General System Theory: Foundations, Development, Applications
General System Theory: Foundations, Development, Applications
Ludwig Von Bertalanffy
FOREWORD
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Von Bertalanffy’s project was grounded in the observation that systemic processes recur isomorphically across many disciplines. For instance, systems can be stabilized by means of feedback in the physical world (e.g. atmospheric pressure in weather systems), the biological world (homeostatic temperature regulation in mammals), and the social world (e.g. co-operation in family units). His suggestion was that these isomorphic processes reflect underlying laws applying to systems in general, which would therefore be applicable across all the disciplines.
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the 1920s and 30s von Bertalanffy suggested that this conflict could be resolved by what he, initially, termed an “organismic” approach—the idea that it is laws of organization that distinguish organisms from non-living matter.
Systems Everywhere
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Systems, of course, have been studied for centuries, but something new has been added… . The tendency to study systems as an entity rather than as a conglomeration of parts is consistent with the tendency in contemporary science no longer to isolate phenomena in narrowly confined contexts, but rather to open interactions for examination and to examine larger and larger slices of nature.
On the History of Systems Theory
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As with every new idea in science and elsewhere, the systems concept has a long history. Although the term “system” itself was not emphasized, the history of this concept includes many illustrious names. As “natural philosophy,” we may trace it back to Leibniz; to Nicholas of Cusa with his coincidence of opposites; to the mystic medicine of Paracelsus; to Vico’s and ibn-Khaldun’s vision of history as a sequence of cultural entities or “systems”; to the dialectic of Marx and Hegel, to mention but a few names from a rich panoply of thinkers
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Nevertheless, the necessity and feasibility of a systems approach became apparent only recently. Its necessity resulted from the fact that the mechanistic scheme of isolable causal trains and meristic treatment had proved insufficient to deal with theoretical problems, especially in the biosocial sciences, and with the practical problems posed by modern technology.
Trends in Systems Theory
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A verbal model is better than no model at all, or a model which, because it can be formulated mathematically, is forcibly imposed upon and falsifies reality. Theories of enormous influence such as psychoanalysis were unmathematical or, like the theory of selection, their impact far exceeded mathematical constructions which came only later and cover only partial aspects and a small fraction of empirical data.
Science and Society
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Scientific control of society is no highway to Utopia.
The System Concept
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A system can be defined as a set of elements standing in interrelations. Interrelation means that elements, p, stand in relations, R, so that the behavior of an element p in R is different from its behavior in another relation, R′. If the behaviors in R and R′ are not different, there is no interaction, and the elements behave independently with respect to the relations R and R′.
Growth
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Mathematically trivial as these examples are, they illustrate a point of interest for the present consideration, namely the fact that certain laws of nature can be arrived at not only on the basis of experience, but also in a purely formal way. The equations discussed signify no more than that the rather general system of equation (3.1), its development into a Taylor series and suitable conditions have been applied. In this sense such laws are “a priori,” independent from their physical, chemical, biological, sociological, etc., interpretation. In other words, this shows the existence of a general system theory which deals with formal characteristics of systems, concrete facts appearing as their special applications by defining variables and parameters. In still other terms, such examples show a formal uniformity of nature.
Wholeness, Sum, Mechanization, Centralization
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In Lord Russell’s book (1948), we find a rather astonishing rejection of the “concept of organism.” This concept states, according to Russell, that the laws governing the behavior of the parts can be stated only by considering the place of the parts in the whole. Russell rejects this view. He uses the example of an eye, the function of which as a light receptor can be understood perfectly well if the eye is isolated and if only the internal physico-chemical reactions, and the incoming stimuli and outgoing nerve impulses, are taken into account. “Scientific progress has been made by analysis and artificial isolation… . It is therefore in any case prudent to adopt the mechanistic view as a working hypothesis, to be abandoned only where there is clear evidence against it. As regards biological phenomena, such evidence, so far, is entirely absent.” It is true that the principles of summativity are applicable to the living organism to a certain extent. The beat of a heart, the twitch of a nerve-muscle preparation, the action potentials in a nerve are much the same if studied in isolation or within the organism as a whole. This applies to those phenomena we shall define later as occurring in highly “mechanized” partial systems. But Russell’s statement is profoundly untrue with respect exactly to the basic and primary biological phenomena. If you take any realm of biological phenomena, whether embryonic development, metabolism, growth, activity of the nervous system, biocoenoses, etc., you will always find that the behavior of an element is different within the system from what it is in isolation. You cannot sum up the behavior of the whole from the isolated parts, and you have to take into account the relations between the various subordinated systems and the systems which are super-ordinated to them in order to understand the behavior of the parts. Analysis and artificial isolation are useful, but in no way sufficient, methods of biological experimentation and theory.
