Abstract
Understanding may be considered as being related to the availability of effective theories allowing for effective predictions and interventions. Formalisations of theories allow modelling and simulations. However, approaches such as connectionism, network science, sub-symbolism, and evidence-based methods, have accustomed us to accept and use approaches without full comprehensive formal explanations, such as for the ubiquitous phenomenon of emergence. We are increasingly accepting the use of concordances, redundancies, transversal properties (e.g., power laws and scale invariance), and simulation properties as clues to be confirmed, as for induction, by their high frequency occurrence. This may be considered to be related to the availability of enormous amounts of data in conceptually data-driven frameworks, where data driven means retrospective clustering. We discuss whether systemic understanding should be considered as ideal, formal understanding or concordance-based.
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Minati, G. (2019). Does Systemics Still Need Theories? Theory-Less Knowledge?. In: Minati, G., Abram, M., Pessa, E. (eds) Systemics of Incompleteness and Quasi-Systems. Contemporary Systems Thinking. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15277-2_5
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