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

PHENOMENA 3)

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The perceptions we obtain from reality in itself.

The Kantian Ding an sich is never directly accessible to us. It corresponds to KORZYBSKI's "territory".

In BATESON's words: "The territory never gets in at all… Always the process of representation will filter it out so that the mental world is only maps of maps of maps, ad infinitum. All 'phenomena' are literally 'appearences'" (1973, p.429).

In this sense, what General Systems Research is trying to do is merely to find out very general and coherent patterns for isomorphic representation between the complex phenomena that we call systems at different levels of complexity (see for example A KORZYBSKI's "structural differential" and J. MILLER's taxonomy of living systems).

R. FUENMAYOR interestingly describes phenomena as "distinctions made on a background"

The crux of the matter is of course, who makes the distinctions and on the base of which frame of reference, or theory.

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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