This art icle was downloaded by: [ Pouvreau David] On: 06 February 2014, At : 07: 26 Publisher: Taylor & Francis I nform a Lt d Regist ered in England and Wales Regist ered Num ber: 1072954 Regist ered office: Mort im er House, 37- 41 Mort im er St reet , London W1T 3JH, UK International Journal of General Systems Publicat ion det ails, including inst ruct ions for aut hors and subscript ion informat ion: ht t p:/ / www.t andfonline.com/ loi/ ggen20 On the history of Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s “general systemology”, and on its relationship to cybernetics - Part II: Contexts and developments of the systemological hermeneutics instigated by von Bertalanffy a David Pouvreau a Bert alanffy Cent er for t he St udy of Syst ems Science (BCSSS), Vienna, Aust ria Published online: 05 Feb 2014. To cite this article: David Pouvreau (2014) On t he hist ory of Ludwig von Bert alanffy’ s “ general syst emology” , and on it s relat ionship t o cybernet ics - Part II: Cont ext s and development s of t he syst emological hermeneut ics inst igat ed by von Bert alanffy, Int ernat ional Journal of General Syst ems, 43:2, 172-245, DOI: 10.1080/ 03081079.2014.883743 To link to this article: ht t p:/ / dx.doi.org/ 10.1080/ 03081079.2014.883743 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTI CLE Taylor & Francis m akes every effort t o ensure t he accuracy of all t he inform at ion ( t he “ Cont ent ” ) cont ained in t he publicat ions on our plat form . However, Taylor & Francis, our agent s, and our licensors m ake no represent at ions or warrant ies what soever as t o t he accuracy, com plet eness, or suit abilit y for any purpose of t he Cont ent . 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Term s & Downloaded by [Pouvreau David] at 07:26 06 February 2014 Condit ions of access and use can be found at ht t p: / / www.t andfonline.com / page/ t erm sand- condit ions International Journal of General Systems, 2014 Vol. 43, No. 2, 172–245, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03081079.2014.883743 On the history of Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s “general systemology”, and on its relationship to cybernetics - Part II: Contexts and developments of the systemological hermeneutics instigated by von Bertalanffy David Pouvreau* Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science (BCSSS), Vienna, Austria Downloaded by [Pouvreau David] at 07:26 06 February 2014 (Received 10 November 2013; accepted 22 December 2013) The history of “general system theory” is investigated in order to clarify its meanings, vocations, foundations and achievements. It is characterized as the project of a science of the systemic interpretation of the “real”, renamed here “general systemology”. The contexts and modes of its elaboration, publication and implementation are discussed. The paper mostly focuses on the works of its instigator: Ludwig von Bertalanffy. However, general systemology was a collective project: the main contributions of other “systemologists”, from the 1950s until the 1970s, are hence also considered. Its solidarity with the history of the Society for General Systems Research is notably discussed. A reconstruction of the systemological hermeneutics is undertaken on this basis. It finds out the potential systematic unity underlying the diversity of the contributions to this both scientific and philosophical project. Light is thus shed on the actual scope of von Bertalanffy’s works. Keywords: general system theory; systemology; Society for General Systems Research 1. Introduction This paper follows an earlier one published in 2007 (Pouvreau and Drack 2007), which sought to clarify the origins and motives behind the so called “general system theory” put forward by Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901–1972) as early as 1937. The expression “general systemology” (which has never been used by Bertalanffy) was coined at that time in order to name it.1 The present contribution in particular seeks to justify its use and to discuss its full meaning. The introduction of this expression is grounded in the following observations: (1) the term “theory” used in order to refer to Bertalanffy’s project and to the related works is misleading; (2) although Bertalanffy was himself one of its co-inventors in 1956, the expression “general systems research”, coined both in order to remedy this problem and to take into account a wide spectrum of systemic perspectives (from basic theoretical science to metaphysics and ethics), is not fully faithful to the meanings of Bertalanffy’s original German expression: Allgemeine Systemlehre. The latter indeed involved the ambition, which has always remained dear to Bertalanffy and to some of his colleagues, to set-up an encompassing framework for a systematic organization of systemic research and knowledge. This aspect of Allgemeine Systemlehre seems to be pushed aside by the expression “general systems research”. Moreover, the qualifier “general” is undetermined in the latter (it is applicable both to “systems” and to “research”), whereas it clearly applies only to Lehre in the German expression. None of those significant facts should be bypassed. Allgemeine Systemlehre may *Email: david_pouvreau@orange.fr © 2014 Taylor & Francis Downloaded by [Pouvreau David] at 07:26 06 February 2014 International Journal of General Systems 173 be understood as the telos of “general systems research”, the very structure and meaning of this research emerging in the course of its own “epigenetic” development. Hence the need for another English term preserving all the meanings of the German expression: “general systemology” appears quite relevant from this point of view. It refers to the project of a science of the systemic interpretation of the “real”, hence to an original hermeneutics. The “systemologists” are the researchers who contributed to its elaboration: apart from Bertalanffy, the main proponents were the mathematician Anatol Rapoport, the economist Kenneth E. Boulding, the bio-mathematician Robert Rosen and the engineer-mathematician George J. Klir. This systemology was “general” in the sense that its horizon was the whole set of aspects of the “real” such as reconstructed using the category of “system”. The term “project” is justified because it has never reached a mature state: neither its foundations nor its applications were sufficiently developed to legitimately claim maturity. As for the term “science”, it should be understood in a very broad sense: the set of concepts, principles and methods elaborated in order to rationalize the “real” in a specific (systemic) way; and the set of justifications for this rationalization enterprise. Finally, two reasons justify the term “interpretation”: (1) the systemeologists asserted a constructivist philosophy of knowledge, which was methodologically translated; and (2) their holistic concepts cannot be dissociated from the issue of sense and from the search for meanings. The latter point is essential and deserves emphasis. In an article read by Bertalanffy, the Austrian philologist and “morphologist of history” Othmar F. Anderle has perfectly expressed in 1960 this invariant of holistic thinkings that apparently always played a prominent role in their ideological echoes. Bertalanffy underlined the following passage during his reading: Making sense consists in being integrated into a wider, encompassing relational context; and it should be observed that it is a relational context of special, over-summative type, with interdependence and uninterchangeability of the parts; that is, what one calls wholes or structures […] “Making sense” should – at least in the perspective of an empiric-scientific interpretation of sense – be understood as “being integrated into a structure”. (Anderle 1960, 144) “Understanding” a phenomenon would consist of grasping the way it emerges from other underlying phenomena and is in turn integrated into a whole set of phenomena with which it can be related, and that confers a meaning on it; that is, “understanding” an object of study would consist of being able to insert it in a stratified order of interrelated systemic formations: Pure “elements”, single and particular facts, do not have any “sense” as such, even if they are complicated […] One can only talk about sense when and insofar as a domain of objects is ruled by holistic structures. (Anderle 1960, 145, 147) The Belgian philosopher Léo Apostel formulated the same idea when he claimed that his time called for a “general theory of systems” enabling to “bring together the desire to explain and to understand, the analysis and the hermeneutics”, as an “operation that discovers senses”: The discovery of sense is always an insertion into a wider set, into an ordered whole (Apostel 1970, 70). This justifies confronting the systemological project with the discussions about the classical opposition between “explaining” and “understanding”. It calls for reappraising the arguments that induced them and that were used in the late nineteenth century by Wilhelm Dilthey to justify the specificity of the hermeneutical method of historical and social sciences with Downloaded by [Pouvreau David] at 07:26 06 February 2014 174 D. Pouvreau regard to natural sciences. In the former, the scientist would be an actor of the human universe that he/she is investigating: the scientist would so to say “live in his/her objects”; the aim would moreover be to reconstruct an “interiority” of the objects “through signs exteriorily given by the senses”, a process that Dilthey called “understanding” (1995, 292). Both ideas can also be found in Bertalanffy, in an original form. First, because his perspectivism generalized the idea that the observer and what he or she is observing form a system, every scientist thus living in his object (whatever the field). And second, because the principle of general systemology was to take as objects not the “things” in themselves, but their systemic study. The task was therefore to provide the conceptual means to construct the objects’ systemicity based on “signs which are given from outside by the senses”; the systemician finds in him-/herself the means to constitute, in a meaningful order, facts that are in themselves devoid of meaning. Lenk (1995, 57–59) has thus seen in every scientific systemic thinking a “constructive projection” using “schemes” that can be identified with “interpretative procedures”. Le Moigne (1977, 2002, 147), in turn, opposed an “analytic modelling” expressing an “explanatory way” and a “systemic modelling” expressing a “hermeneutic way of producing knowledge”. It is nonetheless essential to see that the problem of the systemologists was to break off with the dichotomy between “hermeneutic” and “hypothetic-deductive” methods.2 The approach involved a synthesis expressed by the transposition of the “type” to “general system”, and of “typology” to “systemology”. The decisive ambition of the systemologists was to refuse to restrict the systemic type of “understanding” to the realm of intuition. On the contrary, the aim was to shape it according to a rigorous methodology in which mathematics plays a prominent role: their purpose was to merge “hermeneutic” and “hypothetic-deductive methods”. Rapoport thus could make the following remarkable comment which outwardly clearly pertained only to human sciences, but whose scope ultimately extended to the whole set of sciences, for him as well as for his colleagues: The system approach to the study of man can be appreciated as an effort to restore meaning (in terms of intuitively grasped understanding of wholes) while adhering to the principles of disciplined generalizations and rigorous deduction. It is, in short, an attempt to make the study of man both scientific and meaningful. (Rapoport 1968, xxii) The systemologists understood general systemology as the conceptual and methodological matrix of a disciplined systemic interpretation of the “real”, dedicated to the conciliation of the search for meanings and rigour of thinking, while being able to guide action according to specific values. To achieve this, it had to elaborate (1) the means to construct systemic interpretations of particular aspects of the “real” under the form of specific theoretical models and (2) the means to interpret such models as declensions of theoretical systemic models with higher order of generality. Its ultimate aim was to help mould an understanding of events according to a cosmology centred on the concept of “system”, which it implemented and legitimized. Systems theory stands for attempting scientific interpretation and theory where previously there was none. (von Bertalanffy 1968a, 14) I have shown elsewhere (2013a, 2013b, 2013c) that grasping general systemology as a collective and historically situated project accounts for the genesis, development and potential unity of the conceptions of its instigator. Importantly, these studies also encompass the genesis, development and unity of the conceptions of the whole set of systemological works that were realized by other researchers between the late 1940s and late 1970s. The present contribution International Journal of General Systems 175 Downloaded by [Pouvreau David] at 07:26 06 February 2014 presents some results of this study. The focus is mainly on Bertalanffy’s thinking: this will serve in a third, future contribution the more specific discussion of the relationships between his project and cybernetics. I will first specify the historical context of the development of his systemological conceptions. I emphasize his first texts, revealing the motivations that led to the publication of his project and the relations that he then maintained with the Society for General Systems Research (SGSR), which he co-founded in the mid-1950s. I will then systematically reconstruct the systemological project, completing (Pouvreau 2013c) while pointing to Bertalanffy’s contributions to its implementation. I will, a contrario, also point out aspects that were significantly explored only by other systemologists, but have to be taken into account in order to grasp the meaning and scope of the project that Bertalanffy instigated. 2. Contexts of Bertalanffy’s works on general systemology Bertalanffy’s first discussion of general systemology, in Chicago in late 1937, remains a mystery. Carl G. Hempel attended his talk: in a letter sent to this neo-positivist philosopher in June 1950, Bertalanffy mentioned their “last meeting in Chicago in 1938”. The subsequent correspondence clearly demonstrates that his theses were already familiar to Hempel, although they had been the subject neither of papers nor of other talks in the United States.3 Charles Morris’ attendance is also certain: he organized the seminar where the Viennese had his talk. Rudolf Carnap’s attendance is probable (he was very active on Morris’ side), and the same holds true for Nicolas Rashevsky’s (he had invited Bertalanffy to his department and had significant exchanges with Carnap). Finally, von Bertalanffy (1968a, 90) reported that his talk aroused bitter critique, which he dismissed as a mere “clamor of the Boeotians”. Since no additional elements are available yet, the present study starts with the advent of the systemological project in the intellectual landscape of the immediate post-post-Second World War period. The initial task is to provide the contextual elements of this advent, and of the gelling of this project up until the late 1970s. These elements are necessary prolegomena for any understanding of systemological works, because they condition some of their manifold scientific and philosophical dimensions. 2.1. Bertalanffy’s difficult situation shortly after the war The war ended for Bertalanffy and his family with a brutal break from their privileged situation under the Third Reich. Their home had been reduced to ashes in April 1945. Bertalanffy, one of the few researchers of the zoological institute still working in Vienna, was appointed as interim director on 17 April 1945. He had few doubts about his future and believed to be in a favourable situation for repeating the request for promotion that he had made in vain during the war: a professorship including the directorship of the zoological institute.4 Bertalanffy nonetheless first had to undergo the “denazification” procedure, aimed at clarifying his activities under the Third Reich. It ended in October 1947 with an exemption from prosecution, a decision that was based upon a lack of knowledge of the whole set of aspects of his opportunistic behaviour between 1938 and 1945. He had been suspended in January 1946 and was first able to find employment again in late 1947 – the modest position of Privatdozent that he had held between 1934 and 1937. During this period, he was largely occupied with simple survival on his meagre salary and relied on the help of British and American friends. As early as January 1946, he began to consider potential emigration and reactivated his contacts in America (notably with the Rockefeller Foundation). His motivation in this direction was further strengthened by the realization that other were also suffering the Downloaded by [Pouvreau David] at 07:26 06 February 2014 176 D. Pouvreau consequences of their behaviour under the Third Reich: his best friend at that time, the botanist Fritz Gessner, for example, explained to him how thin their chances were to find a viable academic position. He also met many administrative difficulties in 1946–1947, which prevented him from publish three essays that he had already written. It is in this difficult context that he worked on the exposition of his systemological project and on an essay which synthesized his biological philosophy and was concluded with the exposition of this project: Das biologische Welbild (The biological world view). In early 1948, Bertalanffy also began to take the necessary steps to get a promotion. This would have enabled him to regain his pre-war status (associate professor). These attempts ended in June with a positive decision from the university, which the ministry still had to accept. Bertalanffy, however, did not want to put up with the humiliation imposed on him with the denazification procedure and the downgrading of his status, nor with the relationships at the University (he had aroused strong hostilities during the war), nor with the living conditions in Vienna. He was even less inclined when other horizons opened up. Joseph H. Woodger gave him his first opportunity: this colleague and friend sent him an official invitation to work with him in London, dated 31 May 1948. After six weeks in Bern at the invitation of the economist Walter A. Jöhr, during which he finished Das biologische Weltbild, Bertalanffy arrived in London on 23 August and stayed in Great Britain until late January 1949. His desire to emigrate was further strengthened after his promotion request was rejected on 10 November 1948 by the Austrian ministry of education. Moreover, he knew soon after he arrived in Switzerland that his contacts were bearing fruit: a five thousand dollar grant from the Davis Foundation had been awarded to him on 17 July 1948, along with payment of his trip and the pledge of an academic position. Bertalanffy arrived in Canada in early February 1949, with his wife and son. This was the start of a new phase in his career, which thereafter remained anchored in the USA and Canada, except for about ten stays in Europe (between 1956 and 1969, each lasting several weeks) and despite several attempts to gain an academic position in Germany. During this new period, the philosopher and architect of an “organismic” biology, which he early on wanted to “broaden to a general world view” (1934b, 365), began in earnest to give life to the project of general systemology. 2.2. Chronological elements concerning Bertalanffy’s first publications on general systemology The first trace of a discussion of this project by Bertalanffy is dated 1945, but it is an aborted publication. I found it in 2006 in the remnants of his archives. It is a paper sent to the Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie, entitled “Toward a general systemology” (Zu einer allgemeinen Systemlehre). Its proofs were sent to Bertalanffy on 6 February for final checking. But the publication of this journal was interrupted at the end of the war, and this paper was never published. It is nonetheless precious: it develops some arguments concerning his theory of knowledge that cannot be found in his later texts. Bertalanffy’s project first became public in 1947. At that time he took part in the third symposium organized between 27 August and 8 September in Alpbach, a small Tyrolian village: he chaired the “working group on biology” in this symposium whose overall aim was “constituting a free intellectual forum of the ‘young Europe’ in order to promote international exchanges without ideological concern”. He concluded the work of his group on 6 September with a conference entitled “Unity of science and principles of a general systemology (allgemeine Systemlehre)”. A debate was organized two days later. The texts of this conference and of this debate were published in Austria in the proceedings of the congress Downloaded by [Pouvreau David] at 07:26 06 February 2014 International Journal of General Systems 177 (Bertalanffy, 1948a, 1948b). Their echo nonetheless remained very weak, reflecting the historical circumstances and the almost exclusively Austrian nationality of the participants. The same holds true for two texts that he published in 1949. The first was published in the journal Biologia Generalis (which he directed until his departure for Switzerland): it was a resumption of his 1945 unpublished paper, which had the same title but omitted several parts that were yet necessary with regard to the justifications that he had to give (Bertalanffy 1949b). Nothing indicates that its diffusion extended beyond the narrow circle of the Austrian and German biologists who were interested in theoretical reflections. As for the conclusion of his Das biologische Weltbild, it was limited to general ideas. As it aimed at a wide audience, it omitted the full logical and mathematical considerations contained in his other texts. The echo of this essay was also relatively limited. It stoked the enthusiasm of those scientists, physicians and philosophers who already had affinities with Bertalanffy’s organismic thinking, and also the interest of economists such as Jöhr and Friedrich von Hayek.5 Only after the publication of the English translation in 1952 (under the more neutral title Problems of Life) did this essay, particularly its conclusion, start to become known outside the German-speaking countries. Only after Bertalanffy arrived in London his project become more broadly known. He had many discussions about it there. And he was delighted by the interest that it met with – it was described as “sensational” and of “exceptional importance” by some of his listeners.6 On 17 January 1949, he held a talk about “the theory of open systems in physics and biology”, in which he partly discussed his general project. The framework was the second meeting of the “Philosophy of Science Group”, which had been constituted the year before at the British Society for the History of Science. Bertalanffy had the honour to have Bertrand Russell among his listeners. The text of this talk was published in 1950 in Science (1950a). A paper that fully dealt with general systemology was also published in 1950, in the first volume of the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, edited by the “Philosophy of Science Group”. It extended his 1949 paper in German and was meant to be the “systematization” of this talk (1950b). These two papers enabled Bertalanffy’s views to be internationally known. They aroused much interest in a wide spectrum of academic disciplines, in America as well as in Europe.7 In late 1950, an important step was taken for the promotion of this project and from the viewpoint of its convergence with the new “systems sciences”. From 27–29 December, Bertalanffy took part in the 47th meeting of the “oriental” division of the American Society of Philosophy, in Toronto. Its theme was “Cybernetics and teleology”. Bertalanffy was invited after a recommendation from the philosopher Hans Jonas to the organizator, Max Black.8 At the time, Bertalanffy and Jonas enjoyed a friendly and intellectually rich relationship.9 In Toronto, Bertalanffy met Jonas, Willard V.O. Quine as well as Hempel and Ernst Nagel.10 He presented his main ideas about general systemology, and his three talks on this subject gave rise to constructive controversies with Jonas and Hempel. One controversy revolved around defining his position with regard to cybernetics; he then introduced important distinctions which were to determine his later works in psychiatry and psychology, and more generally, disseminate in the whole history of the “system movement”. The text of these conferences was published in 1951 in the American journal Human Biology (1951b). The year 1951 was also the year of publication of two texts connected to his systemological project. First of all, a paper on theoretical models in psychology (1951c), where he developed epistemological arguments concerning the relevance and the meaning of systemic modelling. And an essay on the popularization of his philosophy of biology and of his “anthropological philosophy”, which he had written in 1947 and 1948 but for which he had not found an editor before (1950a). Nonetheless, his discussion of general systemology was very succinct in that essay, written in German, and the latter was not widely distributed. 178 D. Pouvreau Downloaded by [Pouvreau David] at 07:26 06 February 2014 In November 1953, the American journal Scientific Monthly published the Bertalanffian paper that, in this first period, probably contributed most to the knowledge of his project. Entitled “The philosophy of science in scientific education”, it asserted the necessity of an “education of the scientific generalist” in order to counter the dangers of specialization for science per se and for its social function. Bertalanffy outlined a course plan in the philosophy of science, where general systemology was presented as meeting such a need for integration. He also attacked for the first time in detail the logico-positivist philosophers, especially the physicalist conception of unity of science defended by Carnap and Otto Neurath. Finally, he introduced in this paper the term “perspectivism” in order to describe his philosophy of knowledge, of which he outlined some aspects. This paper has played a crucial role in Bertalanffy’s convergence with other systemicians (notably with Boulding). 