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

MAGICAL NUMBER SEVEN 2)3)

The maximum number of features that can be perceived in a discriminated way.

Actually, G.A. MILLER, who introduced the notion, is somewhat more tolerant about it and writes about "The magical number seven, plus or minus two", as defining "some limits on our capacity for processing information" (1956, p.81-97).

Basing himself on numerous experiments, MILLER came to the following conclusions:

"… the span of absolute judgment and the span of immediate memory impose severe limitations on the amount of information that we are able to receive, process, and remember.

"… the process of recoding is a very important one in human psychology (and)… in particular… linguistic recoding… that seems to me to be the very lifeblood of the thought process.

"… the concepts and measures provided by the theory of information provide a quantitative way of getting at some of these questions. The theory provides us with a yardstick for calibrating our stimulus materials and for measuring the performance of our subjects" (p.79-80).

MILLER's views are significant for various systemic concepts and models:

- our capacity to discriminate our perceptions are severely limited and we are easily exposed to information overload.

- it may be more useful in some cases at least to train ourselves in the perception of complex compounded stimuli units, possibly synthetized through various levels (for instance micro-, macro- and mega-, or hierarchical as in H. SIMON's "Hora and Tempus parable").

- the well organized perception of patterns of correlations and the construction of gestalts should be very useful.

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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