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

ANTISYSTEMIC WAYS 1)

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Linear thinking is still widely practiced and leads to the illusion that a specific issue of problem can be isolated from context or environment and "solved" through some specific intervention, without any side effects In this way a double problem appears:

1) the issue is artificially simplified and, as a result, misunderstood

(J. WARFIELD's underconceptualization)

2) side effects do indeed appear, and in some cases introduce new problems that may even be worse than those whose solution was seeked.

Some are very dramatic, as for example:

- the Aral Sea disaster due to an ill-conceived river harnessing and an irrigation program that took no account of the possible effects on the environment of the whole region.

- the growing resistance of all kinds of pests to chemical insecticides, with for ex. the appearance of "super-mosquitoes" able again to propagate various illnesses that were thought to be controlled (Malaria, yellow fever, etc…)

- the growing resistance of pathogens to antibiotics and chemical medicines

(Tuberculosis, malaria, hospital infections)

This does not mean that new ways to manage these issues (and many others) should not anymore be researched and used . It means that we need to become better chessplayers with nature and, specifically, that we should abandon our narrow views neatly characterized for ex. by the well known motto "et ceteris paribus", because, of course the conditions are never twice absolutely the same; or the illusions that any event has only one cause and produces only one effect, or yet that predictability is always perfectly and completely possible.

The systemic approach is becoming a full need in the complex world that we pretend to manage.

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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