2.3. Bertalanffy’s initial motivations After the setback he suffered in 1937, Bertalanffy decided to “let the drafts [of his project] in the drawer” (1968a, 90). Why did he judge the context of the years 1945–1953 to be favourable enough to change his mind about publication? He gave the following explanation: It is only after the war that my first publications [on General System Theory] appeared. Then, however, something interesting and surprising had happened. It turned out that a change in intellectual climate had taken place, making model building and abstract generalizations fashionable. Even more: quite a number of scientists had followed similar lines of thought. So General System Theory, after all, was not isolated or a personal idiosyncrasy as I had believed, but rather was one within a group of parallel developments. (1962a, 2–3) Such an account is poorly credible: its relevance only starts after his participation at the Toronto congress, i.e. from late 1950 onward. Indeed, none of his publications prior to this congress refers to the new “systems sciences”; as for the scientists having “followed similar lines of thought” in the direction of “abstract generalizations”, he clearly had in mind only biomathematicians such as Alfred J. Lotka and Vito Volterra, as well as physicists who, like Ilya Prigogine, had contributed to the development of thermodynamics of irreversible processes. Moreover, those physicists were his only new references between 1945 and 1950, in comparison with (1937) and (1942). His explanation can therefore not be accepted with regard to the second half of the 1940s. It seems more relevant to seek explanations of his motives in Bertalanffy himself, at two levels: in the development of his thinking and in his personal situation during the period considered here. From the first point of view, Pouvreau and Drack (2007) have already shown the dynamics of his pre-war works and their influences, thereby making understandable the advent of the systemological project. The fact that he had at least partly exposed it in 1937 also shows that the latter responded to a logic inherent in the development of his thinking. The problem here is to grasp the reasons for the publicity that he decided to give to his project from 1945 onward. One hypothesis is that he sought to arouse the interest of scientists and philosophers outside the biological sciences, at a time when his own will (and perhaps even his ability) to develop and implement his biological systemology seemed to have reached its limits. The fact is that his post-war publications on biology were little more than repetitions and syntheses of his previous reflections; they neither conceptually nor experimentally brought substantial advances over his writings from 1937 to 1942. One interpretation is that Bertalanffy was satisfied to have found a systematic coherence and shown its potentialities in the perspective of the theoretical interpretation of biological phenomena. In fact, however, his organismic biology had a propaedeutic character: its elaboration was always designed to prepare and Downloaded by [Pouvreau David] at 07:26 06 February 2014 International Journal of General Systems 179 serve much wider plans. From this point of view, it is no coincidence that Das biologische Weltbild was entirely organized in order to pave the way for the exposition of the systemological project. Publishing his ideas about it may have reflected the strategic opportunity for him to enter into other fields of research such as psychology, psychiatry and social sciences in a systemological perspective, once he felt ready to do so. This decision meshed perfectly with the contemporary emergence of structuralism, but the documents show that Bertalanffy was unaware of this convergence yet. In addition to the intrinsic dynamics of his thinking, several aspects of Bertalanffy’s personal situation must be considered when examining his decision. As early as 1944, for example, he wished to involve his “dynamical morphology” in the study of the “elementary biological units”. This most certainly responded to the logic of extension of his systemological perspective that was inherent in his philosophy of biology. However, he probably also felt the signs of a forthcoming evolution of biology which, with the progress of genetics and the apparent triumph of the “synthetic” theory of evolution, transformed his biological systemology in a most heterodox project. And he was very probably confronted with first feelings of isolation in his field at that time. These feelings can only have been strengthened by his three-year dismissal from the university (or lowly assistant position deprived of most of the means necessary to further his biological research). The solution of emigration no doubt went hand in hand with an understanding that the intellectual climate in America would not be very favourable to his conceptions. In particular, the collusion of holistic ideas with national socialism, which was attacked very early on (Hayek 1944), made them all the more suspect, especially when they were arguing on the basis of biology: in elevating them to a high level of abstraction and generality, he tried to avoid this pitfall while promoting his views. Moreover, the parallel interest in his work of psychologists like Norbert Thumb, of an ethologist like Konrad Lorenz, of economists like Jöhr and Hayek, and even of physicists like Prigogine and Arthur March, encouraged Bertalanffy to perceive the opportunity to publish his project. This was the opportunity to create a favourable ground for the reorientation of his work outside biology. His publications of the years 1949–1951 went in that direction: he received many enthusiastic letters from psychologists and social scientists, including invitations for joint work.11 His 1951 paper on theoretical models in psychology (Bertalanffy 1951c) is a typical indicator of the concrete effect of this reorientation. Publishing his project was apparently a means for Bertalanffy to optimize his chances to open new academic doors to his career, overcoming his Viennese slump (and the same holds true later at Ottawa). This background should be borne in mind when considering his first discourses on general systemology. 2.4. Bertalanffy’s first discourses on general systemology In 1945–1953, these discourses were essentially programmatic. It should be emphasized that Bertalanffy understood their vocation in that way, despite some grandiloquent expressions that might easily induce the belief that he claimed more. Bertalanffy wanted first of all to show that the state of contemporary science and, more generally, humanity, required a paradigm shift. Second, he wanted to present general systemology as an appropriate tool to meet this need: its nature, its missions and its very possibility were argued or, more often, simply suggested. Bertalanffy’s project generalized the one that he had formulated and attempted to implement in biology: its aim was to constitute a science of systemic interpretation applicable to the various “strata” of the “real”. The justification for the possibility of such a science initially involved referring to the isomorphisms between more or less recent theoretical Downloaded by [Pouvreau David] at 07:26 06 February 2014 180 D. Pouvreau constructions in which the “system” concept played a central role under various forms. The fact that such structural correspondences emerge between fields that deal with very different kinds of entities, in apparently independent ways and with a simultaneous concern for logical and methodological autonomy in the respective fields, called for an explanation. Bertalanffy found this explanation in the “postulate” of the existence of “general system principles” and “laws”. By this, he did not mean the existence of a “systemness” per se, an existence that one would have to discover. Rather, he meant the possibility to grasp definite features of the phenomenal world by projecting on them systemic schemes of interpretation expressing relational, “constitutive” traits that enable symbolizing them as “systems”, in the sense of entities displaying global properties depending on the sole structure of the relations between their elements and with their environment. Bertalanffy thought that the heart of general systemology would be a set of logico-mathematical theories, each of them axiomatized as far as possible, and in which, starting with a definite formalized definition of a system, consequences would be derivable in a hypothetic-deductive way. These consequences would then be applicable to the modelling of “concrete” systems – in so far as such a modelling would be elaborated in the framework of such theories. Bertalanffy simply tried to “illustrate” (by means of general systems of differential equations) the possibility of a formalization and even of an a priori derivation of systemic concepts and principles – mainly the organismic ones that he had put at the heart of his biological systemology. He then suggested that such a theoretical corpus may serve as a matrix and “regulative” instrument to model complex systems, thus helping make non-physical sciences “exact sciences”. He claimed that general systemology may become the vehicle of a formal unity of science based on the correspondences between the systemic theoretical constructions elaborated in that way. This meta-scientific function was supposed to extend itself in the education of scientists and in the organization of research. It would promote the understanding of the connections between the various fields of research and help explore the often fertile issues at the interface of different disciplines, enabling transdisciplinary communication and exchanges. Finally, thanks to its reintegration of holistic logic in the scientific field, general systemology was supposed to restore the dialogue between the scientific form of experience of the world and the other ones, particularly mysticism. Bertalanffy primarily understood systemology as a generalization of his organismic thinking; he ascribed to it the virtue of carrying, promoting and serving the respect of the specific dignity of every level of organization of life. Accordingly, it could provide the basis of a unified understanding of human experience. It would help resolve the “critical” and more or less urgent political, economical, technical and ecological problems with which he thought that humanity was confronted. One major difficulty of these first discourses of Bertalanffy is the gap between the high ambitions and the actually given justifications. His emphatic and frequently polemical style certainly well served his main goal, namely arousing great interest among researchers of the non-physical sciences. It did enable him to emphasize the aspects of his project that he thought would meet the needs in those disciplines, specifically in stressing his opposition to what was being increasingly rejected by their representatives: “meristic” (as opposed to “holistic”)12 and reductionist approaches, lack of theoretical ambitions and of constructions really deserving this qualification, and excessive specialization. The other side of the coin, however, was that he thus increased the need to present justifications for his project to those scientists and philosophers who were not predisposed to agree with his theses. The main problem in that regard was the lack of systematic discussion of the foundations from the viewpoint of theory of knowledge. This would have been necessary in order to clarify the ontological status of “general systems laws” and the epistemological functions of abstract theories of “systems”. The scattering of his perspectivist reflections prevented the Downloaded by [Pouvreau David] at 07:26 06 February 2014 International Journal of General Systems 181 overwhelming majority of his readers to be enlightened in those regards. Moreover, although the functions of general systemology as a theoretical framework of systemic modelling were exposed, Bertalanffy said nothing in his founding papers beyond the objectives that he had set, i.e. nothing about the methodology of such a modelling. Finally, a similar problem arose with regard to the missions ascribed to this systemology as a corpus of knowledge helping to guide and structures our understanding and resolution of the apparent “crises” of humanity: beyond declarations of principle, nothing was said about how this approach could concretely assume this role. Interestingly, at least before 1954, the speculative character of his systemological considerations served much more to promote his project than to harm it: the criticisms (sometimes severe) were much rarer than the aroused enthusiasms. It is clear that this project met many expectations and that, despite their shortcomings, Bertalanffy’s expositions could reach their major goal: bolstering hopes that general systemology could meet these expectations and awaken the will to develop it to this end. This project would not have “taken off” without four key researchers: Boulding, Rapoport, the neurophysiologist Ralph W. Gerard and the psychologist James G. Miller. The latter three were involved from 1949 to 1954 in developing the transdisciplinary concept of “behavioral sciences” at University of Chicago, in the Comittee for the Behavioral Sciences (CBS) directed by Miller. And Boulding directed at the University of Michigan a seminar sharing the same ambition, in a perfectly systemological spirit. 2.5. The impact of the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences The Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) was inaugurated in summer 1954 in California near Stanford Campus, at Palo Alto. At that time it was funded by the Ford Foundation, whose objectives had already led it to fund “behavioral sciences” in Chicago: furthering the progress in our understanding of the factors determining human behaviour, in a broad perspective that aimed at fostering world peace and democratic order, and at improving education, justice and social-economical conditions of human life in general. The goal of the CASBS was thus to bring together experts from very various horizons in order to develop “exchange and interdisciplinary integration in the behavioral sciences”, dedicated to the study of the value systems, of learning and communication processes, of the principles of social organization and of the cooperation of individuals and groups. The aim was to provide knowledge applicable to economic or political decision-making. The CASBS was in direct line with the CBS, but Miller could not work there: the funds he had received to establish the Mental Health Research Institute (MHRI) compelled him to focus on the organization of that institute, and then to leave Chicago in 1955 for Ann Arbor (Michigan). The recruiting started in early 1954 and the applications (ca. three thousand) started coming in spring. Boulding was one of the first applicants, and it is through him that Bertalanffy also applied. The invitation started on 1 October 1954 and ended on 1 September 1955. Thirty-six researchers were hired, many of them members of the CBS or attendees at the Macy conferences on cybernetics.13 The year spent at the CASBS was formative for all of them. In an internal report, Bertalanffy described the feeling that a definite ideal of research had been found again, that should be preciously cultivated. And he made explicit the criticism of the conventional organization of research inherent in this ideal: Interconnection of different fields and problems is a most important basis of progress […] It must be said, however, that the conventional university curriculum is unfavorable for developing a 182 D. Pouvreau broader outlook since emphasis is laid almost exclusively on specialist training, knowledge, and know-how […] This is quite natural, for any university government must, by sheer administrative necessity, pigeonhole professorships, departments, curricula, etc., and put the emphasis on training and research in well-established, specialized fields. Only if and when, against resistance of all sorts, an integrative field has become so important that its acknowledgement is imperative, a new department will be established […] In the Center we have, however, an institution which is free of the bondage of usual university administration, and offers a unique opportunity for integration and synthesis. (Bertalanffy 1954) Downloaded by [Pouvreau David] at 07:26 06 February 2014 Bertalanffy took up this discussion again some three years later, based on his experience with the incarnation of this ideal in the CASBS. But he also cryptically mentioned some difficulties and abuse of interdisciplinarity that he had observed in the Center: The old universitas literarum has split up in a multitude of specialized and scarcely connected establishments. Hence the task of founding centers that seek to restore the lost unity of science with the modern means […] The Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences that was founded in Stanford (California) some years ago thus set as its aim to gather during one year representatives of the various scientific fields – biology, psychology, psychiatry, economy, social sciences, etc. – in allowing them free intellectual exchanges and an uncontrolled work, and thus to foster a science of human behavior. We have developed some approaches in that direction, for example in line with general systemology [allgemeine Systemtheorie]. It nonetheless once again appeared that it is very hard to cross the border of one’s original discipline, and that one should be very careful in the field of interdisciplinary research to separate the wheat from the chaff. Despite the difficulties of such a synthetic work, there is few doubts left that it is necessary and that a trend in that direction exists. However, still too few institutions are oriented toward this objective […]: the Princeton’s and Dublin’s Institutes for Advanced Studies, as well as the aforementioned Stanford’s CASBS. (1957b, 5) These reflections were published in Germany in 1957. Bertalanffy then developed an active strategy in order to find a professorship there, and several times almost succeeded (Pouvreau 2009b, 149–166). He wanted to “introduce in Europe, thanks to his activity in America, still little known points of view”: the “trend to interdisciplinary synthesis” and the “behavioral sciences”. He contacted the Ford Foundation in early 1958 in order to obtain funding for the development of “collaboration between America and Germany” in that perspective. In parallel, Hayek wanted to found in Vienna an “institute for advanced studies” similar to those of Princeton, Dublin and Stanford; Bertalanffy proposed that the two collaborate. But they received no support and ultimately had to give up this idea.14 Despite the specificity of their respective objects, the works at the CASBS were mostly conform to the project of general systemology and could be viewed as contributions to its implementation; Bertalanffy summarized the spirit of these works in the following terms for the German readers that he sought to convince of the value of his own researches: General systemology [Allgemeine Systemtheorie] has a very important meaning in the modern field characterized as behavioral science, i.e. the theory of human behavior […] The Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences established by the Ford Foundation in Stanford (California) and many related currents are its clear manifestation. The efforts there are oriented toward the application of general systemology to experimental or social situations. (1957c, 12) More exactly stated, an effort was made there in order to embody the spirit of general systemology in theoretical constructions connecting several disciplines by means of abstract generalizations of some of their concepts based upon the isomorphy of their respective issues. This was done in the spirit of the “generalizations of aspects of experience” common to several “universes of discourse” that Boulding (1953, 1956b, 75) had already started to seek. International Journal of General Systems 183 Downloaded by [Pouvreau David] at 07:26 06 February 2014 In a paper that Bertalanffy wrote at Palo Alto, however, it becomes clear that 1955 not only marked the year when systemology started to benefit from a certain degree of institutionalization, but also when its instigator was confronted with other contemporary systemic approaches. Bertalanffy’s efforts were not invalidated by those parallel developments, which he by then was very aware of. But he henceforth recognized that general systemology would have to integrate many perspectives, whose extent he had until that time not fully appreciated. This encompassed the point of view of the elaborated systems concepts, of the involved mathematical techniques and of the attention devoted to “directed behavior”. More clearly than in 1950–1951, when he had discovered the “first order” cybernetics, Bertalanffy, while restating their originality and importance, understood that his dynamic concept of system and his organismic model were only components of a much broader “system movement”. The diversity of that movement should not be denied, and no model could pretend to supremacy: The mathematical approach followed in General System Theory [systems of differential equations] is not the only possible or most general one. There are a number of related modern approaches, such as information theory, cybernetics, game, decision, and net theories, stochastic models, operations research, to mention only the most important ones. However, the fact that differential equations cover extensive fields in the physical, biological, economical, and probably also the behavioral sciences, makes them a suitable access to the study of generalized systems […] A development which is closely connected with system theory is that of the modern theory of communication [… It] comes close to the theory of open systems, which may increase in order and organization, or show negative entropy [… Moreover], cybernetics tries to show that mechanisms of a feedback nature are at the basis of teleological or purposeful behavior in manmade machines as well as in living organisms, and in social systems. It should be borne in mind, however, that the feedback scheme is of a rather special nature [… and that] dynamics is the broader aspect […] We can indicate models showing adaptiveness, purposiveness, goal-seeking and the like […] One is equifinality, the tendency towards a characteristic final state from different initial states and in different ways, based upon dynamic interaction in an open system attaining a steady state; the second, feedback, the homeostatic maintenance of a characteristic state or the seeking of a goal, based upon circular chains and mechanisms monitoring back information on deviations from the state to be attained or the goal to be reached. A third model for adaptive behavior, a Design for a Brain, was developed by Ashby […] I am not going to discuss the merits and shortcomings of these models of teleological or directed behavior. What should be stressed, however, is the fact that teleological behavior directed towards a characteristic final state or goal is not something off limits of natural science and an anthropomorphic misconception of processes which, in themselves, are undirected and accidental. (1955a, 77–80) Once arrived in Palo Alto, Bertalanffy understood that there were two levels of generality in his systemological project. The lowest one, which he started in (1956c, 8) to describe as “general system theory in the narrow sense”, derived from his “open systems theory” in close connection to Lotka’s works (1925): it was his outline of “general kinetics” discussing the properties of a purely formal system of n differential equations relating n unknown functions (1945, 1950b). Until that time, he had mainly sought in such a system an instrument providing the greatest generality to his corpus of organismic concepts and “principles”. But the generality and mathematical sophistication of this system were at least equalled by those developed in cybernetics and operations research. As for the highest level of generality, which Bertalanffy came to name “general system theory in the broad sense”, it pertained to the scientific and philosophical perspectives on the transdisciplinary study of systems; that is, to the function of a superstructure of systems research that this project was destined to become. The creation of a scientific society to develop and implement the systemological project had become an obvious and urgent necessity for two reasons. The first was the necessity to breathe unity into systems research so that it would not in turn degenerate in a proliferation of 184 D. Pouvreau Downloaded by [Pouvreau David] at 07:26 06 February 2014 disconnected developments. The second was because it was the only means to successfully assert the relevance of organismic conceptions and of their related values in light of emerging antagonistic trends discernible in the other components of the widely scoped system movement. 2.6. The creation of the SGSR The decision to create this society was taken by Bertalanffy, Boulding, Rapoport and Gerard during a lunch at the CASBS in October 1954. They wrote a manifesto for what they called the “Society for the Advancement of General Systems Theory” (SAGST) (Boulding 1977, 2). The plural used for “systems” expressed an awareness of the multiplicity of systemic approaches that claimed to be general: the aim of the society was their integration. The manifesto defined a “general system” in a very broad sense as every “theoretical system applicable to more than one of the traditional departments of knowledge”. Accordingly, the society’s name recognized ipso facto for general systemology the status of a metatheory dealing with the whole set of transdisciplinary theoretical constructions. Interestingly, the manifesto did not mention any (potentially polemical) holistic orientation. Only the methodological functions of the Bertalanffian project were emphasized. Its commitments to the system concept, to the “stratification of the real”, to the “formal unity of science” and to ethics were omitted: The main purpose of the SAGST will be to encourage the development of general systems [in the previous sense]. All sciences develop theoretical systems of concepts, relationships, and models. Many of these systems are isomorphic, but their similarity is undetected because of differences in terminology and of other barriers to communication among specialists. Furthermore, systems which have been well worked out in one fields may be helpful in another. The principal aims of General Systems Theory are therefore: (1) To investigate the isomorphy of concepts, laws, and models in various fields, and to help in useful transfers from one field to another; (2) To encourage the development of adequate theoretical models in areas which lack them; (3) To eliminate the duplication of theoretical efforts in different fields; (4) To promote the unity of science through improving the communication between specialists.15 “The principal aim of the SAGST” was defined as follows two years later: To bring together areas of research with dissimilar contents but with similar structures or philosophical bases, so as to enable the workers in various fields to develop a common language and thus to stimulate each other more effectively. (Bertalanffy and Rapoport 1956, v) Although Bertalanffy and Rapoport at this time clearly expressed the holistic perspective of the society, they insisted on the original character of their interpretation of this perspective: The search for theories of generalized systems is an attempt to escape the extremely “analytic” viewpoint of classical physical science and to make the so-called “holistic” approach, rather vaguely eulogized by various philosophers since Goethe, more rigorous and explicit. (op. cit.) The first meeting was arranged on 27 December 1954 in the framework of the annual symposium of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Downloaded by [Pouvreau David] at 07:26 06 February 2014 International Journal of General Systems 185 The manifesto and an invitation to this meeting were published in the programme. Despite the success, its founding group judged a formal inauguration of the SAGST to be premature and decided to form a committee in order to study the conditions of its constitution. Bertalanffy was appointed executive secretary and spent some of his time at the CASBS to work at the redaction of the legal and organizational details of its functioning. He also answered queries for information. A new meeting was held during the next symposium of the AAAS in late 1955 in Atlanta. The SAGST could then be established. It nonetheless took one year more so that it could become something more than a purely formal organization: concrete problems still had to be solved. Its head office was fixed at the MHRI, which Miller and Boulding soon characterized as a “general systems institute” (Pouvreau 2013a, 820–823). Under Bertalanffy’s and Rapoport’s responsibility, the SAGST materialized its existence in late December 1956 with the publication of a book gathering papers judged as useful for the fulfilment of its objectives. Entitled General Systems, it was the first volume of a twentyeight yearbook series that became one of the society’s publications. An election providing SAGST with a board of directors took place on 15 May 1957. Boulding was appointed president (for two years) and Bertalanffy vice-president (for three years). A decision was also taken to change the name of the society. In previous meetings, two pitfalls had emerged in claiming its vocation to the “development of general systems theory”: a potential misconception that the society exclusively promoted one theory or conceptual model, whereas the intent was to enable the emergence of a unity through the diversity of systems research; and a potential misconception that a “theory” deserving this name already existed, and that the society’s aim would consist in presenting it. The society was therefore renamed “Society for General Systems Research” (SGSR), with the status of a non-profit-making society in Michigan. At the beginning, it was funded by the Bosom Foundation and by sales of General Systems.16 Bertalanffy and Rapoport edited these yearbooks. In fact, Bertalanffy’s very active role between 1954 and 1956 was thereafter mostly restricted to General Systems because of his geographical distance. Although he remained vice-president of the SGSR until 15 May 1960, he indeed worked in California until 1958, then in Kansas for two years, before returning to Canada from 1961 to 1969. 