MEANING ORGANIZER 1)2)
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The pedagogical use of some very general term or concept in order to create correlations among a number of different themes.
R. NUMMELA CAINE and M. CAINE give as an example the concept of "Family", used as a mental frame, or thematic map, to interrelate many quite different types of groupings: Families of humans (in psycho-sociology and anthropology); families of laws, or families of elements (in physics); animal or vegetal families (in natural sciences taxonomies); families of rulers, family trees (in history); families of planets or stars (in astronomy and astrophysics); etc… (1994, p.129).
Of course, such meaning organizers may not even reach the analogies or metaphors levels and should be used with care. They are not much more than mental catalyzers, useful to construct mental maps.
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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