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

TOKEN 1)3)

Something that serves as a representation of some registered experience.

H.von FOERSTER thus explained his use of this term: "Objects and events are representations of relations determined by modes of internal computations: hence "objects" appear to reside exclusively (sic) in the subject's own experience of his sensory/motor coordination. The externality of communal space is established within the social context of other subjects; also recursively experiencing "objects" as tokens of sensory/motor closure. Thus tokens for stable behavior are "tokens for Eigen-functions" (1981, p.274).

In this extremist view, objects (or "objects"?) are merely a kind of illusive intersubjective currency. This is acceptable only if one maintains a cautious ontological agnosticism, but should not lead to a radical negation of "outside there" reality, which would carry us back to pure solipsism.

This must be part of what a French humorist called "Ies dangers de I'auto" (i.e. of auto-poiesis).

R. GLANVILLE saves the point as he writes about the common view of "objects "in se"with their own description built in" that "this meaning is very different from the notion of "object"as "built through the mutually complementary roles of observer and observed" (in G. KLIR (Ed.): "Applied General Systems Research, 1978)

In another paper GLANVILLE also stated that a non-observed object "inhabits the universe unknown to others" (1978)

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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