1972, p.112). In every community, language use is largely an autopoietic process.

According to W. FRITZ, who bases himself on his experiments with artificial intelligent systems (on a digital computer), experiences leading to positive or negative results are registered by the system and their comparison and accumulation derive in "actuation rules" (i.e. prescriptions about suitable action in specific situations), which are stored for possible subsequent use. These rules can undergo reinforcements, be transformed or forgotten. They are created on different levels: practical motor habits (for instance, riding a bicycle); practical habits with a neuro-mental component (driving a car); linguistic habits, etc… For FRITZ, the most abstract and general rules are those called concepts, because they are a multi-use synthesis of many experiments (pers. comm.).

These ideas are consonant with A. KORZYBSKI's structural differential, a general model of the way we extract abstractions at various levels from observed events.

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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