A New Role of Systems Science Informed Systems Approach

Abstract

This chapter is organized as follows. We show first that, while systems science is by its definition interdisciplinary, a split into soft systems science (sociological) and hard systems science (technological) developed about a quarter of century ago and the diversity of systemic approaches followed. It is shown that both hard and soft systems science contributed significantly to the formation of new concepts important for the creation of the new era of knowledge civilization. Therefore, a new integration of systems science is proposed, called the informed systems approach: it should be defined as the discipline concerned with methods of intercultural and interdisciplinary integration of knowledge, including soft intersubjective and hard objective approaches, open and informed. Intercultural means here respect for cultural diversity and an explicit accounting for and analysis of national, regional, even disciplinary (e.g. hard and soft) cultures; open means intersubjectively pluralist as stressed by the soft systems approach; informed means pluralist and as objective as possible, as stressed by the hard systems approach.