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

LEARNING (Systemic) 1)3)4)

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A set of ways and means to acquire an integrated understanding of ourselves, our society, our environment, and all the significant interrelations which connect them.

What we need – all of us – is a meta knowledge, a way to look at this complex world in all its stances and to understand what is going on and what may, possibly, happen.

Let us however not be blinded by high sounding "meta-knowledge". Many of our forefathers did possess at least something of it, passed along by their cultural heritage as "popular wisdom" (fables, proverbs, myths, scriptures, etc.). These tales and sayings proposed, in a covert way, quite general interpretations for many events. This is precisely what our actual instructional and educational process does not offer anymore. Our excessively specialized and micronized knowledge bars us the understanding of global situations, which is precisely what we must recuperate.

We all became all-out mecanicists-voluntarists easily devoid of common sense. The dominant scientific paradigm led us to conceive and understand everyone of our projects (material, personal or social) as a rather simple "machine" that we construct on the base of some linear cause-effect principle in order to reach some clear-cut and defined result. Most of us never doubt that such aims will be necessarily attained, just in the way we did plan our project. Nevertheless, we now have thousands of examples of precisely the opposite.

This is because we ignore, at least in our practice, nonlinear multiple connections, and have a very deficient perception of time dimensions (which leads us to unwarranted extrapolations).

Systemic learning should aim at the creation of a good understanding of every kind of complex systems.

Generally speaking, this suppose the intuitive and later on, the rational appreciation of their constitution, inner workings, their transformations and interrelations among themselves and with their respective environments.

General systemics and cybernetics offer an ever widening set of isomorphies, models and methods to obtain such results.

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]

We thank the following partners for making the open access of this volume possible:

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