2.7. Essential aspects of the evolution of the SGSR During the first years of the SGSR, the various currents of the “system movement” that the society was meant to organize seem to have been on good terms. The main point was then to guarantee the permanence and expansion of the society, to encourage the expression and -blossoming of all existing trends, and to establish constructive dialogues between them. This respect for diversity and conciliation is evident in Bertalanffy until the early 1960s, in line with the reflections that he had started at the CASBS: The way of general systemology [Allgemeine Systemtheorie] in the sense of a generalized kinetics and thermodynamics is not the only possible one. It rather takes part of a group of modern currents to which also take part, among others, information theory, cybernetics, game theory and operations research. What is common to all those currents is the interdisciplinary trend, and what is different between them are the conceptual models and mathematical structures that they apply. General systemology in the narrow sense does not pretend to have any monopoly. (1957c, 9) The various “systems theories” are models that mirror different aspects. They are not mutually exclusive and often combined in application […] The differences of these theories are in the particular model conceptions and mathematical methods applied. (1962a, 4) 186 D. Pouvreau But the very fact that Bertalanffy judged it necessary to insist on those aspects suggests his sensitivity to the threat that the SGSR could become a place of competition between currents of systems research. He may also have harboured the fear that the worth of the organismic model and of the approach of general systems via a “generalized kinetics” would be downplayed: Downloaded by [Pouvreau David] at 07:26 06 February 2014 We have chosen to use the plural for “systems” in the choice of the name of the society in order to express the fact that there are different ways in the elaboration of a general theory of systems [in einer allgemeinen Theorie von Systemen]; I nonetheless consider systemology [Systemtheorie] in the narrow sense as a central member of this group. (1956c, 7–8) More importantly, his distinction, introduced in 1956, between a “narrow” and a “broad” sense of general systemology shows that Bertalanffy had not given up the idea that it could become a project encompassing all “systems sciences”. Studying the dynamics of the evolution of the SGSR demonstrates that it could never play this role (Pouvreau 2013a, 825–851). I will only point here to the essential role in this dynamics played by the question of the relative weights that should be given to theoretical considerations and to technical and societal applications. The centre of gravity of the research has progressively moved from general theoretical constructions combined with scientific-philosophical reflections to applications taking the form of models and techniques that were inspired by those constructions and that aimed at solving specific issues: The integrative force of the partly charismatic and polemic nature of the early writers has in large part given way to attempts to transform the more glamorous original perceptions and insights into well-founded and useful techniques for system problem-solving. (Cavallo 1979, 6–7) This transition toward the search for “applications” of “general systems research” expressed a “socialization” process of the SGSR. This led to a change of its statutes17 in April 1974. A good expression of this trend is the following reformulation, in May 1971, of its official purposes18: In recent years the Society has been increasingly concerned with the application of general systems theory to various organizational and societal problems. This additional purpose is manifest in the changing emphases of the Society’s annual meetings, in the nature of the articles appearing in its major publication – the General Systems Yearbook – and in the activities of the four interest-focus groups which have been instituted since 1967. The assertion of this trend is evident throughout the 1960s in the annual reports of the treasurers, but it first became the guideline in the early 1970s. This reflected a deep and enduring antagonism in the SGSR in that regard: The apparent need for increasing knowledge of the general systems point of view and for its implementation in many areas of human action has led some of us to seek to raise the Society’s visibility around the world in various organizational contexts. But there has always been a sizeable core of Society members who have insisted that we should remain a research organization, in the sense of seeking to promote and to report general systems research as a field of intellectual and academic interest. Thus, there has been historically a body of respected opinion within the Society which holds that we should remain a small club of like-minded people, fruitfully interacting with one another in terms of our general systems research. (Ericson 1973) International Journal of General Systems 187 The advocates of an orientation toward applied research, and more particularly applied to societal issues, nonetheless progressively succeeded in making their point of view prevail. The latter became the norm, well made explicit and explained by Klir in late 1978: The main emphasis of SGSR activities should be oriented toward achieving a recognition of general systems research as a respectable field of inquiry by the scientific and professional community as well as other social and political constituencies. It should in particular “develop thematic programs” in order to “demonstrate and test” the “pragmatic significance of general systems research” (Klir 1978, 4). Downloaded by [Pouvreau David] at 07:26 06 February 2014 2.8. Bertalanffy’s and Rapoport’s role as editors of general systems Bertalanffy’s and Rapoport’s role as editors of General Systems must be understood in this context. The yearbook’s primary function was communication within the SGSR. In 1957, Bertalanffy and Rapoport defined it as “a vehicle of communication for the various points of view”, or also as a “forum”, while no criterion of professional skill had been established in “general systems research” yet, and while the latter meant “many different things to different people”. They therefore pleaded for a “spirit of mutual tolerance” and invited members of the society to acknowledge the diversity of expectations and of interests for general systems research (from “preoccupation with pure mathematical deductions” to “pure philosophical speculation). They called on members to provide the necessary effort of understanding so that the forum could enrich this research and serve the purposes of the SGSR. They characterized General Systems as a field of “experimentation with ideas”: The non-mathematical reader is urged to control his possible distate for pages of equations. The mathematician, on the other hand, is urged to curb his impatience with the metaphorical use of system-theoretical terminology. Experimentation with ideas must always be within the scope of interdisciplinary endeavors. Persistent demands for rigor, clarity and verifiability sometimes scare ideas out of existence before they have a chance to come to fruition. (Bertalanffy and Rapoport 1957, xi) One decade later, Bertalanffy and Rapoport (1968, v). insisted on an important aspect of the communication function of the yearbook: the one of a medium furthering the scientific exchanges beyond the borders, and enabling in that way to enrich general systems research. A significant connection was notably established in the late 1950s with the systemicians of the “Eastern bloc”.19 At the beginning, the editors chose to make of each yearbook mainly a compilation of papers that had already been published elsewhere (often recent ones, but some being several decades old). The papers were selected based on the importance of their contribution to advancing “general systems research”. A growing part from year to year, however, was given to unpublished papers that were too original in their perspective to find another adequate avenue of review and publication: The Yearbook is increasingly becoming a medium for the presentation of original papers containing ideas too broad in scope to be convenient for standard scientific journals. Such articles encompass subjects that meet the interests of wider audiences. (Bertalanffy and Rapoport 1968, v) An essential rule of Bertalanffy and Rapoport’s editorial policy was the following one: A paper that fitted well into any of the established academic disciplines, that is, one dealing primarily with a specific content area, employing a standard methodology, and eschewing 188 D. Pouvreau generalizations to other apparently unrelated areas was, in most cases, not deemed to fall within the scope of General Systems. This, however, was not the only consideration. Several “single content” papers were published in the Yearbook if they gave evidence of the “systemic approach”. (Rapoport 1977, v) Downloaded by [Pouvreau David] at 07:26 06 February 2014 Another rule was the primordial room left for discussions of logical, methodological and epistemological questions: the related papers were published at the beginning of the volumes. Already in the first volume, Bertalanffy and Rapoport emphasized the great importance they attached to the speculative character of the papers that they chose to publish; far from being appalling – as would have been the case for editorial boards of “classical” journals – this character was fundamental in their perspective (Bertalanffy and Rapoport 1956, v): Speculation is definitely on the agenda of a general systems approach. Indeed the approach was largely inspired by Whitehead’s warning that twentieth-century science was still largely living on the intellectual capital of the seventeenth century, which is nearing exhaustion. They were aware of risks thus taken, but they durably maintained their optimism: As usual, neither soundness nor intricacy of specialized knowledge nor tightness of reasoning was taken as the criterion of choice but rather boldness of imagination and originality. It is inevitable, therefore, that many of the papers published in General Systems will prove to be ephemeral. Still if a finite fraction is judged by posterity as having anticipated important future developments, the editors will feel amply rewarded. (Bertalanffy and Rapoport 1960, xvii) Finally, the editors declared their will to maintain important space for papers providing mathematical models of generalized systems liable to be applied in the social and “behavioral” sciences. The objective was explicitly to orient general systems research toward helping advance mathematicizing in those sciences. The argument was a fundamental one: The utility of mathematical models of generalized systems stands or falls with their applicability to social and behavioral science. No argument is needed to convince the physicist of the usefulness of mathematical models, for they are the very basis of physical theory. The biologist, if he is not a vitalist, will (or, at any rate ought to) admit that at least in principle it is worthwhile to try to extend mathematical methods to the study of the events involved in life processes […] The most controversial recent excursion of mathematical methods has been into social science. It is precisely the contentless-ness of mathematics which appears to the proponent of theories of generalized systems to make mathematical methods universally useful. This conviction is put to a severe test in the evaluation of the role of mathematical models in social science. This is why mathematicized social and behavioral science occupies a pivotal position in the general systems approach. (Bertalanffy and Rapoport 1956, v) However, those selection criteria did not guarantee an irreproachable editorial line. From 1972 onward, Rapoport admitted some errors of judgement and difficulties in the selection of the papers together with Bertalanffy. One issue was the exploratory character of many papers and the lack of evaluation criteria. Rapoport also acknowledged the problematical ambivalence of the methodological and theoretical functions of the mathematical homologies in the systemological construction of theories, an issue that Hempel had already emphasized two decades earlier.20 His reflection on that matter was furthered with humour in his last preface: Although the editorial policy that guided the first twenty-two volumes has been quite consistent, it has not been easy to define. “General systems” is not a well defined “field” in which tradition International Journal of General Systems 189 Downloaded by [Pouvreau David] at 07:26 06 February 2014 and established criteria of methodological competence and of importance of contributions provide standards for accepting or declining submissions. Nor has it been possible to delineate clearly the scope of General Systems Yearbook. Since the subject matter of general system is virtually by definition interdisciplinary, the scope could not be delimited by contents […] Since, however, the concept of scope implies boundaries, criteria had to be established, at least for excluding submissions […] The “systemic approach” has been most difficult to evaluate in terms of the significance of the contribution […] There being no “theory” in the accepted (scientific) sense of the term, validation criteria could not be applied. Many papers bordering on far-out fringes of “conceptual experimentation” found home in the pages of General Systems, whether deservedly or not, only time will tell. Unquestionably, the majority of them will sink into oblivion, as will the vast majority of all papers now published in the avalanche of the publication explosion. It may be some consolation to note that this explosion still does not match the extravagance of nature: out of some 85 million spermatozoa ejaculated in the human act of love, one, occasionally, produces a new life. (Rapoport 1977, v) In fact, General Systems was only partially representative of the foci of interest and productions of the SGSR members. It was the expression of compromises between the components of the society that Bertalanffy and Rapoport arbitrated in their editorial policy, with their will to maintain the aims initially assigned to the SGSR. The yearbooks reveal a genuine care for an equilibrium between the various orientations that were expressed in the society. It implied that the conception of systemological research that Bertalanffy, Rapoport and Boulding shared could be significantly represented. They nonetheless had to take into account the trends that asserted themselves, and to handle the problem that they could select only among the papers that they received or had noticed in the contemporary literature: they did not have as much choice among the systemological works as among those undertaken from the perspectives of operations research or management sciences. Ultimately, General Systems was merely one showcase, among others, of the SGSR. It was less representative of the reality of the distribution of the society’s foci of interest than of the will of its editors to assert a definite conception of systems research. That conception soon became minority despite its initial inspiration power. Rapoport’s resignation in 1977 corroborates this interpretation. He took his decision with regard to the predominance, in the SGSR, of instrumental interests oriented toward “managerial” applications instead of theoretical interests: the management of natural and human resources and the decision processes in the context of big firms, administrations, governments or international organizations (Hammond 2003, 154). Rapoport and Bertalanffy tried to restrain this evolution in the yearbooks: the latter were the place of their “resistance” to those trends of systems research, and Boulding also actively joined them. This was revealed by their common insistence, reiterated throughout the 1960s and 1970s, on their specific understanding of the philosophical and ethical aspects of general systemology (Pouvreau 2013a, 842–846, 893–913). 2.9. “General systems research” as a mere current of the SGSR A major gap crosses the whole history of the SGSR. This gap conditioned the stands of the systemologists, particularly Bertalanffy’s. It had several scientific-philosophical declensions. These were combined in the polemical discussions about general systems research and led, in 1976, the editor of the proceedings of the annual meeting of the society to compare this research with a Janus (White 1976, i): theoretical vs. practical orientation, interpretative vs. instrumental aim, efforts for an understanding of the world vs. direct contributions to the transformation of the social, economical and political world (clearly solely from the point of view of functional optimization, not of a change in power structures). This gap had other, Downloaded by [Pouvreau David] at 07:26 06 February 2014 190 D. Pouvreau axiological and ideological declensions connected to the previous ones. In the form of ideal types, two currents were evident: (1) a pacifist ethic that more or less criticized the contemporary social-political order, cared for the proper dignity of the world of values and for individual and scientific freedom, and advocated the decentralization of the places of power, a cooperative, participative and democratic model of decision taking and development at all levels of organization; (2) a more or less scientistic and technocratic pragmatism that was open to the manipulation of individual fates, anxious about its implication in the processes of decision taking in the government and industry and about the conditioning of scientific research to this implication, involved in the military–industrial complex, and advocating a hierarchical model of decision taking and development at all levels of organization. Certain epistemological rifts were superimposed on the previous ones, while often echoing them. There was a competition between questionings, models and schemes of explanation: deterministic schemes vs. spontaneist schemes of evolution, focus on the control of systems and imposed behaviour vs. “self-organization”, cybernetic model of regulation by negative feedback loops vs. dynamic regulation, homeostatic resistance to change vs. positive feedback loops or “step functions” as factors of change, modelling of observing systems (“second order” cybernetics) vs. modelling of observed systems (“first order” cybernetics). General systems research was also marked by the contrast between two trends: a trend to a unitarian focus on isomorphisms (typified by Miller’s and Gerard’s search for “cross-level hypotheses” and by the implementation of these isomorphisms in the construction of systemic models), and a trend to emphasize the principle of relative autonomy of the various “levels of organization” (or “of discourses”).21 Some disagreements with regard to the virtues and role of mathematics in systemological research were also evident, especially in the “behavioral sciences”. Confronted with systemicians such as operations researchers who used very sophisticated and innovative mathematics (like game theory or networks theory), Bertalanffy was led to warn against an “enthusiasm for the new mathematical and logical tools available”, that had, according to him, “led to feverish ‘model building’ as a purpose in itself and often without regard to empirical fact” (1962a, 11). Roger E. Cavallo still witnessed those antagonisms in 1979: he even talked about a “schism”.22 One of this antagonism’s significant expressions was Bertalanffy’s and Ashby’s dispute about the so-called “two main (methodological) lines” in general systemology: (1) an “empirico-intuitive” method searching for regularities in the behaviour of empirical entities studied as systems and inducing, based on those regularities, some general system laws; and (2) an “axiomatic-deductive” method that consisted of considering “the set of ‘all conceivable systems’” and then of “reducing” it to a “more reasonable size”, the “very special subset of those systems that are accepted by the scientist as being ‘suitable for study’”, and especially to “develop a rigorous logic of systems, forming a structure on which all the real forms may find their natural places and their natural relations” (Ashby 1958, 2; Bertalanffy 1962a, 4–5). Finally, rifts and rivalries appeared between the various scientific components of the SGSR. This was promoted by with the growing trend that Bertalanffy criticized in (1962a), to identify the project of general systemology with other components such as “systems analysis” and cybernetics. Very pronounced in Europe, this trend was reinforced in the 1970’s when some distinguished cyberneticists (Stafford Beer, Gordon Pask, Heinz von Foerster) joined the SGSR: this confusion was regularly denounced by other members of the society.23 In his presidential address, Ericson (1979) felt the need to recall two major reasons that invalidated those identifications – the encompassing vocations of general systemology (in the “broad sense”), and the conceptual schemes and values that were specific to it: International Journal of General Systems 191 Downloaded by [Pouvreau David] at 07:26 06 February 2014 There are those among us who express the viewpoint that “general systems” and “cybernetics” are really two ways of identifying what mount to the same set of perceptions. Others see an evolution from “classical” system theory a la Bertalanffy, to cybernetics, information theory, and structuralism. In my view such integrative attempts miss much of the spirit of general systems research as manifested in the Society and its annals. I contend that it has been and continues to be meaningful and useful to differentiate the general systems approach from cybernetics on the one hand, and from systems analysis on the other. And for me the distinctions are of prime importance because this Society has from its earliest beginnings sought to provide a conceptual framework for dealing with the totality of systems phenomenon, of which cybernetics and systems analysis are components […] Moreover, to the uninitiated at least, cybernetics seems inevitably to carry with it an image ranging from servomechanistic engineering factory robots to anatomical prostheses. At any rate, cybernetics apparently almost conjures images which are far from the essence of what most of us, I believe, understand by general systems. (Ericson 1979, 28–29) Its history leaves the image of a SGSR confronted with the persistent difficulty to maintain a coexistence and a constructive dialogue between very diverse orientations. And also the image of a systemological project which, after having been the spearhead of this society, was reduced to the horizon of one of its currents. The project has most certainly always been represented with a significant force of inspiration, but this inspiration was very quickly reduced to affecting the minority and at the price of perpetual reassertions of its specificity (Pouvreau 2013a, 825–851). Those reassertions have nonetheless had the virtue to lead the systemologists, particularly Bertalanffy, to make this project more precise and to significantly develop and implement it in comparison with his founding papers. The second part of the present article considers these efforts, particularly Bertalanffy’s, and seeks their potential systematicity. 3. Developments and implementations of general systemology: Bertalanffy’s contributions 3.1. What about the nature of the systemological field? The scientificity of general systemology claimed by Bertalanffy – he often described it as a “new basic scientific discipline”24 – and his followers, has often been questioned. A commentator (Livesey 1972, 148, 153) typically admitted his “confusion”: Some systems theorists refer outright to General Systems Theory as “science”, and others refer to it as a “perspective philosophy”. I would imagine that the resolution of this apparent difference in terms is merely that it is a “science of sciences” which fits the dictionary definition of “philosophy”. It is true that Bertalanffy explicitly underlined its vocation to become a mathesis universalis in the spirit of Leibniz: an “encompassing system of signs including the various sciences” (1949b, 127–128, 1949e, 187–188, 1950b, 165), or also a new “natural philosophy” (1967a, 53–65). Mesarović (1972, 252), in contrast, judged it necessary to reassert – in opposition to Bertalanffy – that he did not see “general systems theory” as a “scientific philosophy” but as a “scientific enterprise”, while acknowledging its impact on philosophy in general and on epistemology in particular. Klir has, nonetheless, usefully remarked that although one could understand it as a “science of systems”, it was in a heterodox sense of the term “science”: 192 D. Pouvreau Downloaded by [Pouvreau David] at 07:26 06 February 2014 In spite of all its science-like characteristics, I argue that systems science is not a science in the ordinary sense, but rather a new dimension in science. Each system developed as a model of some phenomenon in any traditional science represents knowledge pertaining to that science. Knowledge in systems science is not of this kind. Rather, it is knowledge regarding structures, i.e. specific categories of systems. Hence, experimental objects in systems science are not objects of the real world, but rather abstractions, which we are able to make real on the computer. (Klir 1988, 156)25 The metascientific character of general systemology has thus been emphasized. The French systemician Jacques Eugene (1981, 13, 20, 107) reached the conclusion that it was in the very nature of this “theory” of systemic “universals” to be “the interface of philosophy and science”, of which mathematics would be the “coding means”. He finally included this “theory” in its entirety in the realm of epistemology, in identifying it with the “formal part” of the latter. This characterization is reductive, but it is certain that general systemology, while not being reducible to a philosophy of science either, not only partook of philosophy as well as of science, but even claimed to renew both of them. This situation was necessary in view of Klir’s argument. Bunge rightly had the following well-inspired reflection: Any General Systems Theory practitioner should take into account that being called a philosopher is the price that he has to pay for calling himself a scientist. (1977, 37) Related to the previous one was the issue of the “theoretical” status of general systemology. This uncertainty was expressed in the ambivalence of the German term Lehre (“doctrine” or “theory”) used by Bertalanffy to first name it, and in the embarrassment he felt with its translation by the term “theory”. Bertalanffy and Boulding, themselves, acknowledged in the 1960s that this term remained inadequate: At the moment it would be presumptuous to claim that there is any clearly defined body of theory which could be identified with the name “general systems”. (Boulding 1964, 25–26) No comprehensive theory of systems exists today (Bertalanffy 1967a, 71). Rapoport followed Bertalanffy in repeating the need to distinguish between several meanings of the term “theory”, and that “general system theory” was not a “theory” in the “narrow sense”, i.e. a “collection of propositions bound by deductive and inductive chains”: General System Theory is a theory in the broad sense, a repertoire of concepts serving as an intellectual scheme and providing nourishment for theories (in the narrow sense) that deal with organized complexity. (Rapoport 1974, 247) Klir developed an almost identical conception at the early 1970s: General systems theory in the broad sense refers to a collection of general concepts, principles, tools, problems, methods and techniques associated with systems. (1972, 1) In fact, Bertalanffy had been ahead of them when he talked from 1956 onward about “general system theory in the broad sense”, and more so when he started in 1968 to describe it as “a new scientific paradigm”: International Journal of General Systems 193 The term “general