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

RATIONALITY (Bounded) 3)4)

The limited degree of rationality in decision making due to the limited computational abilities of the decision-maker.

This concept was established by H. SIMON (1969, p.214-29). As stated by J. CASTI: "SIMON assumed that economic agents can never make truly optimal decisions because they are inherently limited in the amount of information that they can process prior to having to make a decision. Accordingly, for SIMON, all decisions, economic or otherwise, generally lead to a nonoptimal "satisficing" kind of behavior" (1990, p.231).

As a consequence, SIMON finds it very important to reduce the extension of what must be computed: "… if an organism is confronted with the problem of behaving approximately rationally, or adaptively, in a particular environment, the kinds of simplifications that are suitable may depend not only of the characteristics – sensory, neural, and other – of the organism, but equally upon the structure of the environment" (1969, p.215).

It becomes thus of paramount importance to establish efficient criteria for structural simplification of situations, without losing their really significant characteristics. The nature of of an efficient structural simplification process appears clearly through SIMON's parable about Hora and Tempus watchmakers.

Most generally, the two opposite aspects to be taken care of, for simplification previous to decision-making, are the necessity of maintenance conditions of the system and the need for sufficient degrees of freedom.

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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