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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PROBABILISTIC VIEWPOINT 1)3)

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Science in general remained mostly deterministic till late in the 19th century, a paradigm perfectly expressed by the famous Laplacian deterministic statement.

The probabilistic view entered, for example through BOLTZMANN statistical dynamics, as a more or less opposed complement to causal determinism. It appeared as a kind of stochastic legality, merely juxtaposed to rigorous determinism, in the worst case.

The first inklings that these dichotomic views were too simplistic came through POINCARÉ'S n-bodies problem, which showed that even celestial mechanics could not be absolutely deterministic. The trajectories vagaries in POINCARÉ phases space were the first indications that determinism and randomness were more closely connected than hitherto believed.

The chaotic behavior recently discovered in many phenomena has emphasized the existence of movements which are globally deterministic, but anyhow unpredictable, or nearly so. This is also the case with emergent dissipative structures, that depend on random nucleation at bifurcation points. As a result, it is now becoming widely admitted that determinism and randomness are inseparable aspects of processes and systems behavior.

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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