system theory” was introduced by the present author, deliberately, in a catholic sense. One may, of course, limit it to the “technical” meaning in the sense of mathematical theory (as is frequently done), but this appears unadvisable in view of the fact that there are many “system” problems asking for “theory” which latter is not at present available in mathematical terms. So the name “general system theory” is here used broadly, similar to our speaking of “theory of evolution”, which comprises about everything between fossil digging, anatomy and the mathematical theory of selection; or “behavior theory” extending from bird watching to sophisticated neurophysiological theories. It is the introduction of a new paradigm that matters. (1968a, xix) Downloaded by [Pouvreau David] at 07:26 06 February 2014 Here, Bertalanffy used a less precise definition of the term “paradigm” than Thomas Kuhn’s, but he explained the rise of this so-called “system paradigm” in perfect accordance with the philosopher’s theses on “gestalt switch” and on the “structure of scientific revolutions”: “Normal” science in Thomas Kuhn’s sense, that is, science as conventionally practiced, was little adapted to deal with “relations” in systems […] Here is the reason why, even though the problems of “system” were ancient and had been known for many centuries, they remained “philosophical” and did not become a “science”. This was so because mathematical techniques were lacking and the problems required a new epistemology; the whole force of “classical” science and its successes over the centuries militated against any change in the fundamental paradigm of one-way causality and resolution into elementary units. (Bertalanffy 1972a, 25–26) Rapoport, like Bertalanffy, considered that the systemic paradigm was “built on recent developments which show[ed] promise of reestablishing holistic approaches to knowledge without abandoning scientific rigor” (1968, xxi). They therefore agreed with Boulding (1964, 25–26) who, in opposition to the scientistic temptations and to the foci on systems technology, identified general systemology with a mere set of “points of view”: General system theory is a model of certain general aspects of reality. But it is also a way of seeing things which were previously overlooked or bypassed, and in this sense is a methodological maxim. And like every scientific theory of broader compass, it is connected with, and tries to give answer to perennial problems of philosophy. (Bertalanffy 1972a, 38) “General system theory” subsumes an outlook or a methodology rather than a theory in the sense ascribed to this term in science. (Rapoport 1966a, 3) General system theory provides, “meta-scientifically”, a new world outlook or philosophy. No hubris is involved; this is one of the “perspectives” human beings – with their endowments and bondages, biological, historical, linguistic, etc. – are able to form; presumably richer and better than the paradigms of the mechanistic conception or of robot psychology, but by no means a ”nothing but” or “cure-all” for the ills of the individual and society. (Bertalanffy 1972e, 186) 3.2. Is there any systematicity in the project of general systemology? At a late stage, Bertalanffy and Rapoport made explicit their view of general systemology. The latter thus explained (1986, bring together the various developments of systems research thinking. Bertalanffy, in turn, presented his view at the end of rough systematic classification of the sub-fields of this research 28–38): global and encompassing 226) that its role was to in a unified scheme of his life in the form of a (1968a, xix–xxiii) (1972a, D. Pouvreau 194 General system theory Systems philosophy Systems science Systems technology Systems epistemology Systems ontology General system principles Theorizing of “general systems” Physical technology Social, economical and political technology Axiology (theory of values) Specific systemic theoretical models Sadovsky (1971, 547–550) provided another classification that deserves mention. It characterized “general system theory” as the mere theoretical branch of “systems research”26: Downloaded by [Pouvreau David] at 07:26 06 February 2014 Systems research Philosophical aspects Logic and methodology General theory of systems Specific conceptions and theories concerning systems Another classification (of “systems approach”) was published 13 years later by Mattesisch (1984, 29–32). It also deserves mention, although “systems research” and “systems approach” usually have definitely distinct connotations. It indeed combined Bertalanffy’s and Sadovsky’s, except that it did not integrate axiology into the field of “systems approach”: Systems approach Systems philosophy Systems analysis Empirical systems research Systems engineering Ontology Mathematical Studies of systems behaviour Constructing artificial systems Epistemology Methodology Systems theories Designing of systems models Testing of systems laws Fitting of systems models Simulation studies All these classifications reveal the uncertain position of logic and methodology, which oscillates between systems philosophy and theoretical science of systems. This position has not been explicitly defined by Bertalanffy, and this is understandable insofar as a typical feature of general systemology was to solve the ontological, logical and methodological problems at the interface of science and philosophy. Is it then possible to talk about a coherent systematic view of this project, at least in Bertalanffy’s case? He has left only scattered contributions on this issue, whereby the respective connections may appear tenuous or even nonexistent. A hermeneutical approach to the whole set of his works is nonetheless possible (and necessary): this approach strives to search for those connections in combining a global view of this set and a precise knowledge of its details. This calls for using writings that are subsequent to a given period under study in order to grasp the dynamics of Bertalanffian thinking, while constantly recalling the writings in German of the years 1923–1942 when the post-war period is being considered. This approach has been enriched by considering the works of the other major systemologists: this helps to reconstruct their discussions with Bertalanffy, to clarify his conceptions, and to specify more precisely the structure and functioning of general systemology in comparison to the rough scheme that he provided in 1968. The outcome is what I term a “system of systemological hermeneutics”, meant to make intelligible the meanings, aims and complementarity of all systemological works (Pouvreau 2013a, 2013b, 2013c). International Journal of General Systems 195 Downloaded by [Pouvreau David] at 07:26 06 February 2014 3.3. Toward a hermeneutical system of general systemology This system is schematized on (Figure 1). Each arrow of the diagram should be read as “informs”. It presents general systemology as structured in four interconnected “poles”: “philosophical systemology”, “basic theoretical systemology”, “applied theoretical systemology” and “systems technology”. In the diagram, logic, methodology and ontology should not be understood as constituting together a “pole” of its own, but rather as taking simultaneously part in two “poles”. Namely, they are presented as the interface of philosophical systemology and basic theoretical systemology: the issues they deal with concern the theoretical construction of “general systems” as well as theory of knowledge, philosophy of science and, to a lesser extent, the other fields of philosophical systemology. Philosophical systemology, which should not be reduced to a mere part of itself termed “philosophy of (systems) science”, had to develop the anthropological, epistemological, ontological, logical and methodological foundations of the systemic knowledge of the “real”. It also had to discuss the way those foundations may contribute to the transformation of scientific thinking and activity, as well as the values that general systemology espoused and the practical transformation of the world that it may foster. Finally, philosophical systemology was supposed to elaborate an “inductive” metaphysics which, while exposing a cosmological Philosophical systemology General Systemology Perspectivism Philosophy of science Philosophical anthropology Systemological logics Basic theoretical systemology Systemological methodology Systems ontology General systems Metaphysics Axiology Praxeology Ideology and their theorizings "Formal sciences" Systems technology Mathematics Mathematical logics Applied theoretical systemology Resolution of practical issues once systemically interpreted Systemic models in the "sciences of the real" "Sciences of the real" Practical issues Physics, chemistry, biology, ecology, medicine, psychology, linguistics, economics, sociology, anthropology, political sciences physico- or biologicotechnical, industrial, ecological, social, economical, political Figure 1. The hermeneutical system of general systemology. Action social economical political Downloaded by [Pouvreau David] at 07:26 06 February 2014 196 D. Pouvreau view supplying meanings, would be based on the results established in “systems science”, i.e. basic and applied theoretical systemologies. The latter two systemologies, while both being “theoretical” in character, should be differentiated from each other with regard to their respective levels of abstraction and purposes. Applied theoretical systemology may be viewed as the interface of the “sciences of the real” and basic theoretical systemology. The latter had no direct connection with the sciences of the “real”: its materials were already theoretical models elaborated with more or less sophistication in the field of applied theoretical systemology based on the problems and knowledge coming from the sciences of the “real”. The first function of basic theoretical systemology was to determine the isomorphies between these models, to construct general systems gathering them in equivalence classes, and then to formulate concepts, principles or even laws applicable to these various classes (all the while relying on the tools elaborated in the “formal sciences”). In that regard, it constituted a logic, a methodology and an ontology, but also a matrix of systemic theorizing. Indeed, its function was also to inform applied theoretical systemology by providing it with a general framework. This should help to guide and structure the construction of theoretical systemic models, to refine existing models as well as to elaborate new ones. Its theoretical productions may be differentiated into two classes: (1) “uninterpreted general systems”: purely formal despite great differences from the point of view of mathematicizing, these systems did not refer to any particular field of empirical investigation. They therefore had no a priori connection to any specific scientific discipline, but remained a posteriori interpretable and thus enabled such connections; (2) “transdisciplinary interpreted general systems”, constructed based on specific concepts and models developed in several scientific disciplines, in which they were meant to be applied. Applied theoretical systemology played a pivotal role. Its models were constructed in relationship to problems studied in the sciences of the “real”, but they were also meant to be supported by general systems, and were more or less consciously supported by axiological or metaphysical considerations. Its modellings, supposed to be guided by theorizing of general systems, were elaborated in close connection to the sciences of the “real” while relying on formal sciences. Applied theoretical systemology in its turn informed its “basic” homologue (in providing its “substance”) as well as the sciences of the “real” (to which it presented original theoretical outlooks). It also informed philosophical systemology in maintaining open and alive the contact of the latter with the sciences of the “real”. This involved either providing the material for an “inductive” systems metaphysics or enabling the epistemological, scientific-philosophical, anthropological, axiological and praxeological reflections to be developed based on relevant and well-founded examples. Applied theoretical systemology finally informed systems technology. This “pole” was indeed destined to solve some practical issues in interpreting them as systemic issues; it could not succeed in this task without having available the necessary theoretical tools. Systems technology was however also directly fed by axiological and praxeological considerations undertaken in philosophical systemology, as well as by ideological considerations which contributed to inform directly its metaphysical, axiological and praxeological components. The ultimate function of systems technology was to enable effective actions agreeing with the concepts, principles and theoretical results elaborated in the other systemological “poles”. 3.4. General systemology as philosophy of the systemic interpretation of the “real” The importance for Bertalanffy of philosophical systemology is reflected in his writings of 1955–1972. This period, inaugurated with an essay on his perspectivist theory of knowledge (1955b), culminated with an essay of “natural philosophy” (1967a, 53). International Journal of General Systems 197 Downloaded by [Pouvreau David] at 07:26 06 February 2014 3.4.1. Philosophical anthropology In 1949, he published in the last page of Das biologische Weltbild the table of contents of a second volume that he had planned to publish, subtitled “Organism, Man and World”. All the themes of his later writings were already there, as if he later on only had formalized, developed and refined his views. He had expressed his main lines of thought as early as 1947, at the Alpbach symposium. In a letter sent ten years later to the psychiatrist Karl Menninger, he explained that he had planned to develop in this second volume “a kind of philosophical anthropology”.27 Far from being a mere appendix to his works, this anthropology should be seen as one of its most important foundations. Interestingly, some of its essential elements are already present in his doctoral thesis (1926). Permeated with the various German critico-idealist traditions, this anthropology was rooted in biology while rejecting every biologicism: it regarded human’s biological specificities as the conditions of possibility for the emergence of purely human universes ruled by laws of their own: symbolic universes. Described as “citizens of two worlds”, humans were “characterized as ‘symbolic animals’”, creators of systems that mediate their active and transactional relationships to the world through what Ernst Cassirer had called in 1923 “symbolic forms”. The latter would be intrinsically ambivalent, as vehicles both of the autonomization of humans with regard to their environment and of their alienation (Pouvreau 2013a, 270–288). This anthropology is a specific contribution of Bertalanffy to general systemology. Later, Boulding and Rapoport most certainly integrated it in their reflections, but without significantly contributing to its development. In particular, the three highest of the nine “levels of theoretical discourses” that Boulding distinguished in (1956b) (subsequent to his discussions with Bertalanffy), the “human level” characterized by the “phenomena of language and symbolism”, the level of social organization and the level of “transcendantal systems”, fitted Bertalanffy’s view of human specificity and of what he termed the “self-transcendance” of “the highest manifestations of culture”. That view stressed the importance of the “realization of values going beyond the individual”; but also the essential idea according to which “the imbeddedness in a cosmic order of hierarchies” of the “very ‘real’ world of symbols, values, social entities and cultures”, is “apt to bridge the opposition of C.P. Snow’s ‘Two Cultures’ of science and the humanities, technology and history, natural and social sciences”.28 3.4.2. Perspectivist theory of knowledge It is in the framework of his anthropology that Bertalanffy’s perspectivism is grounded and must be understood. He raised it to a theory of the systemic knowledge of the “real”. He elaborated it at the contact of many influences, among which the most salient were, before 1939, the various critical idealisms and positivisms, the philosophical debates aroused by the (r)evolutions of modern physics since the last third of the nineteenth century, as well as the specific forms of the methodologies and concepts developed in some currents of social sciences that had considerable influence at that time in the German world, variously incarnated in such figures as Wilhelm Dilthey, Georg Simmel, Max Weber and Oswald Spengler. Enriched after the war by the influences of Jean Piaget’s psychology, Konrad Lorenz’ ethology and John Dewey’s and Arthur F. Bentley’s philosophies, his perspectivism took the form of a constructivist, relationalist, evolutionary, genetic and transactionalist theory of knowledge. That theory recognized the fundamentally interpretative character of every knowledge and assimilated the latter to the production of a model, that is, to a definite rationalized “perspective” (Pouvreau 2013a, 265–380). D. Pouvreau 198 Downloaded by [Pouvreau David] at 07:26 06 February 2014 Although several typical appropriations of this theory can be found in the works of the most philosophically inclined systemologists (such as Boulding, Laszló and Klir), Bertalanffy remains the only one who developed all its themes, mainly between 1937 and 1955. He provided (though sparsely) the elements enabling to reconstruct the theory’s coherence and to understand its systemological function: founding constructivist systems ontology and methodology that preserve – via a “mathematicist” structuralism – a principle of objectivity, without the relativist excesses of conventionalism, pure pragmatism and culturalism. He thus inaugurated a dual perspectivist understanding of the concept of ”system” which appears to be shared by almost all the contemporary and later systemicians. Accordingly, “system” can be viewed at two levels: (1) at the first level, it is a portion of the phenomenal world as grasped by a theoretical model focused on relational properties and representing this portion in its unity, “system” hence already referring at this level to a conceptual construct; and (2) at a second (metatheoretical) level, “system” refers to an equivalence class induced by a similarity in the formal structure of given theoretical models. 3.4.3. Philosophy of “systems science” Bertalanffy’s perspectivism provided the foundations for a philosophy of “systems science” that had two components. The first one, considered here, comprised the discussion of the scientific (in the narrow sense) purposes of general systemology, of its specific theoretical aims as well as of its alleged role in the organization of scientific research and knowledge – the second component, considered in the next sub-sections of this paper, concerned the ontological, logical and methodological aspects of “systems science”. The issue was first of all the legitimacy and necessity of “systems science”. Bertalanffy clarified his ideas in that regard in the 1960s by describing general systemology as a scientific project “aiming at meeting the need for new schemes of thought in order to understand the systems of many components displaying such order traits as organization, wholeness, interaction, concurrence or purposiveness” (1965b, 294), hence at making “open to scientific investigation” the “holistic entities which hitherto, that is, under the mechanistic bias, were excluded as unscientific, vitalistic or metaphysical” (1967a, 70). He thus enumerated the “motives leading to the postulate of a general theory of systems” (1962a, 1–2, 1965c, 1099): (1) The “urgence in the biological, behavioral and sociological sciences” of problems that were not considered by ”classical science”, such as self-maintenance through continuous change, regulation or directiveness of behavior. (2) The rise in those sciences of pressing theoretical needs that remained unmet. (3) The necessity to recognize the legitimity of an elaboration of conceptual tools appropriate to each level of organization, without setting up impenetrable barriers between those levels and thus opposing reductionism in principle by means of another metaphysical bias. (4) The urge of an “extension of conceptual schemes”, of the “introduction of new categories” and new models in order to deal with pertinence and fertility the ”multi-variable” fields and problems of “organized complexity”, where an application of physics is insufficient or even inconceivable with regard to the aims of explanation and prediction. The scientific vocations of general systemology logically followed: General system theory has to develop concepts, models and laws covering long-neglected aspects of reality, and this implies (1) mathematical developments to formulate the concept of “system” International Journal of General Systems 199 and to derive from it features characteristic of systems in general or defined subclasses; (2) application of system considerations to empirical entities and discovery of their laws. (Bertalanffy 1967a, 71) Downloaded by [Pouvreau David] at 07:26 06 February 2014 This, then, is the aim of the systems approach: looking into those organismic features of life, behavior, society; taking them seriously and not bypassing or denying them; finding conceptual tools to handle them; developing models to represent them in conceptual constructs; making these models work in the scientific ways of logical deduction, of construction of material analogues, computer simulation and so forth; and so to come to better understanding, explanation, prediction, control of what makes an organism, a psyche, or a society function. (Bertalanffy 1967c, 35–36) Although less thoroughly, Bertalanffy also repeatedly emphasized with Rapoport after 1956 the close connection between “exact thinking” and the systemological project as a framework of scientific theorizing and vehicle of mathematicizing: almost all their respective writings include justifications for their assertion that this project could become such a framework. Finally, the third part of the definition of the scientific purposes of systemology regarded the problem of the unity of scientific research and knowledge, whereby special emphasis was placed on the questions of communication and “generalist” education of scientists. The approach was here conditioned by what Bertalanffy described as “the essential purpose of systemology [Systemtheorie]”: “emphasizing the logical correspondence of the organization principles and laws in various fields” and elaborating on this basis “generalized constructions” having a transdisciplinary character (1965b, 297, 1965c, 1099). He thus mentioned in 1955 those purposes which were as ambitious as they were essential (1955a, 76): (1) Serving as a center of gravity of an “integration of the various sciences, natural and social”, which, in “developing unifying principles running ‘vertically’ through the universes of the individual sciences, brings us nearer to the goal of the unity of science”. (2) Being thus also in position to “lead to a much-needed integration in scientific education”. The second component of the philosophy of “systems science” comprised its interface character of philosophical systemology and basic theoretical systemology: it was the purely philosophical treatment of ontological, logical and methodological questions. 3.4.4. Ontological component of philosophical systemology As an ontology, philosophical systemology was characterized by a “systemic cosmology” that reinterpreted, in a perspectivist framework, the “monadological world view” that had stimulated the reflections of the young Bertalanffy (who already strove in the 1920s to rehabilitate it “under a critical form” [1927, 263–264]). This ontology of “unity through diversity” (Gray and Rizzo 1973) was developed in the systemological works in two complementary moments. The first one was the “arrangement of the real” in “levels” of systemic “discourses”. Although they were attached to the notion of “level of organization”, Bertalanffy, Boulding and Rapoport did not at all intend to develop an emergentist metaphysics of stratification. Their approach consisted in distinguishing “levels of complexity” in order to develop “conceptual frameworks” and “levels of abstraction” that would be appropriate to each of them (Boulding 1956b, 13). This was done without prejudging the relevance of discerning Downloaded by [Pouvreau David] at 07:26 06 February 2014 200 D. Pouvreau intermediary levels or of the attempts to reduce some levels to other ones. In their view, this approach was justified by the unfathomable difficulties posed by “organized complexity” (according to the term coined by Weaver [1948]), by the obvious failure of its a priori reductionistic approaches, and by the necessity to elaborate new tools in order to grasp it.29 The second moment was the discussion of the ways to understand the “system” concept. The matter was mostly the legitimization of what Rapoport (1970, 22) called “a unified scheme among the various special sciences”: the “organized system”, supposed to provide the basis for interconnecting these “levels of discourse” and for integrating those “special sciences” while structuring their theorizing. Note here that Bertalanffy’s concern for generality was above all oriented toward his organismic schemes of interpretation: the “open system in flux equilibrium” and “progressive hierarchization”, in conjunction with his “principles” of “wholeness”, “dynamical order” and “primary activity” (Pouvreau and Drack 2007; Pouvreau 2013a, 468–499). He was less interested in a perfectly general system concept than in the search for the maximal generality of his organismic model. For him, the “interesting” systemic relationships were those that he considered ubiquitous at all biological levels and for which he yearned to demonstrate the theoretical relevance at the psychological and sociological levels. His ideal consisted of raising his organismic schemes to such a level of abstraction that their biological interpretation would only be one possibility among others; and biology only served him as a model insofar as it was the science in which the systemic concepts were best developed. Generalizing the organismic conception did not mean for him transposing to non-biological fields some concepts and principles that are biological in themselves. Rather, he strove to demonstrate that the systemic concepts and principles that are characteristic of this conception are not restricted to biology in their application, but are transdisciplinary, because in final analysis, they concern structures of relations without any regard for the particular interpretation of these relations and of the involved entities. The “generality” was relative to the extent of the field of application: Bertalanffy’s system concept most always remained specified in an organismic way. And while emphasizing the interest of different concepts of “system”, he mostly worked after the war on the study of the relevance of his organismic schemes outside biology (1950b, 148–151). Even though he was careful not to embrace any biologicism, this focus led him to attribute to his organismic model a “primordial”, “broader and more general” meaning; and he sometimes made the other systemic models, cybernetics in particular, appear as special cases of his own model (1951b, 343–361). This exposed him to the risk of giving the impression that he wanted to “color” biologically every systemic interpretation of the “real”. Rapoport best clarified this issue. He distinguished a “hard” definition of a system (“a portion of the world which at a given time can be characterized by a given state” of definite variables, “together with a set of rules that permit the deduction of the state from partial information”) from a “soft” definition (“a portion of the world that is perceived as a unit and that is able to maintain its ‘identity’ in spite of changes going on it”). He regarded the latter as “a sort of generalization of a definition of an organism” which, although it does not meet the criteria of mathematical rigour, is “highly suggestive” in order to grasp the systems that are still too complex to fit those criteria (1968, xx, 1970, 17–22, 1976, 13). He even regarded the “soft” definition as