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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COMPLEX (Supremacy of the) 1)2)

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H. SABELLI opposes in a dialectic way what he calls the "priority of the simple" and the "supremacy of the complex" (1994).

He means therewith that any complex process dominates and controls more simple ones, but that their existence is conditioned by the prior existence of the simpler ones. For example, the physical processes of the inanimate world are simpler than the biological ones, but, in an organism the physical components are organized by the physiological ones. SABELLI states: "It is thus, in principle possible to study the superior processes through the consideration of the organization of the simpler ones which constitutes them; reciprocally, to understand how the inferior ones are organized, it is necessary to consider the superior ones, which control them" (Ibid).

In this way, the analytic and the synthetic viewpoints become complementary and reciprocally needed.

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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