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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MACRODETERMINACY 1)2)

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"The situation which occurs in a system that may be treated as deterministic at the higher levels (or at the level of the whole itself) but where the lower-order components of the system may not admit to determinacy" (adapted from J SUTHERLAND, 1973, p.42).

SUTHERLAND comments: "… this may mean that the system itself is capable of prediction (or amenable to some sort of finite-state system analysis technique) even though we cannot treat the parts or lower-order components as deterministic". This reminds of Jvon NEUMANN's reliable systems made from unreliable components.

At the time SUTHERLAND offered his definition (1973), research on chaos had just made a start. It is now becoming clear that microlevel relative indeterminacy is the result of the multiplicity of independent local causes within the system. This is the background reason why, as stated by the same author (in relation to human systems): "… when systems under treatment begin to depart from the most simple kind of mechanisms, both our mathematics and our logic (even coupled with a large computer) fail to be able to manage the interactions and componential permutations of behavior potentially availabe" (p.45).

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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