necessary for every systemic interpretation of the “real” (Rapoport 1986, 78–79, 119). With regard to overcoming the opposition between structuralism and evolutionism and fostering their coexistence, the founders of the S.G.S.R. agreed on a conceptual scheme of the “organized system”. Gerard, in 1957, was the first to characterize such a system by three “fundamental properties”: structure (“being”, morphology, architectural constancy in time), function (“behavior”, “acting”, reversible temporal changes) and evolution (“becoming”, history, irreversible temporal changes). These properties would introduce a single division concerning every “horizontal axis” that International Journal of General Systems 201 involves systems of the same “order” at each given “level” of the “vertical axis” that goes from molecules to societies of organisms. An “ascending spiral of causes and effects” would exist between those levels, from “becoming” at a given level to “being” at the next higher level, until “behavior” at a still higher one.30 Rapoport did not betray Bertalanffy’s thinking when he wrote that the systems thus characterized were the proper object of general systemology. The latter would hence focus on the study of the possibility to “broaden” the concept of organism enough to encompass all problems of “organized complexity”, while avoiding loose analogies.31 Indeed, Rapoport described the classification of the sciences of “organized complexity” as the “schematic representation of ‘organismic’ system theory” (Rapoport 1970, 23). Downloaded by [Pouvreau David] at 07:26 06 February 2014 3.4.5. Logical component of philosophical systemology As a logic, philosophical systemology had to generalize the scientific-philosophical approach that Bertalanffy had applied to biology in 1926–1932 before his construction of a nomothetic and “exact” theoretical biology from 1933–1942. It was characterized by four purposes. (1) The criticism of the conceptual structure of existing systemic theoretical constructions, many examples of which can be found between the late 1950s and mid-1970s, for example in the reciprocal criticisms of Bertalanffy (1962a), Ashby (1956, 1958) and Ackoff (1963). (2) The explicitation of the logical status of general systemology from the point of view of its position in the enterprise of scientific theorizing; that is, providing a framework for constructing “second order models of first order models” of the empirical world. It is not Bertalanffy, but Rapoport (1973c) and Laszló (1972a, 19–20) who contributed most significantly in that regard. (3) The elaboration of “verbal”, unformalized but as precise as possible definitions of systemic concepts, or even their systematization. The task consisted in elaborating “means to represent objects under study as ‘systems’” and in developing “an apparatus to describe the most important characteristics of the objects” thus systemically represented (Blauberg, Sadovsky, and Yudin 1973, 253, 261). Despite various efforts in that direction (Blauberg, Sadovsky, and Yudin 1980, 11), no efficient logic had yet been specially elaborated for systems research. There had been no significant development of “specific systemic categories” yet, their lack explaining the multiplicity of the used terminologies. The systemicians had to use logical means originally developed to solve issues that differed from those with which they were confronted, and this situation “directly impaired the efficiency of [their] investigations” (Blauberg, Sadovsky, and Yudin 1973, 258, 260–261). Several works after 1955 nonetheless contributed to logical clarification of systemic concepts. This is particularly true of the works designed to systematize such concepts that were published in the 1970s – the most significant being probably Miller’s “general living systems theory” (1965, 1978) and Troncale’s work (1978). (4) The explicitation of the problems recognized as systemic and the classification of the modes of their description. Although Bertalanffy, Rapoport, Boulding and some other later systemologists contributed substantially to reflecting on the aims and specific difficulties associated with systemological research,32 Sadovsky and some of his Soviet colleagues certainly provided the most synthetic and complete list in that regard.33 Another issue was the various possible modes of systemic description. During the 1960s and 1970s this was the object of many reflections. They were structured based on several major distinctions that were often interconnected because of the underlying mathematical formalisms. The first of them, partly introduced by Bertalanffy (1951c, 27–31) and also discussed after him by Boulding (1962, 2) and especially Rapoport (1972a, 49–56, 61–73), was the distinction between static models (such as those based on game or net theories) and dynamic models (such as those based on Downloaded by [Pouvreau David] at 07:26 06 February 2014 202 D. Pouvreau differential equations). A second important distinction concerning dynamic models, mostly discussed by Rapoport (1972a, 49) and Klir (1968, 15), differentiated between deterministic systems and stochastic ones. A third distinction – a recurrent object of Bertalanffy’s reflections – was that between systems that are open to exchanges of their components with their environment and systems that are closed to such exchanges. A fourth distinction, even more important than the previous ones because it probably encompassed them, was especially discussed by Bertalanffy (1972a, 31–34, 1972b, 12) and Ashby (1958, 2–4). It was the distinction between “internal” and “external” modes of description. Bertalanffy described the former as “essentially structural” and the latter as “essentially functional”, while observing that this distinction “largely coincides” with another one between description by means of continuous variables and description by means of discrete ones. In the “internal-structural” description (for which Bertalanffy did not hide his predilection and in which the typical mathematical expression is the system of differential equations), the behaviour of the system is described based on relationships between the variables selected for its study; this behaviour is thus grasped as the expression of an intrinsic dynamics (even though the latter is only made possible by the interactions of the system with its environment). In the “external” mode of description, typified by the model of the “black box” and characteristic of the neo-behaviouristic approach of cyberneticists like Ashby and Wiener, the same behaviour is grasped exclusively on the basis of relationships between inputs and outputs, whose general form is discrete transfer functions: the description is here made in terms of communication and control (feedback), and it is based solely on the interactions between the system and its environment, with the intent to aquire a posteriori some information on its internal states (Ashby 1958, 3–4). The distinction between these modes of description should, however, be understood as a distinction between ideal-types. Bertalanffy himself noted that the “languages adapted to their respective purposes” (continuous or discrete functions) are “formally related and in certain cases demonstrably translatable” (1972a, 34). His own model of the “general open system”, particularly in the form of his theoretical model of global animal growth, combined these two fundamental modes of systemic description. Note, however, that a third mode of description coexisted with them, and precisely also operated in the Bertalanffian organismic model: the hierarchical mode, which considers each system as an integration of interacting sub-systems, this system itself taking part in yet a “higher” order system inside which it interacts with other systems of the same order. These three modes of description most certainly coexisted in Bertalanffy’s works, but without genuine unity.34 3.4.6. Methodological component of philosophical systemology The methodological component of philosophical systemology was mainly explored by Bertalanffy, Ashby, Rapoport, Klir and Mesarović, along two axes. (1) The first axis is the aforementioned discussion about the relevant approach in basic theoretical systemology. Opposing to Bertalanffy’s approach, which he described as “essentially empirical”, Ashby (1958, 2) asserted the necessity of a development primordially occuring “in the abstract”. Bertalanffy had clearly set the objective of a hypothetic-deductive systemology, and the inspiration for his considerations on general systems of differential equations was similar to Ashby’s. There was nonetheless a significant difference that he bore and justified: Ashby has admirably outlined two possible ways or general methods in systems study […] It will easily be seen that all systems studies follow one or the other of these methods or a combination of both. Each of these approaches has its advantages as well as shortcomings. (1) The first Downloaded by [Pouvreau David] at 07:26 06 February 2014 International Journal of General Systems 203 method is empirico-intuitive; it has the advantage that it remains rather close to reality and can easily be illustrated and even verified by examples taken from the individual fields of science. On the other hand, the approach lacks mathematical elegance and deductive strength and, to the mathematically minded, will appear naïve and unsystematic. Nevertheless, the merits of this empirico-intuitive procedure should not be minimized. [I have] stated a number of “system principles”, partly in the context of biological theory and without explicit reference to General System Theory, partly in what emphatically was entitled an “Outline” of this theory (1950). This was meant in the literal sense: it was intended to call attention to the desirability of such field, and the presentation was in the way of a sketch or blueprint, illustrating the approach by simple examples. However, it turned out that this intuitive survey appears to be remarkably complete […] (2) The way of deductive systems theory was followed by Ashby [… Considering his theory of the machine with input35] permits observation of the limitations of this approach. We completely agree that description by differential equations is not only a clumsy but, in principle, inadequate way to deal with many problems of organization […] However, in overcoming this limitation, Ashby introduced another one. His “modern definition” of system as a ”machine with input” supplants the general system model by another rather special one: the cybernetic model, i.e. a system open to information but closed with respect to entropy transfers […] These remarks are not intended as adverse criticism of Ashby’s or the deductive approach in general; they only emphasize that there is no royal road to General System Theory. As every other scientific field, it will have to develop by an interplay of empirical, intuitive and deductive procedures. If the intuitive approach leaves much to be desired in logical rigor and completeness, the deductive approach faces the difficulty of whether the fundamental terms are correctly chosen […] The danger, in both approaches, is to consider too early the theoretical model as being closed and definitive. (Bertalanffy 1962a, 4–6) Bertalanffy’s Goethean understanding of the systemological construction of the “real” underlay those reflections. Indeed, the issue for him was to have “the intuition of the general case”, of the “unity through diversity”, based on empirical studies of particular systems that take care of their details. Each general system would have the status of an Urtyp (“archetyp”), of an abstract and purely theoretical construction that in turn enables it to guide the systemic interpretation of the “real”. The difference between Bertalanffy and Goethe was, however, that the former did not have the latter’s aversion for mathematics: on the contrary, Bertalanffy conceived it as a necessary and precious tool in order to undertake such constructions. That is why Rapoport, in accordance with Bertalanffy, could insist in (1972a, 74) on the “taxonomic” purpose of the “mathematical general systems theory” (describing it as “typological” nonetheless seems more adequate). In fact, the fundamental purpose of Bertalanffy and his followers was to combine “empirico-intuitive” (or “bottom-up”) and deductive (or “topdown”) approaches, without exclusivity and with care for their complementarity. Their insistence upon the necessity of the former involved doubts about the full relevance of the attempts to elaborate axiomatized theories of hyper-general systems yet: they were aware that such attempts may paradoxically engage the understanding of the notion of “system” in very specific channels by means of definite mathematical abstractions. Anyway, the discussion on this matter that started with Bertalanffy and Ashby has been a lasting one: it indeed continued in the 1960s and 1970s between Mesarović (1964, 1972) and Klir (1969, 1972, 1985a). (2) The second axis that was constitutive of the methodological component of philosophical systemology concerned more generally the methodological role and the legitimacy of mathematicizing in theoretical systemology as a whole. The most significant contributions in that regard are Rapoport’s (1960, 1966a, 1969, 1972a), who developed and specified Bertalanffy’s original views (1937, 1942, 1955a, 1962a, 1966). Together, they opened a way beyond the classical dichotomies. Their approach had an a priori interest in “qualitative” mathematics (such as game theory, graphs theory and topology). It vigorously advocated the mathematicizings of “organized complexity” while putting their relevance and scope into Downloaded by [Pouvreau David] at 07:26 06 February 2014 204 D. Pouvreau perspective, with an acute awareness of their respective shortcomings. In defining mathematics as the “language of structure”, in identifying the objective description of observables to a structural description, and in demanding the reduction of every scientific theory to assertions about observable, it could oppose the idea that mathematicized biology and social science are impossible (Rapoport 1969, 185, 1972a, 48–49). The approach also remained lucid in acknowledging the value of some objections and in considering that it is precisely the difficulty of mathematicizing in non physical sciences that justifies the effort of creating a basic theoretical systemology having a mathematical character, which would be able to shed light on its way (Rapoport 1972b, 24). One specific and important contribution of Bertalanffy remains his insistence upon an essential idea in the systemological project. According to that idea, a genuine mathematicizing of a part of the “real” is always a mathematical shaping of a prior model that one has of it, that is, of an abstract and idealized relevant but not yet (purely) mathematical representation. Such models are necessary in order to “give a real meaning” to the introduced mathematical entities and thus to remove “their otherwise artificial character” (1937, 16, 1942, 234–235, 324). Another important Bertalanffian contribution is his criticism of the trend to distrust or dismiss models formulated in a non-mathematical language, and of the trend to do the same about the qualitative models. Bertalanffy prefered a “verbal” model to a more or less arbitrary mathematical “veneering” on something that is still formless. Particularly since the “expression in ordinary language” in general “precedes mathematical formulation”. Bertalanffy therefore logically refused to yield to an illusory “mathematicism”: A verbal model is better than no model at all, or a model which, because it can be formulated mathematically, is forcibly imposed upon and falsifies reality […] It may be preferable first to have some non-mathematical model with its shortcomings but expressing some previously unnoticed aspects, hoping for future development of a suitable algorithm, than to start with premature mathematical models following known algorithms and, therefore, possibly restricting the field of vision. (1968a, 24) Problems must be intuitively “seen” and recognized before they can be formalized mathematically. Otherwise, mathematical formalism may impede rather than expedite the exploration of very “real” problems. (1972a, 34) Connected to this critique was the post-war trend – in the non-physical sciences seeking theoretical underpinning – to react to the narrow empiricism that had often dominated in going to the other extreme: In recent years, enthusiasm for the new mathematical and logical tools available has led to feverish “model building” as a purpose in itself and often without regard to empirical fact. However, conceptual experimentation at random has no greater chances of success than at-random experimentation with biological, psychological or clinical material [… There is a fundamental misconception] to mistake for a “problem” what actually is only a mathematical “exercise”. One would do well to remember the old Kantian maxim that experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is a mere intellectual play. (Bertalanffy 1962a, 11)36 This criticism was also directed against some contributors to basic theoretical systemology. Like Klir after him, Bertalanffy feared that a riot of abstract formalisms would lead to a loss of contact with the issues of empirical sciences and engineering. He also feared that, in functioning as constructions closed on themselves, the mathematical theories of general systems would ultimately verge on sterility. Bertalanffy’s private correspondence most clearly outlined his serious doubts about the worth of characteristic works such as Mesarović’s. In a letter dated April 1969, he denounced their inability, because of their very focus on axiomatization, International Journal of General Systems 205 Downloaded by [Pouvreau David] at 07:26 06 February 2014 to provide original results, and the “fact” that they were in the final analysis restricted to a mathematical clothing of already known results: There is nowadays a strong trend to axiomatization, to formalization […] This is true for pure mathematics, systemology [Systemtheorie], open systems and other fields. The definition of concepts and the order of conceptual constructions are of course necessary, but I have the feeling that these developments are going too far, because they do not lead to “discoveries” and, in the end, confuse concepts with things. It is a modern form of scholasticism. In that regard, I notice two things: first of all, that one and the same thing may be axiomatized in many different ways; second, that properly said, it provides nothing new […] I have learnt nothing from Mesarović and other [similar systemicians]: with his symbolism and axiomatization, he does not states any original principle that was not already at my disposal (most certainly in the concepts of the “ordinary language”); I would however much appreciate to see in those studies some deductions of hitherto unknown theorems, which would enable a more thorough understanding […] Formalism should not invade all, for there exist a multiplicity of formalisms (among which none is definitive today) and for the natural scientist (in opposition to the pure mathematician) is in last analysis interested in the problem to know if and how a theory “works”. I write all this because it has been a long time since I wanted to tell it: for obvious reasons, I could not do it openly.37 There was another private discussion on this subject in 1972, this time with Klir. The latter was then reflecting with some of his colleagues on the editorial line of the International Journal of General Systems that he had decided to set-up, and he had to arbitrate a controversy between those who considered that this journal should not publish papers presenting formal theories of systems, those who considered that it should publish more papers of this type, and those who, like Klir himself, considered that all trends had to be represented. He asked Bertalanffy’s advice.38 A significant handwritten draft of the latter’s answer can be found in his archives: What General System Theory presently needs, is not further axiomatization and formalization: we have after all dynamic systems theory, your own appr[aisals], [those] of Mesarović, theory of automata and others. What is urgently needed is application to concrete problems […] It is not difficult to build “models” of high mathematical sophistication, but it is hard to prove whether they refer to “reality” and comply with the usual criteria of scientific explanation of specific phenomena, integration into a unified field, prediction, etc. The stand that General System Theory is not “mature” enough for this is disproved by those cases where the above goals were [actually] fulfilled […] This, of course, is an empiricist viewpoint – or, as I prefer – that of a practician scientist. Nevertheless, I feel entitled to such judgement […], because I was in my own carreer [enough criticized as] being a “theorist” when this was a bad name or label, [perfectly know] what it means to be theory-minded, but [hence also know] that one should never forget the shortcomings of the theoretical approach.39 3.4.7 Systems metaphysics Three components of philosophical systemology remain to be considered here: metaphysics, axiology and praxeology. They were closely interrelated and had in common that they took their “substance” from applied theoretical systemology. As far as metaphysics is concerned, a distinction has to be made between systemologists such as Bertalanffy, Rapoport and Boulding on the one hand, and those who, like Erwin Laszló, Arthur Koestler and Mario Bunge, actually contributed to the development of “systems metaphysics”. The justification of this distinction is not that there was no metaphysics in the works of the former: they themselves would not have made such a claim. Rather, the distinction derives from the very restricted and circumscribed character of their considerations on the subject in their works. This stands Downloaded by [Pouvreau David] at 07:26 06 February 2014 206 D. Pouvreau in contrast to the systematic endeavours of the latter, who mainly dedicated their works to such a development. Bertalanffy thought that the “metaphysical” questions are the ones to which no answer is given in a definite paradigmatic framework. Although he agreed with Rapoport on the essential importance of identifying the progress of science with the overcoming the metaphysical traits of its concepts and hypotheses and with the “disciplined” character of its analogies, this did not imply for him that metaphysics was unable to lay claim to its autonomy, nor that it could not play any fertile role in science, nor that science could do without it. His arguments: (1) metaphysics is directed at the “essence of things” forsaken by science; (2) the methodological use of metaphysical notions as heuristic fictions has a great heuristic value; and (3) metaphysical a priori are necessary for every science. In perfect agreement with his perspectivism, Bertalanffy granted metaphysics its full place in general systemology: that the former also took part in the latter would a priori not imply any confusion or conflict with theoretical systemologies. In continuity of his writings in the years 1926–1932, when he was inspired by Eduard von Hartmann’s “inductive metaphysics”, Bertalanffy described in 1968 the “natural philosophy” forming the background of systemology as the “view of the world as a great organization”. Although he himself did not significantly contribute to its development, he defended the legitimacy and the interest of “inductive system metaphysics” in phase with the “systems science” such as Laszló’s and Koestler’s (who much referred to him). He considered their works in line with a long and venerable tradition of Naturphilosophie which would have been cultivated from Heraclitus to Cusanus, Leibniz, Goethe, Fechner and, more recently, to holistic and emergentist metaphysics such as Alfred N. Whitehead’s and Nicolaï Hartmann’s (Bertalanffy 1932a, 71, 1968a, 27, 217–219, 1972d, 1972e, 1972f). Although the systemologists wanted to construct a “scientific holism” and typically avoided venturing into metaphysical speculations, their works tended to be guided by a metaphysical representation, a “systemic cosmology”. In agreement with the project that Bertalanffy outlined as early as in his doctoral thesis (1926, 30–50), it modernized the “monadological view of the world” in structuring itself around an ontological scheme “claiming both the diversity and the unity of the world”. Bunge sought to systematize that scheme in the late 1960s by describing it as an “integrated pluralism worth being further explored as a candidate to the metaphysics of a science that acknowledges the existence of distinct but interrelated levels of organization” (Bunge 1968, 22–28). Cavallo (1979) is the worker who most exhaustively detailed the metaphysical postulates (understood as merely “regulative” by Bertalanffy and most of the contributors to “systems science”) that more or less explicitly underlied the systemological works40. Between the late 1960s and late 1970s, Laszló (1972a), Koestler (1967) and Bunge (1968, 1979) variously tried to integrate those principles in metaphysical frameworks. They aimed at explicating the general meaning of the scientific results of the systemicians. The form they chose was a corpus of statements that were supposed to provide a coherent and unifying basis to their research, and even to submit some working hypotheses to their examination. 