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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CORRELATION (Spurious) 1)

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According to some early critics of G.S.T., most analogies lead only to senseless comparisons between widely different entities (R.C. BUCK, 1956).

Of course, analogy is merely a weak heuristic tool… but is it better than none. Moreover, an analogy may lead to an homology or isomorphy, i.e. a more formalized model that can be applied to different objects of study.

BERTALANFFY writes: "Buck's criticism is, in principle, the same as if one would criticize NEWTON's law because it draws a loose "analogy" between apples, planets, ebb and tide and many other entities; or if one would declare the theory of probability meaningless because it is concerned with the "analogy" of games of dice, mortality statistics, molecules in a gas, the distribution of hereditary characteristics, and a host of other phenomena" (1962, p.9).

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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