Abstract
In this chapter, we develop a detailed discussion about the nature and evolution of general principles in science, how they relate to worldviews, laws, theories and theoretical virtues. We then apply this analysis to systems principles, to develop strategies for deriving general scientific systems principles. By applying these insights and also the conclusions from previous chapters we then present work done to discover three general scientific systems principles, and discuss some of the practical implications of these principles.
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Notes
- 1.
In this sense many disciplines beyond the traditional ‘hard sciences’ can be considered to be scientific in spirit and becoming increasingly scientific in practice.
- 2.
Early work on general systems principles focused largely on concepts (for example, (von Bertalanffy, 1969, pp. 91, 95)), and while these remain controversial, important progress is now being made (for example, (Sillitto et al., 2017)). In addition, progress is now being made towards establishing propositional general scientific systems principles . Two recent papers respectively presented three such principles (Rousseau, 2017b) and eight strategies for discovery projects (Rousseau, 2017a).
- 3.
- 4.
There are very many concepts relevant to systems in the vocabulary of Systemology, for example there are 3807 entries in the second edition of Charles Francois’ International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics (Francois, 2004). These terms are far from standardised, and many systemologists have produced their own lists, for example (Danielle-Allegro & Smith, 2016; Heylighen, 2012, pp. 21–33; Kramer & De Smit, 1977, pp. 11–46; Schindel, 2013; Schoderbek, Schoderbek, & Kefalas, 1990, pp. 13–68; Wimsatt, 2007, pp. 353–360). However, very few of these concepts are general systems concepts , i.e. concepts describing universal attributes of systems as systems.
- 5.
Useful discussions of Scientific Realism can be found in (Chakravartty, 2010; Ellis, 2009; Schrenk, 2016). See also endnote 1. Within the present system movement it is related to the view called Critical Realism (Mingers, 2006, 2014). As a worldview component it is close to the view of the founders of the general systems movement, known as the General Systems Worldview , as discussed in Chap. 4.
- 6.
Things are “naturalistic” if they can only change in accordance with the laws of nature, and “concrete” if they have causal powers.
- 7.
- 8.
Note that these proportionalities do not have to be linear.
- 9.
Note that conservation principles can have time-dependencies, so that energy is conserved over an interval.
- 10.
The example just given, of a fence containing a bull, could mistakenly be taken as a counter-example to Ashby’s “Law of Requisite Variety”, which is often loosely stated as that to be effective a controller must be more complex (in the sense of having more variety) than the system it controls. However, careful framings of Ashby’s Law are stated in terms of degrees of freedom, and then specifically claim that relative to the process being controlled the degree of freedom of the controller must be larger than the degree of freedom of the process being controlled. This is a paraphrase of the argument developed here for only applying a rule relative to a specific dimension of interaction. Under Ashby’s Law, an effective control system must therefore have more variety relative to each of the kinds of processes to be regulated in the controlled system.
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Rousseau, D., Wilby, J., Billingham, J., Blachfellner, S. (2018). Scientific Principles for General Systemology. In: General Systemology. Translational Systems Sciences, vol 13. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-0892-4_6
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