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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DENOTATION (Objective) and Connotation 3)

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According to E.von GLASERSFELD: "… one can show that even the commonest words retain a margin of subjective meaning for each individual speaker. Linguists and philosophers of language usually subsume this margin under the term "connotation", and they claim to be able to separate the subjective component neatly from "objective denotation". From our point of view, this claim rests on the illusion that words refer to things in the real world. In our theory …words… refer to subjective experiences of the individual language user. The separation between denotation and connotation thus no longer involves objectivity but becomes a question of greater or lesser fit with the usage of other speakers.

"The result of our investigations in this area is that the meanings of words and longer segments of language are never "shared" with others in the sense that they could be considered the same for all members of a language community. All one can say is that among proficient speakers of a language, meanings are at best compatible, that is, they function similarly in most situations.

"This is an important difference from the artificial, technical communication systems. There, the code that bestows significance on the signals is established and distributed to the communicators before any communication takes place ". (E.von GLASERSFELD, 1996, p.493-4)

The telephone repertory of numbers and subscribers could be a good example.

This is also related to the non-semantic significance of SHANNON's Theory of communication, as specified by SHANNON himself (and generally forgotten).

→ Objectivity; Ontological Skepticism or Agnosticism

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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