3.4.8. Systemological axiology The metaphysical considerations on the “systemic cosmos” supported incursions into the axiological field, while finding in the latter their own completion: in one way or another, the universe of human values was raised as the highest level of organization in that cosmos.41 The importance Bertalanffy gave to axiology was not at all obvious in a systemological framework designed to generate an “exact” science of systems. Under axiology, Bertalanffy Downloaded by [Pouvreau David] at 07:26 06 February 2014 International Journal of General Systems 207 understood not only the project of a systemic theory of values pertaining, like others before it, to the field of social sciences (hence as such meant to be objective). He also understood it to be a reflection on the relationships between science and the world of values on the one hand, and the will to make general systemology the vehicle of specific values on the other hand. Boulding first made the connection between the world of values and systemology in his “theory of the image”, or “eiconics” (1956a). Bertalanffy also significantly contributed to this connection in the framework of his philosophical anthropology. He did his utmost in 1964 to lay a foundation for a “symbolist theory of values” that sought to “elucidate where they came from, what they mean, from what ultimate concept they can be derived, and what are their consequences for human behavior and society” (1964a, 499). He sought to demonstrate the untenable character of the three usual kinds of theories42 and the possibility to understand every system of values as a “symbolic universe” ruled by the principles stated for such systems in his anthropology. Accordingly, he emphasized the “psycho-hygienic” virtues of such universes, to which the contemporary materialism and utilitarianism would be blind, thus creating the nihilistic conditions of a “starvation at this symbolic level”. That starvation “leads to disturbances of the mental organism just as starvation at the biological level leads to disturbances of the physical organism” (1964a, 498–500, 1967a, 39–48). Another aspect of the axiological dimension of philosophical systemology, naturally rooted in perspectivism, was the assertion that the role of values in scientific constructions is legitimate and necessary, particularly in the systemological ones. Rapoport expressed and justified (better than did Bertalanffy) their common conviction that science and value interact in the depths. This was held true not only because “the practice of science inevitably changes the perspectives and therefore the objectives of its practitioners and of the societies where it is applied”, but also because, at least in social sciences, an axiological dimension is constitutive of every theoretical elaboration, without necessarily going against the principle of objectivity (Rapoport 1960, vii, 1969, 182). General systemology should also be seen from this viewpoint: The selection of any part of reality as a “system” (by which the rest is excluded as “environment”) is already directed by axiological conceptions. In the interest of objectivity (not to be confused with ethical neutrality), one should make explicit the axiological conceptions by which one lets himself guide, the methodological presuppositions and preferences. (Rapoport 1986, 36) Most systemologists claimed that their project bore specific values. Especially Rapoport: The concepts of general system theory put inter-relatedness of things and events at the center of attention. This view is already imbued with ethical and normative commitments; for the essence of any ethical problem is appreciation of the effects of one’s actions on others and, through these, on oneself. In singling out large biological and social systems as proper objects of scientific investigations, the system view of the world provides a nexus between science and ethics, joining what had been rent asunder by the “classical” scientific outlook with its sharp distinction between questions of what is and questions of what ought to be. The system view restores the connection by spelling out in terms of concretely demonstrable interdependencies what had been hitherto made manifest only through religious or poetic insights. (Rapoport 1974, 247) This position derived from two convictions that systemologists shared to various degrees, and which already imprinted on the young Bertalanffy (notably under Spengler’s influence): (1) a deep-rooted “crisis of culture”, all the expressions of which would “tend to lose their intrinsic value and to retain only their utilitarian or snob value” (1964a, 501); and (2) the urgency to fight efficiently a generalized moral decay, an unfathomable existential emptiness: 208 D. Pouvreau There never was a deeper, more all-pervading gap between the facts – the world which is – and values – the world which ought to be, a more profound insecurity about our directions […] We have the highest standard of living ever achieved, [but] economic opulence goes hand in hand with a peak of mental illness and a continuous increase in the rate of crime […] A new type of mental sickness has developed for which the psychotherapists have even had to coin a new term – existential neurosis, mental illness arising from the meaninglessness of life, the lack of goals and hopes in a mechanized mass society […] We have conquered the world, but somewhere on the way, we have lost our soul. (Bertalanffy 1964a, 496–498) Downloaded by [Pouvreau David] at 07:26 06 February 2014 The survival of our culture seems to me to depend on this basic question: is it possible at the last hour to rehabilitate the characteristic system of values which belongs to our culture? Only in a rehabilitation of these values can an avoidance of the Decline of the West be found. (Bertalanffy 1962c) The organismic tone that Bertalanffy gave to his project can also be explained by the values that his organismic conception had already promoted in the 1930s: respect for the specificity and dignity of each level of organization of the world of life (biological, psychological, sociological and ecological); openness to its environment (transaction) as a condition for the development of each system pertaining to this world; conciliation between the “monadological” character of each of these systems, its “primary activity” and “progressive individualization”, and its interdependence on other systems of the same “order” serving toward a “higher order integration” without which it could not achieve even its own ends (its maintenance and its progress toward autonomy and self-realization). The values promoted by general systemology could hence be viewed as necessary for a sound organization of contemporary human life. While making clear that he did “not belong to the world-saviors” (1960a, 215), Bertalanffy several times emphasized the axiological significance of what he had called in his doctoral thesis (1926) the “monadological conception of the world”: Possibly the model of the world as a great organization can help to re-enforce the sense of reverence for the living which we have almost lost in the last sanguinary decades of human history. (1955a, 81) If reality is [understood as] a hierarchy of organized wholes, the image of man will be different from what it is in a world [understood as made] of physical particles governed by chance events as the ultimate and only “true” reality. (1968a, xxii) Boulding (1973, 951) considered that the most important “value orientations” of systemology were the importance given to conceptual unity of knowledge, the attempt to break the compartmentalization of disciplines, the disposition to learn from those with whom one is not usually associated, and the simplification of the learning process. General systemology was hence supposed to play an essential role in education, at a time perceived as creating the “danger of man being enslaved by the very complexity of his manufactured environment” (Gause and Weinberg 1973, 139–140). Science was criticized as having been submitted to economic and utilitarian requirements. It was therefore “not a personal vocation anymore, but a job like any other one” and had split up into increasingly disconnected specialities. This prompted systemologists to present their project as a cure for nihilism, defined by Bertalanffy as the lack of a value system adapted to the complexity of our civilization (1967a, 50, 1957b, 4). He wished to “restore” the values of the “old [European] culture” (1962c, 1964a, 497– 498, 1964c, 14, 1967a, 116), which were essentially continuations of the old humanistic ideal of Bildung rooted in German Romanticism and post-Kantian idealisms that had much influenced him in his youth. Systemologists such as Boulding and Rapoport were equally attached Downloaded by [Pouvreau David] at 07:26 06 February 2014 International Journal of General Systems 209 to these values: disinterested research and academic freedom, unity of knowledge and formation of the “whole man”, exchange and cooperation at all levels of existence, peace and infinite respect for life. Although Bertalanffy (1960a, 216) and most of his colleagues agreed on rejecting every kind of scientism, there was another, most controversial,43 aspect of their project’s axiological dimension. It pertained to their common faith in the possibility to derive an objective foundation to those cardinal values from the scientific constructions elaborated in the systemological framework. This faith for example explains why Bertalanffy complained that the traditional education of natural scientists “carefully skip[ped] those questions and results that ha[d] a bearing on our picture of the world and man” (1956a, 33). This position was coherent because he considered that the scientific representations whose shortcomings he criticized were, contrary to the “positivist myths”, intrinsically connected to specific values, or at least used in order to legitimize the latter. His critiques of the scheme of homeostatic regulation were thus related to his rejection of utilitarian philosophies (1962a, 8). In fact, a deep originality of the systemological project as conceived by Bertalanffy and Rapoport was the ambition to integrate what the latter called the “descriptive” and “normative” approaches of systems44 in conjunction with the desire to reach that goal by means of mathematics (Rapoport 1986, 8, 35). The mathematician could thus consider that “there is an ethical justification for disseminating the system approach among behavioral scientists”: it may help overcome the split between two groups, namely (1) “those who aspire to the scientific status of physical scientists and, in consequence, tend to select research problems that yield to the analytic method” and thus “stand in danger of trivializing the study of man” or, even “worse, of placing their expertise at the service of groups having power to manipulate man”; and (2) “those who are moved by a need to ‘understand man’”, who “stand in danger of obscuring the study of man in free-wheeling speculations without sufficient anchorage in facts or testable hypotheses” (Rapoport 1968, xxii). This, particularly, well demonstrates the vocation of systemological hermeneutics to conciliate the search for meanings with scientific rigour.45 3.4.9. Systemological praxeology The demand to “integrate knowledge and action” (subtitle of Rapoport [1953]) in making porous the borders between sciences and values in a critical way, was deep-rooted in the mind of most systemologists, particularly Bertalanffy. They clearly assigned to mathematics the function to sophisticate and “discipline” systemic thinking, thus providing the tools for its hermeneutical ambitions. The horizon was the ultimate stratum of the “systemic cosmos”: the human universe. Their task was not only to understand it as a hierarchy of organized systems, but also to provide it a “self-awareness” and the means to solve its complex problems. As if general systemology had to adhere to the famous last Marxian thesis on Feuerbach46: it should not only be the organon of a unified theoretical interpretation of the world (that restored the specific dignity which classical science would have deprived humans of), but also be the instrument of an effective social, economic and political praxis directed by this interpretation. Hence this Bertalanffian reflection several years after the war: Science is not an event hanging in the empty space of a pure conceptual development: it is a factor as well as an expression of the course of history […] In the dreadful crises shaking our time may be left the hope that the [systemological] world view which is now being outlined will prepare a new step of the development of humanity. (Bertalanffy 1950a, 224, 245) 210 D. Pouvreau The fact that general systemology was entrusted with the mission to assume the function of a praxeological guide was still explicit two decades later in Rapoport’s writings: Modern system theory should be viewed not only as a set of techniques for solving problems arising in conventional frameworks of thought, such as problems of increasingly complex technology, but also as a harbinger of a new outlook, one that is better equipped to cope with the accelerating rate of historical change. (Rapoport 1970, 25) Mesarović may be the one who has most clearly asserted this duality of motives, in 1964: Downloaded by [Pouvreau David] at 07:26 06 February 2014 The ever increasing complexity of the world we live in requires that our understanding of this phenomenon be based on a broader theoretical basis. The motivation for an attempt to develop such a theory is therefore both scientific, with the objective of improving our understanding of the natural and social phenomena, and practical (engineering), with the objective to provide better methods for the synthesis and control of complex systems. (1964, xiii) 3.4.10. General systemology between praxeology and ideology Rapoport himself emphasized that “a repertoire of concepts becomes an ideology in the context of action and problem solving” (1974, 247). The interactions between general systemology and ideological field hence became unavoidable. The first major manifestation of these interactions is the connection of general systemology with ecologism. This was explicitly established and more or less developed by several systemologists (Boulding, Rapoport, Mesarović, Laszló, Prigogine). It was also established, sometimes explicitly (Macy 1991) but most of the time indirectly or even unawares, by most other advocates of ecologism with regard to their favourite themes of discussion and vocabulary (wholeness, holism, system, networks, organic growth, open systems, flux equilibria, etc.). Bertalanffy remained cautious in that regard. His critical discussion in 1951 of William Vogt’s theses is typical. He considered that the system approach of the ecologist was of utmost interest, and did not hide his sympathy for some of his main theses. These included: a Western civilization sick of the destructive and suicidal constraints that it imposes on its natural environment due to a dominant anthropocentrism based on static and meristic modes of thinking that make westerners blind to their relationship to this environment; and the denunciation of the great illusion of “industrialized man”, living in an overcrowded world generating misery which, in setting up itself by exhausting natural resources, would be heading for destruction. However, in view of his anthropology, Bertalanffy was logically led to oppose the trend – apparent in Vogt’s thinking as well as in some other ecologist discourses – to slip toward a biologicist position. That position denied the irreducible cultural character of humanity by transposing, via “wild” analogies, certain biological concepts and models to sociological, economic and political problems. It further suggested, based on such considerations, that radical changes, in agreement with the “lessons” of “natural systems”, are necessary for the organization of human life.47 Although the complexity of the concept of “life” in Bertalanffy’s thinking cannot be bypassed (a complexity that was inherited from the cultural context of his youth), this circumspection should not mask his claim that general systemology promoted a “deep reverence for life” almost forgotten in the modern world (1955a, 81). This reverence was (and still is) an essential value of the environmentalist ethics and mysticism. One may perhaps even detect here a secrete influence of Albert Schweitzer: the famous ecologist had used precisely this expression in 1915 (Nash 1989, 6). Bertalanffy’s direct contribution to the connection between general systemology and ecologism is rather meagre Downloaded by [Pouvreau David] at 07:26 06 February 2014 International Journal of General Systems 211 overall. I nonetheless venture to suggest that, although his role was mostly indirect, he might be granted a significant place in the early histories both of “deep ecology” and of the “degrowth” movement – and the same of course holds true for the systemologists who made explicit their commitment to ecologism. Systemological influences on Arne Naess’ and Joanna Macy’s founding “ecosophical” thinking are obvious, with specific references to Bertalanffy in the case of the latter (Macy 1991; Naess 2008). Moreover, several themes of Bertalanffy’s thinking anticipate and can be recognized in Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen’s approach, concepts and theory of “degrowth” (2011): this includes Bertalanffy’s emphasis on the constant necessity to take into account the “insertion” of the human world in a “cosmic order of hierarchies”, but also his “general open system” model and related considerations on thermodynamics of “flux equilibria” (concerning entropy production), as well as his view of technology as a continuation of biological evolution by other means (Bertalanffy 1948a). The literature references of Georgescu-Roegen strikingly include many researchers who either also significantly influenced Bertalanffy (notably Lotka, who symptomatically was one of the fathers both of general systemology and of “bioeconomics”) or were significantly influenced by him (notably Prigogine, and especially Boulding, who shared Georgescu-Roegen’s status as dissident of economic science in developing the concept of “economics of the coming spaceship Earth” [1966]). The previous suggestion (granting the main founder of general systemology a place of honour in the “deep ecology” and “degrowth” movements) is all the more justified in view of Bertalanffy’s contribution to challenging the productivist economy and the consumer society enslaved by its logics. He indeed attacked them from the axiological viewpoint in the 1960s, in a favourable (counter-) cultural context: he thus updated the ideological considerations formulated in many writings of his youth. His reassertion, recurrent at that time, of the both aristocratic and humanistic values inherent in the old ideal of Bildung were indeed associated with his denunciation of the so-called “affluence economy”. In his opinion, maintaining that economy would necessitate “the application of psychological techniques appealing to the lowest common denominator of man”. The main products would be an “industralized and commercialized mass society” reducing human life to a “meaningless rat race”, a “civilization of money” especially cultivating “affluent mediocrity”, the latter combining the highest level of material prosperity and the highest proportion ever observed of mentally ill, neurotic persons and delinquents. The only “merit” this would have would be in constituting a “largescale experimentation” refuting the behaviouristic model of man and all the pseudo-scientific justifications for the reign of utilitarianism and generalized concurrence.48 Bertalanffy most certainly never completed those observations with concrete propositions on social, economic and political organization. Note, however, that his “open system” model had and still has considerable ideological potential and far-reaching influence. Other systemicians, notably in management sciences, have clearly emphasized its praxeological function and thus showed that this model could actually and concretely meet some of Bertalanffy’s concerns: Whereas the limited financial model of corporate behavior was intended to maximize return-oninvestment alone, the open-system model poses the objective of maximizing the return on all resources employed by the corporation […] It rather starkly reveals how inadequate a view of corporate performance is provided by the close-system, financial model alone […] By not considering the social counterparts to its financial activities, the corporation grossly distorts its true impact on society [… An] open-system accounting model, therefore, appears essential if we hope to direct economic behavior in a reasonably enlightened fashion which maximizes the total amount of social welfare created by the corporation, rather than financial profits alone. (Halal 1978, 767–768) Downloaded by [Pouvreau David] at 07:26 06 February 2014 212 D. Pouvreau Another main type of considerations in which systemologically inspired works had praxeological significance was related to the previously described rejection of “commercialism” and productivism, a connection that Bertalanffy well understood (1968d, 5): “peace research”. Boulding and Rapoport dedicated a significant part of their work to this science of conflict resolution, and made a vigorous commitment to it from the late 1950s onward: they sought to provide a scientific basis for their pacifism. Nonetheless, although Bertalanffy clearly sympathized with this commitment, he did not significantly mobilize in support of it. Finally, ecologism and pacifism led several systemologists (Boulding, Rapoport, Mesarović and Laszló) to present their works as arguments for an internationalist and globalist view of political action, and as tools contributing to its concretization. Rapoport (1973b, 189) thus characterized “internationalism and ecological responsibility” as “symptoms of expanding horizons inherent in a more or less explicit systems view of the world” – genuine conflict resolution necessitating in particular the “building of responsible government at the world level” (Boulding 1962, 336). Bertalanffy did not openly embrace this commitment either. His troubled past with national-socialism seems to have convinced him that a better strategy was to avoid such premature exposure of systemology to the vehement and narrowly focused criticisms that they were destined to arouse. In fact, the criticism aimed at the functionalist sociologists was then redirected against the systemologists: some critics alleged their ideological bias toward order and stability. They were accused of viewing conflict and disorder as dysfunctional rather than as sources of adaptation; of their ideological bias toward the justification of social stratification; and of their conservative bias, which would be a consequence of these foci on maintaining the systemic order and on the principle of hierarchical organization. In fact, the critique of the bias toward hierarchy ignored that stratification could be regarded as a condition of individual freedom in modern society (such as was the case in Bertalanffy [1955a, 82] and especially Laszló [1974]). As for the critique of neglecting the role of conflict, it is irrelevant: most systemicians, particularly, those in social science, were concerned with the necessity to account not only for the conditions of system maintenance, but also for the conditions of its evolution. Bertalanffy’s “general open system” played a significant role here, especially in Buckley’s (1967), Easton’s (1965), and Katz and Kahn’s (1966) works: it enabled grasping equilibria as transient states and of understanding interaction with environment not merely as a source of perturbation, but as an essential condition for the progressive organization of the system and of its adaptation. There was indisputably a potential conservative trend here. This, however, did not involve a neglect of social change, but rather an essentially apolitical perception of its factors (Katz and Kahn 1966, 448–449; Keren 1979, 312–322). In fact, the relevance of the critiques reported here depends on the systemicians considered. And Bertalanffy made every effort to avoid them: The main critique of functionalism, particularly in Parsons’ version, is that it overemphasizes maintenance, equilibrium, adjustment, homeostasis, stable institutional structures, and so on, with the result that history, process, sociocultural change, inner-directed development, etc., are underplayed and, at most, appear as “deviants” with a negative value connotation. The theory therefore appears to be one of conservatism and conformism, defending the “system” (or the megamachine of present society, to use Mumford’s term) as it is, conceptually neglecting and hence obstructing social change. Obviously, general system theory in the form here presented is free of this objection as it incorporates equally maintenance and change, preservation of system and internal conflict; it may therefore be apt to serve as logical skeleton for improved sociological theory. (Bertalanffy 1968a, 196) Bertalanffy most certainly demanded the “recognition of spiritual aristocracy” instead of the triumph of materialism, the “unspeakable vulgarity of popular culture” and the Downloaded by [Pouvreau David] at 07:26 06 February 2014 International Journal of General Systems 213 “degradation of the democratic dogma” in a fanatical egalitarianism (1964a, 205–507, 1967a, 12). As for Brian Gaines, he described general systemology as “a form of philosophical engineering” of which Plato’s Republic would have been a precursor (1979, 3). These facts are nonetheless insufficient for the justification of other critiques of this project. One such charge was of being, especially via the “open system” model, “the alibi of technocratic practice”. “Haunted by the technicist ideology”, the systemologists were allegedly inclined to bypass, in human sciences, the problem of interpreting unconscious behaviour and determinations and substituting for them explanations in terms of processes and regulation devices (Palmade 1977; Keren 1979, 316–322). According to this criticism, there would have been an organic link between the emergence of system thinking and the emergence of new scientific and technocratic elites, and “system theory” would appear as a “potentially authoritarian” ideology in accordance with the class interest of the latter; namely, the “ideology of the administrative intellectual”, or of the “bureaucratic planner” (Lilienfeld 1978; Regelmann and Schramm 1986, 9). These critiques wrongly reduced all systemologists to the systemicians who worked for big firms or the industrial-military complex – like Gerard, Miller as well as most of “operations researchers” and “systems analysts”. They thus ignored the tensions generated by this implication in the “systemic movement”, as well as the disparity of the ideological options of the systemologists. This calls for remembering some reflections that Bertalanffy had between 1968 and 1972 under the influence of the critiques of the technicist system developed by Lewis Mumford in 1934. In radical opposition to “the new utopians of systems engineering” and to the “new cybernetic world”, Bertalanffy notably wrote: Systems research seems to serve and hasten the process of mechanization, automation and devaluation of man, making him ever more a replaceable wheel in what Lewis Mumford brilliantly depicted as the megamachine of human society (1968d, 5–6).49 Certainly, the systems approach can be used for the further mechanization, enslavement and alienation of man. It was up till now mainly applied to the benefit of the industrial-commercialmilitary complex, and is only hesitatingly introduced for social desirable purposes like the stemming of pollution, the planning of cities and the like. But it is not a specific fault of this development. It is part of the ambivalence of every science, technology, and human endeavor […] All great ideas of man lend themselves to inhuman purposes; the new trend makes no exception. This rests in man’s perversity. (1971b, 90) 3.4.11. General systemology as a humanistic project The main group of systemologists shared a genuine humanism. Marked by an acute sense of the tragic extent and depth of the new problems posed to contemporary and future humanity, it sought to open and explore adequate ways for their resolution. Five grounds, explicited below, justify the description of general systemology as a ”humanistic” project – made for the first time by Bertalanffy (1965c, 1111). One of his followers described his works as oriented toward an “organismic-humanistic theory” of systems, in view of (1) his opposition to reductionism; (2) his emphasis on “primary activity”; (3) his insistence on the necessity to consider seriously the specific traits of humans such as symbolism; and (4) his demand to integrate values, ethics and morality in the systemological framework (Gray 1972, 127, 1973, 170). The term “humanistic” here referred to Bertalanffy’s effort to include in the scientific agenda the whole set of human specificities. This was in opposition to a science perceived as having deliberately excluded them from its scope. The consequences were an inhuman understanding of humans and a major contribution 214 D. Pouvreau to creating a world in many respects inhuman. Bertalanffy thus described as “profoundly humanistic” the systemological attempt to overcome the “limitations of the mechanistic view”. He emphasized its effort to “reintroduce the human or humanistic element which was lost” in this view when it was applied to human individuals and human societies (1971b, 117–118): Humanistic psychology and orientation must take place – “humanistic” in the quite scientific sense of what is precisely characteristic of man. (Bertalanffy 1970b, 31) Downloaded by [Pouvreau David] at 07:26 06 February 2014 In that sense, a profound ambition was to generate with general systemology the matrix of a “humanistic science”. For Bertalanffy and his followers, this was an essential boundary line with the other currents of the systemic movement. This yielded the main sense of his dichotomy between “mechanicist” and “organismic” theories of systems: The positivistic, technological, behavioristic and commercialistic philosophy devaluates man into a robot and handles him accordingly. Against this robotization of man, we may aspire toward a humanization of science. (Bertalanffy 1967a, 114) The humanistic concern of general system theory as I understand it makes a difference to mechanistically oriented system theorists speaking solely in terms of mathematics, feedback and technology and so giving rise to the fear that system theory is indeed the ultimate step towards mechanization and devaluation of man and towards technocratic society. (Bertalanffy 1968a, xxiii) Nonetheless, a distinction must be made between two humanistic features underlying those discourses, in order to take into account all Bertalanffian philosophical perspectives: (1) General systemology was the expression and was meant to be the organon of implementation of a “systemic cosmology” and of an anthropology that, in defining the specificity of humans (being “symbolic animals”) and in emphasizing the particular dignity deriving from it, restored their position at the apex of