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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DISTRIBUTION 2)

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"The relation which is commutative and intransitive" (J. FEIBLEMAN & J.W. FRIEND, 1969, p.33).

Grains of sand in a dune do accumulate in a commutative way, as the order in which they accumulate is irrelevant. Moreover, since they are directly in contact (i.e. without any sequential ordering), their distribution is not transitive. This implies that there is no structure of any kind.

However, distribution as defined by FEIBLEMAN and FRIEND is a primitive and rudimentary form of coordination between elements: An environmental force, the wind, modifies at any moment the distribution of the grains of sand on the dune. No distribution of this kind becomes more significant than any other, at least if the environmental force shows a strictly random behavior, which is seldom the case in concrete situations.

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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