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As a rule, the organization of physical wholes, such as atoms, molecules, or crystals, results from the union of pre-existing elements. In contrast, the organization of biological wholes is built up by differentiation of an original whole which segregates into parts. An example is determination in embryonic development, when the germ passes from a state of equipotentiality to a state where it behaves like a mosaic or sum of regions which develop independently into definite organs. The same is true in the development and evolution of the nervous system and of behavior starting with actions of the whole body or of large regions and passing to the establishment of definite centers and localized reflex arcs, and for many other biological phenomena.
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Mechanization, however, is never complete in the biological realm; even though the organism is partly mechanized, it still remains a unitary system; this is the basis of regulation and of the interaction with changing demands of the environment. Similar considerations apply to social structures.
Approaches and Aims in Systems Science
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Up to recent times the field of science as a nomothetic endeavor, i.e., trying to establish an explanatory and predictive system of laws, was practically identical with theoretical physics. Consequently, physical reality appeared to be the only one vouchsafed by science. The consequence was the postulate of reductionism, i.e. the principle that biology, behavior and the social sciences are to be handled according to the paragon of physics, and eventually should be reduced to concepts and entities of the physical level. Owing to developments in physics itself, the physicalistic and reductionist theses became problematic, and indeed appeared as metaphysical prejudices. The entities about which physics is talking—atoms, elementary particles and the like —have turned out to be much more ambiguous than previously supposed: not metaphysical building blocks of the universe, but rather complicated conceptual models invented to take account of certain phenomena of observation. On the other hand, the biological, behavioral and social sciences have come into their own. Owing to the concern with these fields on the one hand, and the exigencies of a new technology, a generalization of scientific concepts and models became necessary which resulted in the emergence of new fields beyond the traditional system of physics.
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What has been said are not metaphysical or philosophic contentions. We are not erecting a barrier between inorganic and living nature which obviously would be inappropriate in view of intermediates such as viruses, nucleoproteins and self-duplicating units. Nor do we protest that biology is in principle “irreducible to physics” which also would be out of place in view of the tremendous advances of physical and chemical explanation of life processes. Similarly, no barrier between biology and the behavioral and social sciences is intended. This, however, does not obviate the fact that in the fields mentioned we do not have appropriate conceptual tools serving for explanation and prediction as we have in physics and its various fields of application.
This clarifies the confusion I had in the previous highlight, I guess.
Advances of General System Theory
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Furthermore, that precarious mental equilibrium must not be disturbed: Hence, in what rather ironically is called progressive education, the anxiety not to overload the child, not to impose constraints and to minimize all directing influences— with the result of a previously unheard-of crop of illiterates and juvenile delinquents.
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What has been said can also be couched in philosophical terms. If existentialists speak of the emptiness and meaninglessness of life, if they see in it a source not only of anxiety but of actual mental illness, it is essentially the same viewpoint: that behavior is not merely a matter of satisfaction of biological drives and of maintenance in psychological and social equilibrium but that something more is involved. If life becomes unbearably empty in an industrialized society, what can a person do but develop a neurosis? The principle, which may loosely be called spontaneous activity of the psychophysical organism, is a more realistic formulation of what the existentialists want to say in their often obscure language. And if personality theorists like Maslow or Gardner Murphy speak of self-realization as human goal, it is again a somewhat pompous expression of the same.
