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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LEARNING (Reinforcement in) 2)

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The strenghtening of a behavioral or mental pattern by the occurence or experimental introduction of a relevant stimulus.

G. BATESON remarks: "The notion is that random changes occur, in the brain or elsewhere, and that the results of such random change are selected for survival by processes of reinforcement and extinction. In basic theory, creative thought has come to ressemble the evolutionary process in its fundamentally stochastic nature".

However: "In both the theory of evolution and the theory of learning,… the word'random' is conspicuously undefined and the word is not an easy one to define… Underlying both the stochastic theory of evolution and that of learning, there are unstated theories regarding the determinants of the probabilities in question. If however, we ask about change in these determinants, we shall again be given stochastic answers, so that the word'random', upon which all of these explanations turn, appears to be a word whose meaning is hierarchically structured" (1973, p.226).

Once again, we find ourselves confronted to the basic problem of the meaning or our concepts. In our definition "strenghtening" and "relevant" imply the existence of some former structure, already more or less autopoietic: How was it instated?

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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