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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HYPOTHETICALITY 1)3)

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The nature of "situations in which we have to make life-or-death decisions but are unable to perform the experiments or tests needed to gain much-needed information about the situation before having to make the decision". (J. CASTI, 1997, p.8 - after Wolf HAEFELE, former director of the German Nuclear Research Center in Juelich).

The situations alluded to are complex ones, in which an important number of elemental processes in interaction should be considered simultaneously, In such cases the dynamics of the situation generally becomes chaotic and predictability is possible only within the limits of a statistically reduced determinism.

In J. WARFIELD words, our problen in such cases is to "transform complexity into understanding" (1999, work in progress, pers. comm.)

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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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