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A widely held contention says that they are not. This is the concept of “nomothetic” method in science and “idiographic” method in history. While science to a greater or less extent can establish “laws” for natural events, history, concerned with human events of enormous complexity in causes and outcome and presumably determined by free decisions of individuals, can only describe, more or less satisfactorily, what has happened in the past.
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The “principle of rationality” fits—not the majority of human actions but rather the “unreasoning” behavior of animals. Animals and organisms in general do function in a “ratiomorphic” way, maximizing such values as maintenance, satisfaction, survival, etc.; they select, in general, what is biologically good for them, and prefer more of a commodity (e.g., food) to less.
Unsolved Problems
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Here we are dealing with fundamental problems which, I believe, “are swept under the carpet” in the present biological creed. Today’s synthetic theory of evolution considers evolution to be the result of chance mutations, after a well-known simile (Beadle, 1963), of “typing errors” in the reduplication of the genetic code, which are directed by selection, i.e., the survival of those populations or genotypes that produce the highest number of offspring under existing external conditions. Similarly, the origin of life is explained by a chance appearance of organic compounds (amino acids, nucleic acids, enzymes, ATP, etc.) in a primeval ocean which, by way of selection, formed reproducing units, viruslike forms, protoorganisms, cells, etc.
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Future research will probably have to take into consideration irreversible thermodynamics, the accumulation of information in the genetic code and “organizational laws” in the latter. Presently the genetic code represents the vocabulary of hereditary substance, i.e., the nucleotide triplets which “spell” the amino acids of the proteins of an organism. Obviously, there must also exist a grammar of the code; the latter cannot, to use a psychiatric expression, be a word salad, a chance series of unrelated words (nucleotide triplets and corresponding amino acids in the protein molecules). Without such “grammar” the code could at best produce a pile of proteins, but not an organized organism. Certain experiences in genetic regulation indicate the existence of such organization of the hereditary substratum; their effects will have to be studied also in macroscopic laws of evolution (von Bertalanffy, 1949a; Rensch, 1961). I therefore believe that the presently generally accepted “synthetic theory of evolution” is at best a partial truth, not a complete theory. Apart from additional biological research, physical considerations have to be taken into account, in the theory of open systems and its present borderline problems.
7 Some Aspects of System Theory in Biology
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The consequence is that curve-fitting may be an indoor sport and useful for purposes of interpolation and extrapolation. However, approximation of empirical data is not a verification of particular mathematical expressions used. We can speak of verification and of equations representing a theory only if (1) the parameters occurring can be confirmed by independent experiment: and if (2) predictions of yet unobserved facts can be derived from the theory.
8 The System Concept in the Sciences of Man
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The practical consequence is that human beings are born not only with equal rights but with equal capabilities.
As opposed to superiority to race? I wonder what was the authors philosophical justification to join the Nazi party.
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Biologically, life is not maintenance or restoration of equilibrium but is essentially maintenance of disequilibria, as the doctrine of the organism as open system reveals. Reaching equilibrium means death and consequent decay. Psychologically, behavior not only tends to release tensions but also builds up tensions; if this stops, the patient is a decaying mental corpse in the same way a living organism becomes a body in decay when tensions and forces keeping it from equilibrium have stopped.
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Greek sculpture, Renaissance painting. German music—indeed, any aspect of culture— has nothing to do with utility, or with the better survival of individuals or nations.
No. Art & culture work as a unifying force for a society. Critical enterprises like war make much uses of this unity.
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Also the principle of stress, so often invoked in psychology, psychiatry and psychosomatics, needs some reevaluation. As everything in the world, stress too is an ambivalent thing. Stress is not only a danger to life to be controlled and neutralized by adaptive mechanisms; it also creates higher life. If life, after disturbance from outside, had simply returned to the so-called homeostatic equilibrium, it would never have progressed beyond the amoeba which, after all, is the best adapted creature in the world—it has survived billions of years from the primeval ocean to the present day.
