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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CYBERSEMIOTICS 1)3)

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A synthesis of systems theory, second order cybernetics and the semiotics of Charles S. PEIRCE (N. ORT, 2001, p. 155)

The concept has been introduced by S. BRIER (1995, p.3-14). It is closely related to biological and particularly human communication because:

- only organized entities (i.e. systems) are able to communicate

- communication needs of reciprocal observation in a recursive way

- elaborated meanings appear only through recurrent dialogue among living observers

- signs and signals are the "commodities" traded through communication, which would be impossible without this type of "currency".

BRIER writes: "Cyber-semiotics is based on different view of what a sign – and more specifically a symbol – is than the syntactic denotative concept of cognitive science. It is based on PEIRCE's semiotics" (p.6). Formerly "the mechanistic idea of reason and knowledge – and of logic, of course – has led to a simplistic understanding of how meaning functions in both language and practice. The mechanicist hopes that the causal interaction of symbols can be explained through their syntactic relations" (p.5). Of course this implies communication without the bio-neuro-psychological presence of the communicators.

BRIER writes, refering himself to a text of FODOR which basically endorses the mechanicist view as expressed through the recourse to purely syntactic relations: "There are many arguments against this. Mine are from a biological perspective. I do not think that meaning can be fully represented in a syntactic logical form. Meaning is very much tied to biological existence. Two important aspects of this are the dynamics of biological organization in relation both to evolution and to the dynamics of population. The new concepts developed within second-order cybernetics and biosemiotics, which describe these qualities, are autopoiesis and code-duality. In this paper I want to suggest a combination of these including a semiotic approach. This what I call cyber semiotics" (p.6).

Thus, cyber-semiotics should be understood as cyber-bio-semiotics, in which the "cyber-" aspect should not be reduced to the purely mechanistic feedbacks of Wienerian original cybernetics.

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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