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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CONSENSUS AND CONSENSUALITY 3)4)

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Following R. HARNDEN: "With respect to a constitutive ontology as proposed by Humberto MATURANA and based on a refined physio-psychology of perception and conceptualization, consensuality is about shifting currents of discourse and understanding in the present they realize.

"This is not the same as "consensus", which implies transcending such shifting currents in order to secure some sort of "meta" vantage and be able to pronounce this the "norm" or "average" (as agreement)" (1990, p.298).

In other words, consensuality is a psycho-social process, whose result is consensus, a stable evaluation, which may of course be reviewed at any moment by reversing to the consensuality process.

Consensuality protects human groups from conceptual sclerosis and their organizations from blockage.

However, it would be excessive to admit that all scientific theory or model can be refuted (or falsified in Popper's terminology) simply by some new psycho-social consensus. In AULIN's words "NEWTON was never refuted by EINSTEIN" (1987, p.76): There is "something" in the real world that, at some scale and within defined conditions, endows some models with a bedrock stability that no shift of consensus could alter. After all, classical gravitation calculus is what permitted the successful steering of the PIONEER and VOYAGER probes, three bodies problem notwithstanding.

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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