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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CONSTANCY 2)

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The unchanging level of some variable or character of some subsystem for a time.

ASHBY explains: "If some of the variables or subsystems are constant for a time, than during that time the connections through them are reduced functionally to zero, and the effect is as if the connexions had been severed in some material way during that time… Thus a whole, connected system may, if a sufficient proportion of its variables go constant, be temporarily equivalent to a set of unconnected subsystems. Constancies, in other words, can cut a system to pieces" (1960, p.169).

This is one of these original, stimulating & and somewhat paradoxical ideas of ASHBY. Of course, a dosis of constancy, let us say for example of structural constancy in our skeleton, is obviously helpful. But arthrosis would not be.

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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