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

RECURSION 1)

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A mechanism of circular self-reproduction of components and/or relationships in a system.

Or: The cyclical creation or recreation of elements or interrelations in a system through the application to existing elements or interrelations of a specified feedback or set of feedbacks.

The feedbacks are specified within the system from its very autogenesis on, through organizational closure, of which recursion is practically the signature.

An example is fractal branching.

Recursion can in principle be applied on its own results without limits.

F. FRISCHKNECHT and J.P.van GIGCH observe: "Recursion is a finite prescription of an infinite process" (1989, p.243), and: "Nonlinear feedback (i.e. recursion) is the novelty that burst into physics challenging its old axiomatic models. Recursion replaced mathematical axiomatization by constructivism, state by process, models by metamodels" (p.249). The same authors state the very important conclusion that these metamodels "… only furnish second-order knowledge, they do not predict, they just simulate. This is the only way to understand complexity: to know its rules, the states being unpredictable" (Ibid).

"Unpredictable" should be possibly better replaced by "only imprecisely predictable", as chaotic randomness is still basically deterministic.

Recursion is an essential feature of the autopoiesis theory. Organizational closure, i.e. the permanent self-reconstruction by a system is entirely dependent on recursion. This is seemingly also true in the psychology of identity, in psycho-pathology and in social and cultural systems.

Recursion seems to operate only within networks (which necessarily possess rules of self-organization and self-reproduction).

A formal calculus of recursive self-reference has been developed by G. SPENCER BROWN (1969) and extended by F. VARELA (1975).

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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