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

GOAL-SEEKING SYSTEM 1)3)

← Back

W. R. ASHBY writes: "Every stable system has the property that if displaced from a state of equilibrium and released, the subsequent movement is so matched to the initial displacement that the system is brought back to the state of equilibrium. A variety of disturbances will therefore evoke a variety of matched reactions.

"This pairing of the line of return to the initial displacement has sometimes been regarded as "intelligent" and peculiar to living things. But a simple refutation is given by the ordinary pendulum: if we displace it to the right, it develops a force which tends to move it to the left; and if we displace it to the left, it develops a force which tends to move it to the right. Noticing that the pendulum reacted with forces which though varied in direction always pointed towards the centre, the mediaeval scientist would have said "the pendulum seeks the centre". By this phrase he would have recognised that the behaviour of a stable system may be described as "goal seeking". Without introducing any metaphysical implications we may recognize that this type of behaviour does occur in the stable dynamic systems" (1960, p.54).

→ "LE CHATELIER Principle".

As human systems (personal and social) describe their goals and pursue them in a willful way (i.e. an at least seemingly not rigorously pre-determined way), one may wonder if the words "goal-seeking" should be used for all types of systems.

Even a biological system as an animal, which exhibits many kinds of complex activities is not simply responding passively to a stimulus, which is the case with the pendulum.

In any case, a true goal-seeking seems to necessarily imply corrective feedback.

ASHBY himself states: "machines with feedback are not subject to the oft-repeated dictum that machines must act blindly and cannot correct their errors" (p.55) and moreover: "A system which possesses feedback is usually actively stable or actively unstable; and whether it is stable or unstable depends on the quantitative details of the particular arrangement" (p.54).

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:

© 2020 BCSSS Contact/Imprint