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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MODEL TRANSFERABILITY 2)3)

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The possibility to generalize a particular model in order to use it in a variety of cases.

P.M. ALLEN et al. propose the following – quite systemic – way to construct general models: "Instead of building a model of a particular system (New York, the insurance market in Belgium, the Aleutian ecosystem) in terms of the salient features of the moment, it may be more informative to study generic models (urban systems, markets, interacting populations…) and the ways that their constituent elements cluster, grow, and structure according to the series of "folds" that their interactive mechanisms impart to them, and the attributes which emerge for different branches of solutions.

"The study of such evolutionary trees may then show us that New York, Brussels, and other cities correspond to different branches of solution of similar models with different parameter values and different histories. Only a "transferable" model of this kind can be used predictively on a particular case, since a model built in terms of a particular problem, and calibrated on it, is a purely descriptive construct incapable of anticipating change. So… a good model must be a metamodel!" (1985, p.76).

"… Or at least derived of such a general frame in accordance with the specific situation under study.

And the best metamodels are those which retrace analogies, homomorphies and isomorphies.

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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