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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SYNTAX 1)3)

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"The rules by which symbols can be concateneted to form legitime strings" (H.von FOERSTER, 1981, p.217)

Such rules form an interconnected and interactive set and structures any type of language or signs system.

However, as argued by J. SEARLE, "no amount of syntax alone (i.e. symbol shuffling) can ever give rise to semantics" (Quoted by J. CASTI, who adds the comment that the classical symbol shuffling computer "can have no understanding of the meaning of the symbols it manipulates" (1994, p.163).

von FOERSTER observes: "… semantics, i.e., the rules that give meaning to those strings, was long a dirty word. This is not so any longer after it has been recognized that syntactic ambiguities are disambiguated in the semantic domain" (Ibid).

Semantics is thus at the metalevel of validation for syntactic constructions. This should be obvious, as it is perfectly possible to construct non-sensical strings of symbols without any violation of syntactic rules ("The dog burns the silken palmtree"), or even that such strings become meaningful only if and when the receiver knows the semantic frame in which they make sense. ("Mtoto alivunjika sahani"… a perfectly significant sentence in Kiswahili).

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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