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.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z

MECHANISM 1)

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Any constructed device that can contribute to the operation of a machine.

To be reliable, a mechanism needs to present a foreseable behavior. This supposes that it should be in principle entirely deterministic. This is for instance implied in classical celestial mechanics, as well as in the operation of any constructed appliance.

However, real mechanical devices are in the habit of breaking down because it is impossible in practice to endow them with rigorous determinism in front of unavoidable imperfections of their elements and unforeseable variations in the conditions of their operation. This is also the case of purely mechanistic models, of which the theory of deterministic chaos shows the somewhat narrow limitations.

Mechanisms – either models of machines – are constructed by people, i.e. not self-constructed.

Even when quite complex, a mechanism can never be completely autonomous. It must be maintained and repaired by human experts. It is not autopoietic, i.e. it cannot reproduce its own elements, nor organize them in a self-referent network. The gap between machines and natural systems seems however to be narrowing (G.M. WHITESIDES, 1995, p.114-18), and foresaid may become less true in the future.

"Mechanism" is also frequently used in an analogic or metaphoric sense: the "mechanisms of economy", the "mechanisms of mind", etc… This is objectionable, because it introduces a conceptual bias into research and models.

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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