Creation and scientific agenda. (2) General systemology was based on a perspectivist theory of knowledge that “humanized” all the sciences: it reintegrated them in a biological and cultural process while considering them as thorough expressions of human freedom and creativity; and while rejecting integral relativism, it identified the causes of their limitations with those of their dignity. Two additional “humanistic” aspects of this project can be found in systemological writings: (3) General systemology was destined to contribute to the unification of knowledge, particularly of “natural sciences” and “humanities”, with regard to the contents as well as to the global meaning of their productions, and to the sociology of the scientific “community”. (4) General systemology was destined to restore an education in the noble sense of the term (Bildung), primarily dedicated to the intellectual and spiritual formation and not merely to the education of “specialists”, and consequently free of every kind of utilitarianism. International Journal of General Systems 215 After Rapoport (1963, 123) and Boulding (1964, 37–38), Bertalanffy emphasized these aspects: Science itself is a “humanistic” endeavor […] Unifying concepts such as those of general systems theory appear able to bridge fields traditionally subsumed under the title of science and humanities, and herald syntheses without obliterating or minimizing the profound differences that do exist in entities of the realm of science and of the socio-cultural field. In education, such concepts may contribute toward unification of knowledge, permitting us to perceive a grand plan or structure in what otherwise are different and divergent specialities […] Science is more than an accumulation of facts and technological exploitation of knowledge in the service of the Establishment; it may still be able to present a grand view and to become deeply humanistic in its endeavor. If we achieve as much as contributing a bit toward humanization of science, we have done our share in the service of society and civilization. (1967a, 114–115) Downloaded by [Pouvreau David] at 07:26 06 February 2014 Finally, the project instigated by Bertalanffy deserves to be described as humanistic in a fifth sense that was especially dear to Rapoport and Boulding: (5) General systemology aimed at providing non-reductionistic conceptual tools furthering the development of a global awareness of the social, economic, ecological and political issues threatening contemporary humanity. It also aimed at an adequate framework for elaborating solutions that respect the human dignity – that is, conciliate the demands, viewed as complementary, to further the self-realization of each individual and his/her integration in supra-individual, socio-cultural and ecological systems without which this self-realization would be impossible. A major originality of systemological humanism came from its relationships to mathematics. The latter was meant to work in three directions: (1) making systemic thinking rigorous, formalizing its concepts and principles, and thus providing it with a synthetic and prospective power; (2) establishing correspondences between scientific fields, or at least furthering their communication by means of isomorphisms; and (3) contributing to the accession of human sciences to such a level of development that they become able to effectively model the understanding and resolution of human problems. In the final analysis, this humanism was based on mathematics. Understood in the senses (1), (3), (4) and (5), this humanism needed mathematics in order to become operational; and it also needed mathematics in its second sense, because mathematics guaranteed the perspectivism on which general systemology was built. This did not imply any reduction of the latter to the formal construction elaborated in theoretical systemologies. Bertalanffy emphasized that any neglect of the humanistic aspects of his project on behalf of mathematical (or technological) approaches implied a “resticted and fractional vision” (1968a, xxiii). However, this meant that the possibility and coherence of general systemology, as well as the force of its humanism, could not exist without mathematics. Accordingly, this project cannot be reduced to a philosophy: philosophical systemology was only one of the “poles” of the “hermeneutical system”, and its substance as well as its meaning and scope depended on its relationships to the three other “poles”, especially to basic theoretical systemology (at least because of their interface). 3.5 General systemology as basic theoretical science of “general systems” Bertalanffy’s essays of the years 1948–1951 already suggest that basic theoretical systemology constituted the very heart of his project. This systemology represented the most original “pole” that not only had to be founded from the viewpoint of its scientific and philosophical legitimacies, but also to be sufficiently elaborated to demonstrate the relevance of the whole 216 D. Pouvreau Downloaded by [Pouvreau David] at 07:26 06 February 2014 systemological project. The Bertalanffian postulates demanded the development of this “pole” supported by the “content of other subject areas” (Checkland 1989, 9) and dedicated to the elaboration of a “metalanguage” in which “the logical bases of the (systemic) explanations of definite types of phenomena” could be discussed (Löfgren 1972, 343). Every basic systemological work was constitutive of a logic, of a methodology and of an ontology, while being inscribed in the scientific domain. Basic theoretical systemology was also meant to become a field of elaboration of “second order” theoretical models inspired by the sciences of the “real”: the “general systems”, destined to structure the construction of “first order” theoretical models in those sciences. This field was formed by the logical and methodological tools for the construction of such general systems, as well as by their respective theorizings. 3.5.1. The ontology of general systems The expression “general system” first appeared in Bertalanffy’s works in 1954, in the SAGST manifesto. This was followed by the very eclectic definition then given for the related concept. He gave no other one. One may argue that his characterization of a system as a “model of general nature” consisting of “a conceptual analog of certain rather universal traits of observed entities” (Bertalanffy 1968a, 251) expressed an essential perspectivist trait of “general systems”. Such a characterization, however, is insufficient. Rapoport, Rosen, Mesarović and Klir provided clarifications on the roles and limitations of analogies, and on the concepts of isomorphism and equivalence class of models. Some of these definitions are precise and complementary (Pouvreau 2013a, 915–919). A distinction made by Rosen deserves emphasis. He referred to “realization” of a formal system as every “natural system” (i.e. defined in relationship to a definite set of phenomena) of which the former is a model – both systems thus being engaged in a “modelling relation”. He defined the analogy between two “natural systems” (not to be confused with the previous relation) as the fact that those systems “realize” a single formal model (Rosen 1977b, 508, 1978, 495, 1991, 57–63, 119). This is what Rapoport had already referred to in 1972 as a “conceptual isomorphism between concrete systems”, to be differentiated from a mathematical analogy: Isomorphism between two mathematical systems induces a conceptual isomorphism between the concrete systems they represent. In other words, two concrete systems can be said to be conceptually isomorphic to each other if both can be represented by the same mathematical model.50 Two “concrete systems” would thus be isomorphic only by proxy, via a formal system that they “realize” and to which their isomorphy is relative (ultimately depending on the features of those systems that are taken into consideration, hence to the choice of a definite perspective).51 Rosen was already guided by the idea that “modelling involves a relation of equivalence between systems” which “indicates the further existence of an underlying mathematical structure which the given systems realize” [1979, 177–182]. This enabled him to implicitely provide the following adequate definition of a “general system” in 1977: We can study modelling in the context of an arbitrary equivalence relation imposed on a class (or category) of systems; such an equivalence relation says precisely that any two systems in the same equivalence class are indistinguishable with respect to some property P which defines the equivalence. Given a system S, a model M is thus any system lying in the same equivalence class. One of the basic problems of modelling is to extract from this equivalence class some canonical representative, characterized by a further property of simplicity and minimality. (1977b, 504) International Journal of General Systems 217 That is why Rosen, who spent the years 1971–1972 with Bertalanffy at the Center for Theoretical Biology at SUNY-Buffalo, was also in position to interpret (see below) what I call “basic theoretical systemology”. An important point here is that he legitimately attributed the paternity of this interpretation to Bertalanffy (“a wise and noble man” of whom he wanted to “assimilate the insights and continue making progress along the paths he illuminated”): Downloaded by [Pouvreau David] at 07:26 06 February 2014 To me, general system theory is precisely the study of the different analytic paradigms which can be applied to understand particular system behaviors, and the characterization of the circumstances in which a system S’ may be a model of a system S. All this was clear to von Bertalanffy long ago, and these insights animated every aspect of his work. (1979, 176–177, 184) In fact, Klir had formulated as early as 1972 the definition of a “general system” that probably inspired Rosen: a “formal representant of a particular equivalence class obtained when an isomorphic relation is applied to certain traits of systems” (Klir 1972, 2–3). He also deserves the credit for having pointed out the fact that – insofar as the construction of a general system is relative to the perspective taken on the various models of which it is a “canonical representant”, and insofar as a single “thing” can be represented as a system according to different perspectives – a single model (or set of models) can be put in correspondence with several general systems. Klir (1969, 93–94) and Robert Orchard (1972, 206) were thus led to define “general systems theory” as the theory dealing with the class of all possible general systems. Since each general system is the object of one theorizing, it nonetheless seems less confusing to call “basic theoretical systemology” the set of these theorizing. 3.5.2. Logic and methodology of the theorizing of general systems One part of the efforts dedicated to developing basic theoretical systemology involved codifying the logical and methodological aspects of the theorizing of general systems. Three main directions can be distinguished: (1) The precise and formalized definition of the concepts required in order to construct such systems. The discussions that Bertalanffy had in the 1930s and 1940s in justifying his general models of the “open system” and of the “organized system” partly constitute his contribution in that regard. They had the originality to demonstrate that an exchange of components of a system with its environment, his “metabolism”, is a requirement for the progressive establishment and maintenance of the definite order of “relationships between its elements”: this enables it to constitute a “system”. Nonetheless, this contribution was very modest compared with Klir’s and Mesarović’s, in the years 1964–1975. Klir sought to specify the “characteristic traits” of every “definition of a system on an object”, i.e. the aspects that necessarily constitute any systemic construction. He derived several formalized ”fundamental definitions” of a class of systems, each of them being applicable to classes of particular problems; and he correlated the classes of systems thus defined with the classes of systemic problems that scientists and engineers must deal with (1965, 30–33, 1968, 13–16, 1969, 37–55, 69–73, 1972, 8). Klir’s researches resulted in a hierarchization of epistemological categories of systems (Klir 1985a; Klir and Rozehnal 1996). Mesarović’s approach was different. Instead of embracing this “empirico-inductive” and pluralist approach to general systems (essentially in accordance with Bertalanffy), he based himself on a specific, set-theoretic definition of a general system. He then examined various mathematicized systemic concepts and stated theorems involving them. His leading idea had already been considered in Bertalanffy’s founding papers (especially [1951b, 339–340]): progressively enriching the initial system (which uses a “minimal mathematical structure”) and then studying systems that have more special Downloaded by [Pouvreau David] at 07:26 06 February 2014 218 D. Pouvreau properties by “adding axioms” to this initial system, of which the logical consequences are investigated. This work of “constructive specification” enabled Mesarović to formulate sophisticated definitions of general concepts such as “temporal system”, “dynamic system”, systemic “controlability”, “reproductibility” and “stability”. He gave mathematical characterizations of systemic states resulting in a mathematical typology of systems (Mesarović 1968, 1972, Mesarović and Takahara 1975). (2) The methodology of construction and theorizing of general systems. Two approaches corresponded to the logical viewpoints typified by Klir and Mesarović. Mesarović thought that invariant structures could be determined in the statements derived from the models constructed in order to study “real life” situations. The formalization of such structures would be sufficient for the construction of precise and general definitions of systemic concepts that are potential bases for general systems theorizing (Mesarović 1968, 78; Mesarović and Takahara 1975, 7, 1986, 9–10). Nonetheless, the difficulty remained, as emphasized by Bertalanffy and Klir, that Mesarović neglected to take into account the diversity of the models related to “observations of real life”. Moreover, his pretension to extreme generality was undermined by his choice of a definite kind of formalism. Klir’s work was different and probably remains the most advanced development of the approach that Bertalanffy instigated. In relating, organically, the two types of theoretical systemologies (“basic” and “applied”), he aimed at formalizing the general frameworks of systemic analysis that are relevant for dealing with the problems arising in the sciences of the “real”. He did so based on a distinction between three methodological types: “analysis” of a system, “synthesis” and the “problem of the black box”52 (Klir 1965, 39–42). The general systems theory as [I propose it] is based on a consistent set of definitions of general systems, each of which is applicable for a particular problem [… It] is applicable for both the description of system properties and the solution of systems problems [… Its] universality does not oppose the multiplicity of general systems [… It] is based on fundamental traits obtained by successive generalization up to a reasonable level in order to reach a proper compromise between its generality and its content (effectiveness in application). (Klir 1968, 18–19, 1969, 95) The recurrence of some mathematical structures in the theoretical models of the sciences of the “real” aroused the will to study these structures in abstracto. The goal was to obtain a set of mathematical theories of general systems that serve as a repertoire for the implementation of the methodology exposed by Klir. Rapoport shed important light on this issue, while furthering Bertalanffy’s early discussions about general systems of differential equations (1949b, 1950b). He emphasized the constructive dialectics that should enable such mathematical general systems to meet the requirement of relevance for empirical research, with reciprocal benefits: The mathematical trend in general systems theory makes the mathematical system, rather than a concrete system, the point of departure. Thus the theoretical investigation is an investigation of the mathematical properties of an abstract system of relations. These properties being common to all mathematical systems isomorphic to the given one, the conclusions drawn are expected to apply to all concrete systems of which the mathematical systems are adequate representations. This program naturally guides the system theorist along the lines of least mathematical resistance, and the simplest mathematical systems are investigated first. Attempts are made to fit concrete systems into the mold of the now-familiar mathematical system. Inevitably, the perceived success of the attempt is colored by the all-too-human desire to see one’s enterprise succeed. Nevertheless, the failures are often too conspicuous to be ignored. Here the advantages of the mathematical approach become evident. The reasons for the failure can sometimes be inferred International Journal of General Systems 219 from explicit inadequacies of the postulates that characterize the type of mathematical system, and directions for generalization are indicated. (Rapoport 1972a, 56–57) Remaining faithful to Rashevsky (under whose direction he had worked in Chicago) and in perfect accordance with Bertalanffy, Rapoport insisted on the idea that this “direct” mathematical approach has a fruitful autonomy: Downloaded by [Pouvreau David] at 07:26 06 February 2014 The usefulness of mathematical general system theory would be severely limited if it were confined to a search for isomorphisms between precisely specified models known to be faithful representations of some portions of the world. The scope of general system theory can be greatly expanded is systemic properties of mathematical objects are studied for their own sake; as it were, for the insights such properties can impart about possible properties of systems. (1973c, 440) (3) The rigorous formalization of the theoretic-systemological procedure. This work was mainly undertaken in the 1970s (after Bertalanffy had passed away) by Rosen (in continuation of his “biotopological” works [1958a, 1958b]) and by Mesarović and Takahara (1975, 217–247, 1989, 221–255). They all strived to find, in the mathematical theory of “categories”, the means to formalize the “modelling relations” between systems. They considered that it should play an essential metatheoretical role in basic theoretical systemology, enabling in particular to specify its theoretical status with regard to the various theories of general systems. Their idea was to represent the “modelling relations” between systems in the framework of this theory (Rosen [1958b], [1979, 179], Mesarović and Takahara [1989, 222–223]). Nonetheless, they achieved little beyond demonstrating the possibility to formalize concepts that were already known, and finding again in formal ways results that had already been established. They thus opened themselves up to the critics, who denounced an “ornemental mathematizing” as “pompous” as useless (Berlinski 1978; Delattre 1982, 10; Thom 1993, 115). Beyond those shortcomings, it should be noticed that Rosen put in 1978 the concepts of this theory at the service of a formalized representation of the procedure of theoretic-systemological construction which is quite relevant (1978, 498–501).53 3.5.3. Status and theoretical functions of basic theoretical systemology The reflections undertaken from 1955 onward about the status and functions of basic theoretical systemology specified the views sketched by Bertalanffy in his founding papers – he himself introduced further precisions. There were two main issues: (1) the way the theoretical status of this systemology could be defined and legitimated, because the very meaning of the term “theoretical” had become a problem with regard to classical conceptions: it was irreducible to a component of formal sciences or to a component of the sciences of the “real”; and (2) which aspects of the research undertaken in its framework were constitutive of its theoretical character, and which were its associated functions? The first issue underlies a striking remark that inaugurated the founding paper published in 1956 by Boulding after his discussions with Bertalanffy at the CASBS: General Systems Theory is a name which has come into use to describe a level of theoretical model-building which lies somewhere between the highly generalized constructions of pure mathematics and the specific theories of the specialized disciplines. (Boulding 1956b, 11) In fact, basic theoretical systemology (which was the subject matter here) was a scientific metatheory: its “matter” was already made of theoretical models, of which it investigated the conceptual structure. Whereas the various scientific disciplines constructed models of specific 220 D. Pouvreau Downloaded by [Pouvreau David] at 07:26 06 February 2014 systems that bypassed their systemic features as such, it focused on those features, on the gathering of systems in equivalence classes, and on the study of the general properties of “canonical representants” of the latter, each of these studies constituting one theory of a general system. Cybernetics may thus be viewed as the part of basic theoretical systemology focused on the study of informational processes. The best characterization of this metatheoretical character may be the one provided by Sadovsky and his Soviet colleagues in the early 1970s: General Systems Theory is the interdisciplinary research whose objectives are as follows: (1) elaboration of means to represent objects under study as “systems”; (2) development of generalized models of system and various classes of systems and their features, including dynamic systems theories, theories of purposeful behavior, hierarchical structure, control processes in systems, etc; (3) investigation of the conceptual structure of systems theories. Considered in this way, General Systems Theory is, on the one hand, generalization of special systems theories; and, on the other, it has much in common with the logic and methodology of systems research. (Blauberg, Sadovsky, and Yudin 1973, 253)54 Accordingly, basic theoretical systemology should include the definitions of the fundamental systemic concepts and the classification of systems, but also the construction of methods and formalisms of systemic representation (Sadovsky 1971, 550–551, Lenk 1978, 246–247). Seven properly scientific functions (that is, directly concerning the construction of specific theoretical models) of this metatheory are evident. They were at least touched upon by Bertalanffy in his founding papers, and were more substantially discussed by others thereafter: (1) A definitory function: determining the variables and definitions appropriate to the construction of “system theory in the narrow sense”, that is, a system of statements connecting events while making clear the conditions in which they occur (Rapoport 1972a, 44). (2) A taxonomic function: “classifying systems by the way their components are interrelated and deriving typical patterns of behavior for the different classes of systems” singled-out; thus creating a “purely logico-structural, content-free taxonomy of systems” in order to “investigate the consequences of the classification of systems induced by mathematical isomorphisms” (Rapoport 1972a, 74, 1968, xvii). Game theory has provided significant examples (Rapoport 1966b, 1972a, 72–73), but the example of general systems of differential equations brought up by Bertalanffy has always remained paradigmatic in view of the possibilities to set-up “exact” typologies of such systems (Rapoport 1952, 1972a, 50–62, 1973c, 440–441). This taxonomic function was also a discrimination tool: Bertalanffy already noted in (1956c, 5) that what is termed here “basic theoretical systemology” should help find the principles that are specific to definite classes of systems; and Boulding several times noted the same after him.55 (3) A function of conceptual framework for system modelling, that Bertalanffy regularly emphasized.56 Rapoport (1972a, 44–45, 72, 1975, 58) and Mesarović and Takahara (1975, 2) pointed out the task to “enlarge the conceptual repertoire” of the sciences of the “real” and to generate new hypotheses that may “yield rich dividends”. It should integrate problems that were hitherto regarded as metaphysical into the realm of science. This should lay the ground for theoretical modelling in the sciences of the “real” dealing with “organized complexity” (Wymore 1972, 271). The issue was not to organize and experiment empirically interpretable hypotheses. Rather, it was to systematize analogies between existing models in order to “broaden” concepts and to Downloaded by [Pouvreau David] at 07:26 06 February 2014 International Journal of General Systems 221 provide the means for elaborating new models: analogy was meant to play a constituent role in theorizing, in establishing a priori, between some variables, definite relationships still having no known empirical translation. (4) A nomothetic function and a function of vehicle for mathematicizing. Only few reflections on this subject dear to Bertalanffy were undertaken after his original claims in the 1940s. Rapoport confined himself to reassert that the inability to formulate many phenomena in terms of physical laws imposes on the inclinations to mathematicizings and on the nomothetic ambitions the necessity of an enlargement of the spectrum of the investigated mathematical systems: the “theory of general systems” was meant to serve this end (1973c, 442–443). From this viewpoint, the resources provided by the developments of fields such as topology, graphs theory or game theory appeared precious to Rapoport as well as to the other mathematicians of general systems57: they were aware, as had been Bertalanffy as early as in (1932b), that the challenge taken up was the “exact” treatment of structural, essentially qualitative problems. (5) An explanatory or simulatory function. As Bertalanffy had tried to show with his general models of the “open system” and of the “organized system”, the “theories of general systems” were meant to serve as matrixes for theorizings of definite aspects of the “real”, formulating testable laws (at least in a “vicariant” sense: Bunge [1977, 29, 35]). Their statements, however, could not as such have the value of “laws” because of their “hyper-generality” (Bunge 1974, 17; Lenk 1978, 248–249): they did not formulate any direct and precisely testable prediction. Bertalanffy and Rapoport considered that these statements nonetheless have a precious value of “explanation in principle” (a concept taken from Hayek [1956]), qualitatively predictive: If quantification is impossible, and even if the components of a system are ill-defined, it can at least be expected that certain principles will qualitatively apply to the whole qua system. At least “explanation on principle” may be possible. (Bertalanffy 1962a, 13)58 The statements of general system theory pertain to formal or structural communalities abstracting from the “nature of elements and forces in the system” with which the special sciences (and explanations in these) are concerned. In other words, system-theoretical arguments pertain to, and have predictive value inasmuch as general structures are concerned. Such “explanation in principle” may have considerable predictive value; for specific explanation, introduction of the special system conditions is naturally required. (Bertalanffy 1968a, 252) General systemology would in particular “show how, when certain parameters exceed certain quantitative limits, a system may change from a stable one to an unstable one, and consequently may suffer a qualitative change” (Rapoport 1973c, 459). This legitimization of models substituting merely “qualitative” and “plausible” explanations to nomological and quantitatively predictive ones expressed a significant evolution in the understanding of the model concept. This evolution was furthered with regard to the question of the legitimacy of simulation. Boulding was the first, in 1964, to emphasize the affinity between “the general system point of view” and the methods of simulation, when he noted in (1964, 35) that the latter are “highly consistent” with the former. Six years later, Bertalanffy claimed that basic theoretical systemology would be in position to justify this radically original type of modellings which were increasingly in use with the advent and progress of computers, and which deliberately renounced to explain (even “in principle”) phenomena: The advantage of a general theory of isomorphic systems is that it can describe and predict the functioning of a system even when the details of its components and elementary processes are unknown. It is on this basis that rely the method of simulation, nowadays widely used. (1970b, 24)59 Downloaded by [Pouvreau David] at 07:26 06 February 2014 222 D. Pouvreau Mesarović had already explained in (1968, 60, 72) that simulation may take over from mathematical analysis of general systems when the latter remains helpless. This idea quickly stood out,60 especially after the publication of (Gardner and Ashby 1970), which showed how to investigate various classes of general systems simulated on the computer in a scientific way. (6) A heuristic function. Furthering his early writings, Bertalanffy often emphasized after 1955 the potential ability of basic theoretical systemology to render old and hitherto “metaphysical” problems accessible to scientific investigation in “opening new perspectives and viewpoints capable of experimental and practical application” (1957c, 10, 1962a, 13, 1967a, 70). Rapoport also emphasized this point, best illustrated by the elaboration of the cyberneticist concepts of feedback (Rosenblueth et al. 1943) and by Bertalanffy’s transformation of “equifinality” in a characterization of the flux equilibria of open systems under definite conditions (Bertalanffy 1940). The level of abstraction of any theory of a general system prevents its conclusions from being directly applicable to the “real”; but they may constitute “useful starting points” in formulating hypotheses about certain phenomena: The rewards of general system analysis come typically in the form of new problems rather than in the form of solutions to old ones. The rewards are none the less real, since the formulation of new problems usually involves a sharpening of newly found concepts and a redirection of intellectual energy to new, sometimes virginal, domains.61 (7) A regulative function: controlling analogical transfers between conceptual constructions and ascertaining or not their relevance. However, nothing new was written about this function beyond its mere statement by Bertalanffy in his founding papers: it has remained unclear. 