International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics

A method aiming at a better integration of specialized knowledge with a global understanding of complex situations and systems.

Not only did instruction slowly pushed education (psychical and social) out of the classrooms and auditories. It has also gravely curtailed its own scope by encouraging more and more narrow specialization in evermore limited and isolated fields. This undoubtedly corresponds to the practical needs of our highly technified contemporary societies and seems thus unavoidable.

It however leads to a growing segregation between evermore numerous and particularized disciplines, and this destroys the capacity for synthesis, intercommunication and global approach to complexity.

Systemic instruction seeks to restore such a capacity for synthesis by creating a conceptual and methodological language usable to create bridges between specialists from different disciplines.

The acquisition of any specific knowledge seems to be a process of creation of frames of reference, i.e. the specific cerebral organization which reflects these frames and the capacity to modify them, or create new ones, when necessary.

This is probably closely related to the progressive organization by adequate training of neural circuits in the neocortex.

The systemic language contributes to this process by the use of fundamental and confirmed analogies and, still better when possible, homomorphies and isomorphies between structural and/or functional models elicited from various disciplines. It also establishes general concepts related to the global aspects of the situations and systems under observation.

This dictionary aims to make a critical census as complete as possible of these analogies, homomorphies, isomorphies and concepts as well as of the ways and means to use them.