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It is hard to see that music, say, has any adaptive or survival value;
9 General System Theory in Psychology and Psychiatry
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“Even without external stimuli, the organism is not a passive but an intrinsically active system. Reflex theory has presupposed that the primary element of behavior is response to external stimuli. In contrast, recent research shows with increasing clarity that autonomous activity of the nervous system, resting in the system itself, is to be considered primary. In evolution and development, reactive mechanisms appear to be superimposed upon primitive, rhythmic-locomotor activities. The stimulus (i.e., a change in external conditions) does not cause a process in an otherwise inert system; it only modifies processes in an autonomously active system”
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It is a symptom of mental disease that spontaneity is impaired. The patient increasingly becomes an automaton or S-R machine, is pushed by biological drives, obsessed by needs for food, elimination, sex gratification, and so on. The model of the passive organism is a quite adequate description of the stereotype behavior of compulsives, of patients with brain lesions, and of the waning of autonomous activity in catatonia and related psychopathology. But by the same token, this emphasizes that normal behavior is different.
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The origins of language are obscure; but insofar as we can form an idea, it seems that “holophrastic” (W. Humboldt, cf. Werner, 1957a) language and thought—i.e., utterances and thoughts with a broad aura of associations—preceded separation of meanings and articulate speech. Similarly, the categories of developed mental life such as the distinction of “I” and objects, space, time, number, causality, and so forth, evolved from a perceptual-conceptual-motivational continuum represented by the “paleologic” perception of infants, primitives, and schizophrenics (Arieti, 1959; Piaget, 1959; Werner, 1957a). Myth was the prolific chaos from which language, magic, art, science, medicine, mores, morals, and religion were differentiated (Cassirer, 1953–1957).
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Mental disease is essentially a disturbance of system functions of the psychophysical organism. For this reason, isolated symptoms or syndromes do not define the disease entity (von Bertalanffy, 1960a). Look at some classical symptoms of schizophrenia. “Loosening of associational structure” (E. Bleuler) and unbridled chains of associations; quite similar examples are found in “purple” poetry and rhetoric. Auditory hallucinations; “voices” told Joan of Arc to liberate France. Piercing sensations; a great mystic like St. Teresa reported identical experience. Fantastic world constructions; those of science surpass any schizophrenic’s. This is not to play on the theme “genius and madness,” but it is apt to show that not single criteria but integration makes for the difference.
10 The Relativity of Categories
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It may be mentioned, in passing, that the relation between language and world view is not unidirectional but reciprocal, a fact which perhaps was not made sufficiently clear by Whorf. The structure of language seems to determine which traits of reality are abstracted and hence what form the categories of thinking take on. On the other hand, the world outlook determines and forms the language.
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A good example is the evolution from classical to medieval Latin. The Gothic world view has recreated an ancient language, this being true for the lexical as well as the grammatical aspect. Thus the scholastics invented hosts of words which are atrocities from the standpoint of Cicero’s language (as the humanists of the Renaissance so deeply felt in their revivalistic struggle); words introduced to cope with abstract aspects foreign to the corporeally-thinking Roman mind, like leonitas, quidditas and the rest of them. Equally, although the superficial rules of grammar were observed, the line of thinking and construction was profoundly altered. This also applies to the rhetorical aspect, as in the introduction of the end-rhyme in contrast to the classical meters. Comparison, say, of the colossal lines of the Dies irae with some Virgilian or Horatian stanza makes obvious not only the tremendous gap between different “world-feelings” but the determination of language by the latter as well.
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Speaking in anthropomorphic terms: A group of schizophrenics who share their illusions may get along with each other pretty well; they are, however, utterly unfit to react and adapt themselves to real outside situations, and this is precisely the reason why they are put into the asylum. Or, in terms of Plato’s simile: the prisoners in the cave do not see the real things but only their shadows; but if they are not only looking at the spectacle, but have to take part in the performance, the shadows must, in some way, be representative of the real things. It seems to be the most serious shortcoming of classic occidental philosophy, from Plato to Descartes and Kant, to consider man primarily as a spectator, as ens cogitans, while, for biological reasons, he has essentially to be a performer, an ens agens in the world he is thrown in.