Natural and Formal Systems

Abstract

In the present chapter, we shall be concerned with specifying what we mean by a natural system. Roughly speaking, a natural system comprises some aspect of the external world which we wish to study. A stone, a star, the solar system, an organism, a beehive, an ecosystem, are typical examples of natural systems; but so, too, are automobiles, factories, cities, and the like. Thus, natural systems are what the sciences are about, and what technologies seek to fabricate and control. We use the adjective “natural” to distinguish these systems from the formal systems which we create to represent and model them; formal systems are the vehicles for drawing inferences from premises, and belong to mathematics rather than science. There are of course close relations between the two classes of systems, natural and formal, which we hope to develop in due course.