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Since the Greeks, the term system has pervaded the entire western intellectual history, hardly any epoch has renounced the word. To take just one important example: The work Systema Naturae is the most famous work of the Swedish scientist C. von Linné. The tenth edition of Systema Naturae, which has been extensively revised several times, was published in 1753 and is the first book in which plants were depicted in the binominal notation that is still used today. For a long time - for example with Plato, Descartes, Hegel - the term system was used for teaching or for hypothetical teaching. Only since the 20th century has the term system also been used (and in system theories mainly) for carriers of behaviour that can be systematically investigated. While before that the term system was used for the whole, which was identified with the teaching of the whole, I use the more recent term system in a way that I can also speak meaningfully of a system theory, because now I can compare different systems like machines, organisms and institutions, while systems like nature and the world spirit as a whole exist only once each (note 1).
I use the expressions system and system theory terminologically bound by the present system theory. But I want to explain the context of this theory a bit, to give a framework for my arbitrariness.
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A certain type of systems theory was developed during the Second World War in the environment of Norbert Wiener under the term cybernetics. N. Wiener characterized the technologically oriented program as "control and communication in animals and machines". The main focus was on control in feedback mechanisms or how this operative understanding could be used technologically - first in the war machine. The "systems theory", developed by the biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy, existed at that time quite independently of this "systems theory". The systems theory was conceived as a general natural science, which should do justice to the phenomenon "life". Through the translation into the American language, the "General Systems Theory" became the "General Systems Theory", although the term "teaching" would hardly be translated as "theory" by anyone beyond this context. After Talcot Parsons called his sociological functionalism also systems theory, and Jay Forrester made System Dynamics known, Anatol Rapoport sensibly proposed to speak of a "General Systems Theory" when certain formal descriptions are used, because general is at most the mathematics used in such descriptions. Nevertheless, there are plenty of introductions to systems theory, which are of course always as arbitrary as my systems theory. |
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N. Wiener referred to the science he developed, which deals with feedback mechanisms, as cybernetics. N. Wiener discovered that feedback logic, which was developed on the basis of war machinery, could be used as a general scientific language when he worked with the neurophysiologist A. Rosenblueth to get a grip on certain control problems. This gave rise to the idea of interdisciplinary research, in which the various fields were connected via cybernetics ((note 2).
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Cybernetics was one of the most important technologies of the American Army, which organized research as war science during World War II. Among other things, the army also had the rights to N. Wiener's "Cybernetics". Therefore N. Wiener could only publish the book in 1948 for reasons of armament strategy, although it was essentially written in 1940. After the war, many military research projects were converted into civilian projects and financed by foundation funds. The conferences of the cybernetic engineering intelligentia were financed by the Macy Foundation, which also gave the conferences their name. The people who met at the Macy conferences knew each other largely from the research centres of the American army. After the war, thanks to medical sponsorship, psychiatrists and social scientists were also invited, making the conferences truly interdisciplinary and thus doomed to failure. Under the influence of people like G. Bateson, cybernetics became reflexive and the cyberneticist became the focus of research as an observer. Heinz von Foerster, who organised the conferences, developed from this the self-referential approaches, which he called Cybernetics of Cybernetics or Cybernetics of the 2nd Order. |
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Heinz von Foerster continued to work after the war on programmes financed by the army that were not geared towards quick solutions. Among other things, he pursued the idea of bionic computers that would function as neural networks analogous to the human brain. In these contexts, he brought various researchers to his institute, including H. Maturana, who worked on cybernetic perception and invented auptopoiesis. In the same context he also met E. von Glasersfeld, who also worked for the American army on a language translation machine and invented Radical Constructivism (note 3).
