Abstract
In 1968 Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901–1972) reviewed his roughly 40 years of research experience, and published the result in a book, entitled General System Theory. It focused on the difficulties he had experienced when applying the traditional scientific method. Unfortunately it was not widely noticed that he proposed two ways of dealing with the difficulties. It is argued that the one that has become popular is the lesser of the two.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
References in this paper are to the revised edition, 1969.
References
Arrow, Kenneth .J. (1950): A difficulty in the concept of social welfare, The Journal of political economy 58, 4, pp. 328–346.
Axelrod, Robert (1984): The Evolution of Cooperation, New York: Basic Books.
Axelrod, Robert (1997): The Complexity of Cooperation: Agent-Based Models of Competition and Collaboration, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Bateson, Gregory (1973): Steps to an Ecology of Mind, New York: Paladin Books.
Barnes, John (2000): Aristotle. A very short history, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Beer, Stafford (1979): The Heart of Enterprise, Chichester: Wiley, 1994.
Bogdanov, Alexander A. (1921): Essays in Tektology, Seaside, CA: Intersystems, 1980.
Capra, Fritjof (1997): The Web of Life: A New Synthesis of Mind and Matter, London: Flamingo.
Checkland, Peter (1981): Systems Thinking, Systems Practice, Chichester: John Wiley & Sons.
Churchman, C. West (1971): The Design of Inquiring Systems: Basic Concepts of Systems and Organization, New York: Basic Books.
Edelman, Gerald M. (1989): The Remembered Present: A Biological Theory of Consciousness, New York: Basic Books.
Foerster, Heinz von (1970): Molecular Ethology: An Immodest Proposal for Semantic Clarification, in: Georges Ungas (ed.) Molecular Mechanisms in Memory and Learning, New York: Plenum Press, pp. 213–248.
François, Charles (ed.) (1997): International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics, München: Saur.
Galilei, Galileo (1632): Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems: Ptolemaic and Copernican, transl. Stillman Drake, California: University of California Press, 1967.
Gell-Mann, Murray (1984): The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and Complex, New York: Freeman and Company, 1994.
Gell-Mann, Murray (1997): The Simple and the Complex, in: David S. Alberts and Thomas J. Czerwinski (eds.), Complexity, Global Politics, and National Security, Washington, DC: National Defense University, pp. 3–28.
Galison, Peter (2003): Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s maps: Empires of Time, London: Sceptre.
Glanville, Ranulph (1998): Challenging the Scientific Paradigm for Research and Design, in: A. Robertson (ed.), Designing Design Research 2: The Design Research Publication, Cyberbridge-4D Design, Leicester: De Montfort University.
Hardin, Garrett (1968): The Tragedy of the Commons, Science162, Nr 3859, pp. 1243–1248.
Huizer, Gerrit (1997): Participatory Action Research and People’s Participation: Introduction and Case Studies, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 5.
Jantsch, Erich (1980): The self-Organizing Universe, Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1989.
Knudsen, Thorbjørn (2003): A Neo-Darwinian Model of Science, in: Hans Siggard Jensen, Lykke Margot Ricard, Morton Thanning Vendelø, The Evolution of Scientific Knowledge, Cheltenham: Elgar, P., pp. 79–120.
Kuhn, Thomas S. (1962): The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Miller, James Grier (1978): Living Systems, New York: Mc Graw Hill.
Pask, Gordon, and Gerard de Zeeuw (1992): A Succinct Summary of Novel Theories, in: Robert Trappl (ed.), Cybernetics and Systems Research 92, Bd 1, Singapore: World Scientific, pp. 665–672.
Pask, Gordon (1975): Conversation, Cognition and Learning, Amsterdam: Elsevier.
Popper, Karl (1959): The Logic of Scientific Discovery, London: Routledge, 2002
Popper, Karl (1999): All Life is Problem Solving, New York and Milton Park: Routledge.
Prigogine, Ilya (1950): Introduction to Thermodynamics of Irreversible Processes, Springfield: Charles C. Thomas Publisher.
Rorty, Richard (1967): The Linguistic Turn, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
Rosenblueth, Arturo, Norbert Wiener and Julian Bigelow (1943): Behavior, Purpose and Teleology, Philosophy of Science 10, 1, pp. 18–24.
Takens, Floris (1981): Detecting strange attractors in turbulence, in D. A. Rand and L.-S. Young (ed.). Dynamical Systems and Turbulence, Lecture Notes in Mathematics 898, Springer-Verlag. pp. 366–381
Thom, René (1989): Structural Stability and Morphogenesis: An Outline of a General Theory of Models, Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Ulrich, Werner (1983): Critical Heuristicss of Social Planning: A New Approach to Practical Philosophy, Chichester: Wiley, 1994.
von Bertalanffy, Ludwig (1968): General Systems Theory: Foundations, Developments, Applications, rev. ed., New York: Braziller, 1969.
Waldrop, M. Mitchell (1992): Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos, London: Penguin.
Warfield, John H. (1990): A Science of Generic Design: Managing Complexity Through Systems Design, Salinas: Intersystems Publications.
Zeeuw, Gerard de (2003): Discovering Social Knowledge, Cybernetics and Human Knowing 10, 3/4, pp. 150–169.
Zeeuw, Gerard de (2004): Fighting for Science, Kybernetes 33, 3/4, pp. 717–726.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, ein Teil von Springer Nature
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
de Zeeuw, G. (2021). Strategies Beyond Systems. In: Baecker, D. (eds) Schlüsselwerke der Systemtheorie. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-30633-5_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-30633-5_6
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer VS, Wiesbaden
Print ISBN: 978-3-658-30632-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-658-30633-5
eBook Packages: Social Science and Law (German Language)