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

ORGANIZATION ("Good") 1)2)

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Basing himself on a comment by ASHBY according to which the properties of constraints "are not intrinsic to the thing but are relational between observer and thing" (1968, p.109), W.R. WINBURN states: "This means that no organization can be good, useful, functional, etc., in any absolute sense; rather, such qualities are relative to the context or viewpoint of the observer. Yet, for any given context, we find that good organization is of the nature of a relation between the set of disturbances and the system 's goals" (1991, p.562).

"Good" seems here to express fitness. Still, our appreciation of fitness is always an observer's view. However, systems, well or ill organized, survive or perish independently of their observers. We need thus to sharpen our observation in order to limit discrepancies between what we see as "good" or "fit" and what it may be for the concrete system we are interested in.

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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