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

PARTITION 2)

← Back

The division in subsets of the model of a system.

St. BEER writes: "Obviously sets can have subsets. The commonest form of partition in ordinary life, and particularly in the company organization, is to define a set of subsets which exhaust the set and do not overlap" (1968, p.106).

This may be needed in order to construct a manageable model of the system. We should however remember that no-overlapping is fictional: without overlaps, the system would not be connected, and so, would not be a system at all. An unconfortable result of this is pointed out by M.C.LE DUC: "To date, nobody has conceived a general, teachable and explicit method for partitioning problems. Most scientific papers do not articulate how and why a particular partition, and not another, has been chosen. Analysis is an intuitive process that a competent scientist has learnt by experience. The worst result of this precept is that many take the part for the whole… Just walk into an hospital or a university" (1992, p.919).

A. EDWARDS fractalization of VENN diagrams seems to open a way to partition without loss of connections (1989).

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]

We thank the following partners for making the open access of this volume possible:

© 2020 BCSSS Contact/Imprint