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

NON-IDENTITY PRINCIPLE 2)3)4)

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This principle was quite graphically expressed by A. KORZYBSKI, when he stated that "The map is not the territory" (i.e.: the label is not the object, and label on level 2 of abstraction is not to be confused with label on level 1 nor with label on level 3). The Belgian surrealist painter R. MAGRITTE who painted a pipe with the caption: "This is not a pipe", made the same point.

The non-identity principle is the only way out of the paradoxes provoked by self-reference, whose pernicious effects were described by A.N. WHITEHEAD and B. RUSSELL in their "Principia Mathematica" and further considered by H.von FOERSTER, who in turn inspired H. MATURANA in his work on autopoiesis and F. VARELA in his calculus for self-reference.

The non-identity principle leads also to a recursivity of expanding logical layers, as a result of GÖDEL's incompleteness theorem and is related to D. BOHM's concept of generating order (1987).

On psychological ground non-identity leads to non-identification, i.e. to avoid the identification fallacy, which, as shown by KORZYBSKI, opens the road toward mental illness.

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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