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Humberto Maturana describes his systems theory as "autopoiesis", which describes self-producing - i.e. auto and poiesis - machines (note 4). While L. von Bertalanffy bitterly distinguished his systemic theory of the living from the cybernetics of automata, H. Maturana speaks of living machines to express that systems theory describes operations that can be realized in living beings and in machines. H. Maturana distinguishes actual machines from "living machines" precisely because living beings produce themselves. All machines - i.e. the allo- and autopoietic ones - are subject to the same system-theoretical laws. In particular, they are regarded in systems theory as operationally closed. H. Maturana proposes to become aware of the respective observer's point of view by means of "logical accounting", i.e. either to see a system in its environment (observer) or to look at it self-referentially as an observer system (2nd order observer). In the first case one observes other systems, in the second case one observes one's own operating, what I call 2nd order observation. N. Luhmann has taken over the concept of autopoiesis from H. Maturana and applied it to units that are conventionally understood as contexts for action, such as society, art or science, which he sees as "functional systems" in the succession of T. Parsons. In Luhmann's version of autopoiesis, the theorized entities generate themselves by referring themselves exclusively to the communications within the functional system that constitute the system. N. Luhmann argues with G. Spencer Brown 's calculus of forms, which was introduced into systems theory by H. von Foerster . The calculus is a kind of operative algebra, which uses only one operator and thus only one operation and resolves paradoxes with a special procedure called re-entry. |
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N. Luhmann and H. Maturana quickly realised that they were talking about very different autopoieses. H. Maturana speaks of machines, N. Luhmann of functions. In N. Luhmann's autopoiesis, which as a theory represents a sociological theory of society, a completely independent conception of system is developed, which for me has no recognizable relationship to the systems of cybernetics or those of System Dynamics. I will come back to this later in a comparative way, but for the time being I will not include the "sociological systems theory" as well as that of L. von Bertalanffy and T. Parsons. In a certain sense, I am thus moving in the Middle Ages, of which L. von Bertalanffy would probably say that this modern variant is not a systems theory, because it (also) speaks about machines, and N. Luhmann would probably say that this old variant is not a systems theory, because it is still mechanistic/ontologistic. Of course, I see it differently.
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Constructivism has not been founded on systems theory (for reasons of time alone, since it is older than modern systems theory), but the essential arguments can be understood as congruent with systems theory in all phases up to its radical version (note 5). Constructivism is first of all an expression from art studies, where it should express that works of art are not illustrations but creative creations as constructions. Jean Piaget generalized the term "constructivism" in his epistemological "child psychology" and postulated that thinking in general does not make illustrations, but creatively constructively produces reality in the first place (this makes every person an artist, even if J. Beuys demanded much more). For example, if my ballpoint pen disappears from my face because I put a piece of paper on it, I assume that the ballpoint pen is under the paper, although I cannot see it. And if I see it again because I have taken the paper away again, I believe that it is the same ballpoint pen I saw before. Of course I can't really know that, but there are good reasons to believe that the same pen was always there behind the paper. The question is where I got these reasons. J. Piaget called the phenomenon object constancy. Object constancy is an assumption developed by the observer, according to which there are objects that exist even when you don't see them. According to his research, small children do not yet know constant objects; they only live in the present, they only experience the present. For a child at this age, only those objects exist that he or she can perceive. The idea that there are permanent objects he called "La construction du réel", without specifying how this work of art could go. For me, it's just very practical to assume that the pen is there when I'm not looking at it. |
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Have you ever seen the magician David Cooperfield make elephants and trains disappear? Magicians who make objects disappear or conjure them out of a hat play with the ambivalence of the notion of object constancy. Obviously, I couldn't make the pen disappear if you didn't think it was a constantly existing object. On the other hand, I know that this is only a - repeatedly proving itself - construction, which is why I enjoy playing the game of the magicians, in which the construction does not prove itself for once, so much fun.
Ernst von Glasersfeld radically interpreted J. Piaget's constructivism and showed that no reality at all need be assumed when examining the construction of knowledge in the sense of J. Piaget (note 6). For the pen I am seeing again right now is also given to me only by assumptions. It is - when I see it, as when I know that it is hidden behind the paper - part of my sensual experience. And whether or not my experience represents a reality that is independent of me, I cannot but check by my experience. J. von Goethe said that he could see with no instrument more than what his eyes allow. And G. Berkeley wondered whether a tree falling in the middle of the forest also makes sounds when there is no one there to hear them? In (radical) constructivism, all objects are (explicitly) explanations for perceptions. For "perceive", however, I do not perceive by means of my sense organs, but at most something that I perceive sensually - that is, through my sense organs.
The radical constructivism of E. von Glaserfeld makes many explicit references to cybernetics, which I reconstruct. Especially the 2nd order of cybernetics has found its expression in Radical Constructivism, since H. von Foerster and H. Maturana are generally counted among Radical Constructivism, although H. Maturana does not use the term and H. von Foerster explicitly said that he did not want to belong to any school.
S. Ceccato, who realized early on that J. Piaget was actually a cyberneticist and had thus prepared the ground for radical constructivism, also created the essential points of contact with cybernetics in the narrower sense with his operationalism. Systems can generally be understood as carriers of operations, which R. Ashby called transformations.
The extent to which my view is compatible with the context presented here is of course also a matter of discretion. With my systems theory I show how I interpret these approaches.
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