General Systems Methodology and Political Science

Abstract

As part of an earlier presentation to this congress Cavallo and Klir characterized the situation regarding the role of general systems research with respect to the social sciences. Fundamental to their presentation was an attitude toward epistemology and science which places primary emphasis on the process-related aspects of research and knowledge acquisition rather than on the finished-research-report status accorded to “theory” by many positivist accounts. In this regard their position parallels that of the physicist Werner Heisenberg who perceived that “in the development of natural science [it] will be rather the exception than the rule… [that a] sentence belongs to a closed system of concepts and axioms [Heisenberg 1958].” Their development of the notion of a general systems problem solver (GSPS), which is methodologically oriented, is based on a view also similar to that of a Nobel physicist, Neils Bohr, who argues that “physics is to be regarded not so much as the study of something a priori given, but rather as the development of methods for ordering and surveying human experience [Bohr 1963].”