3.5.4. Bertalanffy’s main general systems theorizing Which were Bertalanffy’s main contributions to the construction and theorizing of general systems? Let us first consider his “uninterpreted” general systems. A case in point is his model of “organized system” (mostly elaborated in [1937]), even though it was not mathematically formalized. It most certainly originated in biology, a discipline that provided this model with a reservoir of immediately convincing illustrations. It was, however, the abstract and potentially transdisciplinary description of an entity which, thanks to its exchanges of components with its environment, structures itself and hierarchically functions, thus gaining the ability to adjust to changing conditions. In particular, Bertalanffy thus produced one of the first contributions to the theorizing of hierarchical organization.62 His works on the a priori analysis of systems of differential equations – whose unknown functions have no specific interpretation (particularly his “general open system” [1940]) – have moreover contributed to the production of mathematically formalized “uninterpreted” general systems. However, his contribution remains modest: his considerations were mostly purely (and explicitely) “illustrative” and in many regards mere revivals of Lotka’s “general kinetics” (1925). More significant were Ashby’s theory of “state determined systems” (1952) and Rapoport’s analyses of the stability conditions of stationary states in systems of differential equations – Rapoport sought to demonstrate that such analyses may “lead to theoretical insights”, as well as promote “the role of mathematical analogy in the construction of theories” (1952, 1972a, 50–54, 1973c, 441–443, 1986, 38–77). In Bertalanffy’s works and in those of later systemologists (notably Rosen [1968], Mesarović and Takahara [1975], Gottinger [1977], and Thom [1972]), the considerations on general systems of differential equations were connected to an acute interest in dynamical systems theory. Bertalanffy, however, did not pay much attention to the Downloaded by [Pouvreau David] at 07:26 06 February 2014 International Journal of General Systems 223 theory of “finite automata” that was developed in the 1960s by authors such as Taylor L. Booth, Arthur Gill, Michael A. Harrison and Juris Hartmanis; that theory was certainly one of the most important contributions to basic theoretical systemology (Klir 1969, 99–100; Rosen 1978, 497–498). What about Bertalanffy’s contribution to “transdisciplinarily interpreted” general systems? In a work undertaken in 1955 at the CASBS, Bertalanffy and Raoul S. Naroll (1956) generalized the reflections that the former had instigated between 1937 and 1942 about the broad dx applicability of allometric equations in biology (whose type is dy dt = dt ¼ ay=x, where x and y are the variables under study, and a the “allometric” constant). Bertalanffy had strived to demonstrate that such equations form a general system of relative growth, applicable to all levels of biological organization. His and Naroll’s desire was to show its relevance also for sociology: their interpretation of the variables of the general equation was restricted to the biological and sociological fields. They established a correspondence between the uses of allometric equations in biology (physiology of metabolism and growth, biochemistry, theory of evolution) and their recent uses for the treatment of sociological problems. Their work resulted in a model demonstrating the existence, at least in several countries, of a diachronic allometric relation between urban and rural populations. Apart from this modest contribution to “transdisciplinarily interpreted” general systems, the significant influence in that regard of Bertalanffy’s organismic system model should be noted. This is particularly the case in one of the most typical series of such general systems: the papers published annually in the Yearbooks between 1960 and 1966 by the meteorologist and psychologist John W. Thompson.63 3.6. General systemology as applied theoretical systems science The raison d’être and very existence of basic theoretical systemology had to be supported by a link with the sciences of the “real”. This link, an indirect one, was enabled by applied theoretical systemology, which provided basic theoretical systemology with the material necessary for the construction of general systems. Applied theoretical systemology was the pole of general systemology dedicated to the construction of systemic theoretical models of specific phenomena. It was indispensable for the scientific and philosophical legitimization of general systemology, in the same way that only Bertalanffy’s successes in his theorizing of specific biological problems had enabled his biological systemology to win its legitimacy. 3.6.1. The “theoretic-systemological” procedure of application Several thorough discussions of the systemological procedure of construction of “first order” systemic models were published in the late 1960s. Bertalanffy had provided essential perspectives in that regard in his biotheoretical works (1932–1942), but he never systematically discussed this procedure in relationship to his project of general systemology. Mesarović (1968, 62–63), Klir (1968, 18–19, 1969, 95) and Orchard (1972) are the main contributors to the reflections upon the epistemology of theoretic-systemological application that was more or less successfully actualized in the works of the systemologists, particularly Bertalanffy. I have discussed in (2013a, 940–944) a scheme of the recursive procedure characterizing this application, which furthers their reflections and can be used to account for the theoretical models elaborated in a genuine systemological perspective: see (Figure 2). This scheme is based upon a distinction between the concepts of “model-object”, “modelling” and “model” (Pouvreau 2013a, 354–366). A model-object of an enigmatic “thing” X is a schematic representation OM of X: a stylized construction that abstracts some traits of X and focuses on some other traits in idealizing them, with the a priori that they are essential. D. Pouvreau 224 Already studied "things" Analysis Systemic model-objects of these "things" Theory of the general system Isomorphisms General system Intuitively perceived similarity of behavior "Object system" Isomorphism (selection of attributes) Information on an adequate structure for modelling Homomorphism Systemic modelobject Choice of viewpoint Downloaded by [Pouvreau David] at 07:26 06 February 2014 "Source system" (set of variables and of their states) "Thing" under study Knowledge from the "formal sciences" New questions ? Validation ? Challenging the model ? Knowledge from the "sciences of the real" Modelling of the systemic model-object Information on the "thing" such as systemically reconstructed Empirical test Analysis Interpretation Systemic model of the "thing" Figure 2. The recursive systemological procedure of construction of theoretical models. This model-object is fruitful if and only if it is possible to implement it; that is, to make it operational. Questions concerning X have to be translatable in questions concerning OM ; it must be possible to get answers to the latter and then to translate them in turn into answers to the initial questions, experimentally testable. This is the role of a modelling, understood here in the sense of the art to implement a model-object and thus to make it fruitful. A modelling (of OM ) is the union of the set of the rules of operation on OM and of the set of the rules of correspondence between OM and X: it is the real tool for the interpretation of X. Although it is constructed in relation to the “thing” under study, the modelling concerns the model-object, and the latter is therefore a cognitive mediator between this ”thing” and this modelling: there is no “modelling of the real”. Finally, a model M of X is defined as the combination of a model-object OM of X and of a modelling of OM providing the rules of operation on OM and of correspondence with X. This model is said to be “theoretical” if the modelling is a hypothetic-deductive system, and “mathematical” if the modelling is purely mathematical. At any rate, M is an interpretation of X aimed at generating information about it, and at making it intelligible in “molding” it according to specific rational requirements. These distinctions are necessary. Several models of a single model object are indeed a priori conceivable. This will therefore yield an equal number of different models of the “thing” International Journal of General Systems 225 Downloaded by [Pouvreau David] at 07:26 06 February 2014 investigated, and the challenge of a specific one will a priori first concern the model involved, not the model object: it will be possible to dismiss a model while keeping its model object, the latter being liable to serve as a basis for other models insofar as it is considered as relevant. This principle was constituent of Bertalanffy’s systemic models, especially with regard to global animal growth. What the systemician models by isomorphy to a general system is an abstract representation relating in a still very formal and unspecified way the selected variables: the “systemic model-object” of the “thing” under study. The direct function of the general system concerns the construction of the model-object to be modelled, whereas the direct function of the theory of this general system concerns modelling as such – thus taking on its function of logical guide. Finally, it should be noted that any challenge posed to the resulting systemic model most certainly primarily concerns the specifications of the systemic model-object involved in its modelling, but may ultimately concern the very choice of the general system. 3.6.2. The example of the Bertalanffian theory of global animal growth In taking liberties with the chronology of Bertalanffy’s works without, however, betraying his inspiration, it seems possible to illustrate best the “concrete” functioning of the previously discussed procedure in reformulating in its terms the construction of Bertalanffy’s model of global animal growth. That model remains one of the most significant contributions to applied theoretical systemology, and its construction is demonstrably similar to Lotka’s constructions of “prey-predator” models (Bertalanffy 1934a, 1964b, Pouvreau and Drack 2007, Pouvreau 2013a, 553–561, 593–617). Clearly, the “thing” to be studied is here the growing animal, whose behaviour as such, particularly the manifest equifinality of the process, presents similarities with the behaviour of some open chemical systems. The latter are describable by means of systems of differential equations isomorphic to the “general open system” formalized by Bertalanffy. This makes relevant the choice to guide the construction of the model of organic growth with this general system. The “object-system” is in that case defined as an entity that exchanges matter with its environment. This involves assimilation and dissimilation processes, such that the former predominate. The “source-system” is this system studied from the viewpoint of the states of a single variable: the weight of the organism (the list of the temporally parametered values of this weight is the set of its associated states). The model-object of the growing organism is the very formal and general representation of growth by the equation expressing the temporal derivative of weight as the difference between two functions having the weight as an argument, which symbolize the antagonistic metabolic processes. The theory of the “general open system” then brings an essential information: the equifinality of the stationary state requires that time is not an explicit argument of these functions. Physiological knowledge combined with differential calculus complete this analysis in order to generate the set of Bertalanffy’s growth equations. Finally, their mathematical analysis provides quantitative and qualitative information, experimentally interpretable and testable. 3.6.3. Interpretations of the Bertalanffian “organized system” in psychology and psychiatry Bertalanffy also deserves the credit for having provided one the most emblematic examples of applied theoretical systemology. This involved his transposition to the human sciences of his organismic model of system, initially constructed in order to embrace all levels of biological organization. From 1951 and especially 1956 onward, a growing part of his work was dedicated to this task. The ambition was to establish the relevance and fruitfulness of Downloaded by [Pouvreau David] at 07:26 06 February 2014 226 D. Pouvreau combining in psychology and psychiatry his theoretical schemes of organismic interpretation (open system in “flux equilibrium” and “progressive hierarchization”) (Bertalanffy 1951c, 1956a, 1956d, 1965c, 1966, 1967a, 1967b, 1967c, 1968b, 1968d, 1970a). Bertalanffy already explained in 1950 that he conceived “general system theory” as an “expansion of his open systems theory” which, just because of its generality, “might be valuable” for psychology, “where our knowledge of the material basis of the phenomena is very limited”64: in providing the means to elaborate “dynamic, molar and formal” (instead of “static, molecular and material”) models that are more adequate to their objects than the previous behavioristic or psychanalytic ones, it would create in psychology and psychiatry the opportunity for autonomous theoretical developments, devoid of hypothetical entities (1951c). It would also help preserve the possibility of a non-reductionistic correspondence (an isomorphism of conceptual constructs understood in terms of code) between psychological and neurophysiological processes, thus fostering an understanding of human that significantly takes into account psychophysical unity.65 Bertalanffy, however, was also aware of the mainly heuristic character of the transposition of his concept of “open system” in this context – it was no longer a question here of material exchanges, but of “transactions” in symbolic universes: Physics and biophysics deal with open systems which are of course very different from the open systems meant by the psychologist. I nonetheless consider that, as a provisional or reference model, the “open system”, with “autonomous activity” and “anamorphosis”, is a better starting construction than the “closed system”, the “primary reactivity” and the mental organization viewed as an apparatus aimed at maintaining “equilibrium”. (1956d, 9) His organismic model of human, elaborated between 1951 and 1956, characterized the individual as an “active personality system” (1965c, 1099), open to its material, social and cultural environments, and therefore able to structure itself while maintaining a state of continually recreated tension, thus avoiding psychical equilibrium. An “innerly directed” system of which the “primary activity” expresses itself by creativity, will to exploration and inclination for play, and which can only develop healthily by interacting with a cultural universe having “psycho-hygienic” functions. Psychical illness should not be viewed as a loss of specific functions but, like somatic illness, as a disturbance of systemic functions – namely, a “disintegration” of personality expressing a “disturbance of symbolic functions”. As early as 1951, Bertalanffy claimed and strived to show that all the concepts and principles constituent of his model of “organized system” may be interpreted in the psychiatric and psychological contexts using analogues of their biological interpretations discussed in the 1930s and 1940s: A living organism is a hierarchy of open systems maintaining itself in a steady state due to its inherent system conditions. It appears that a corresponding definition could be applied as a general model of personality. (Bertalanffy 1951c, 37) His concept of “differenciation” would be applicable to mental functions and, along with a transposition of the concept of “border”, to the characterization of the process by which the “self” crystalizes in an entity separated from the “external world”. And the same would hold for his other organismic concepts such as “progressive mechanization”, “centralization”, “leading part”, “trigger action” and “stratification”.66 Bertalanffy elaborated his model in connection with some contemporary developments in psychiatry and psychology. His organismic approach aroused a significant interest among leading representatives of the currents challenging the “mechanicist” paradigma then prevailing in their disciplines (especially the “mechanomorphism” and “zoomorphism” of International Journal of General Systems 227 behavioristic psychology), such as Jean Piaget, Karl A. Menninger, Charlotte Bühler and Abraham Maslow (Pouvreau 2009b, 164–186). In consequence of its ability to enable an understanding of individual behaviour in its social and cultural context without bypassing the subjective determinants of this behaviour, Bertalanffy’s model introduced an approach (in many regards similar to Kurt Goldstein’s) that was considered more genuinely “systemic” and relevant than the one of the so-called “Palo Alto school” by most of these psychiatrists and psychologists. The value of his model was still praised in 1990: it was then described as a “conceptual revolution for the psychophysical problem” (Bianchi 1990, 7–15, 25–39).67 Downloaded by [Pouvreau David] at 07:26 06 February 2014 3.6.4. Interpretations of the Bertalanffian “organized system” in social sciences While Bertalanffy was prompt to transpose his model of the “organized system” to psychology and psychiatry, his attitude was quite different toward “cultural (or historical) morphology” – defined by Anderle as the “science dealing with the form of the structural aspects of cultural (or historical) phenomena” (Sorokin 1966, 205). This is interesting because this field had been quite important in the genesis of his ideas. His correspondence in the 1950s and many allusions in his contemporary publications show that he wanted to make such a transposition but was afraid after the war that introducing his organismic model in that field would trigger a shower of bitter critique. This would have been harmful for the promotion of his systemological project, at a time when every thinking labelled as “organicism” generally remained moribund among historians. The year 1960 marks the year when, for the first time since the 1920s, Bertalanffy reintegrated the “historico-morphological” considerations in his publications. Initially, he did so very cautiously. He limited himself to the reassertion that, despite its undeniable shortcomings, a scientific legitimacy should be granted to Spengler’s historical morphology as a “theoretical model” because it had all the attributes deserving this designation (mainly its explicative and predictive abilities) (1960a, 209–211).68 The transposition did not really occur before 1962; its main elaboration even came as late as 1971 (Bertalanffy 1962a, 19–20, 1967a, 112–113, 1971a). This “comeback to the roots” can be explained by a more favourable intellectual context.69 Bertalanffy thought that the theoretic-systemological perspective was equally applicable to historical as to sociological phenomena. This application would presuppose (1) that the notion of “theoretic-historical” construction is correctly understood, (2) the awareness of the diversity of “degrees of explanation” and (3) the awareness of the fact that the search for regularities in the structure of historical events does not necessarily imply the search for deterministic laws (1971a, 74–77). In these three factors he was inspired by Anderle (1958, 31–35). Bertalanffy stated in 1971 ten “theses of a system theory of history”. He had already exposed their general perspective four years earlier: It can hardly be doubted that in “synchronic” as well as in “diachronic” aspects socio-cultural phenomena are neither an additive result of individual actions, nor borne by an undifferentiated humanity but by super-individual “systems” whose laws are open to further investigation. This, of course, does not say that societies or cultures are “organisms” like animals or plants, living things well separated from each other and with predetermined life cycle […] If we take the theories of history as working models permitting us to see certain regularities – and, at present, very immature and contradictory models – we shall be more fair [in our evaluation of Spengler’s and Toynbee’s works], even admitting that different models are possible and pertinent. As a matter of fact, the “organismic” model, which is a horror to historians, is well accepted in sociology, applied to such unromantic things as the growth of businesses and commercial organizations and leading to neat quantitative formulas. Reduced to sober terms, the mystique imbuing the works of prophets like Spengler and Toynbee, and the ire of academic history against their dilettante endeavor evaporate. (1967a, 108–109) Downloaded by [Pouvreau David] at 07:26 06 February 2014 228 D. Pouvreau Bertalanffy’s theses (1971a, 77–82) sketched a historical interpretation of his general “organized system”. This interpretation was obviously rooted in the German cultural context of the 1920s. He notably asserted that (1) “history is the evolution of holistic entities or systems called cultures or civilizations, localized in space and time”; (2) “cultures show autonomous developments in the sense that their changes are not completely accountable as changes of their environment: they are systems that are not merely ‘reactive’ in response to stimuli, but are ‘active’ or ‘creative’”; (3) “two aspects, and consequently also historical entities, have always to be distinguished when applying the system model: commonalities of structure in different systems (isomorphies) and specifics of systems, called ‘style’”70; (4) “cultural diffusion, even if patent and undisputed, contributes nothing to explain the ‘style’ or origin of a culture”; (5) “there are regularities in cultural evolution which are roughly comparable to a biological life cycle”; (6) “trying to establish structural principles common to culture change or evolution is but an expansion of a widely applied model or paradigm”; and (7) “the difference between the great civilizations of the past and our own is the global and technological characters of the latter, which explode the cyclic scheme and place our civilization at a different level from previous ones” (an idea which is nowadays revived and renewed in the contemporary reflections on “degrowth” and “anthropocene”: Sinaï [2013]). Bertalanffy admitted that he thus only “superficially reviewed” some “aspects of a system model of culture”. He nonetheless considered that this model, “compared to the conventional historiography, allows new insight into civilization in general, and specific civilizations in particular, permitting a clearer view of problems like growth and decay, cultural autonomy and diffusion, civilization and primitive culture, and the like”. He moreover thought that general systemology may provide a “common language” and give a unity to the systemic inspired works such as Spengler’s and Sorokin’s, American functionalist sociology and ethnology, French structural anthropology (Claude Levi-Strauss) or Noam Chomsky’s linguistics. It is in the sense of a working hypothesis – leading to new empirical research and providing a conceptual framework – that I advance the concept of “cultures as systems” […] Insofar as the prevailing modes of historical thought are to examine parts rather than wholes, to take a monocultural focus rather than a transcultural one, to be linear rather than cyclical in presumption, and to take events as unique rather than to look for common structures and isomorphic trends – insofar as it is the case, this conceptual framework is implicitely a contribution toward a “critique of historical reason”. (Bertalanffy 1971a, 84) Sorokin has elaborated and applied this systemic model. His many convergences with Bertalanffy are expressed by their cross references and private correspondence.71 The significant influence of Bertalanffy is moreover demonstrated by Easton’s “systems analysis of political life” (1965) and Katz and Kahn’s “social psychology of organizations” (1966): these essays were constructed based on his organismic model of “open system”. This because it enabled to grasp both the conditions of stability of any political system or social organization and the conditions of its adaptation and evolution, but also because it augured the possibility to think out hierarchical order in a dynamicist perspective (Easton 1965, 18–20, 33, 475–479; Katz and Kahn 1966; Young 1964, 244, 249–253; Keren 1979, 312–313). 3.7. General systemology as systems technology Theoretical systemology had two levels of application: the “second order” models elaborated in basic theoretical systemology were meant to be interpreted in applied theoretical systemology in furthering the construction of “first order” models; and the latter were meant to be applied, in turn, in the sciences of the “real” or for the resolution of practical issues. In the International Journal of General Systems 229 Downloaded by [Pouvreau David] at 07:26 06 February 2014 latter case, the application was technological: instead of serving objectives of description and explanation of phenomena, the systemic model here became a tool for elaborating and prescribing solutions to issues concerning artefacts. Regarded as complex, these issues had been generated by the technical sophistications and the organizational needs of the contemporary world. They could be (without exclusivity) either physico-technical, biologico-technical, sociological, economic, ecological or political in nature. Insofar as they were interpreted as systemic issues, they were the objects of systems technology: the solutions that the latter had to elaborate used systemological developments originating in the other “poles”. When these issues directly concerned the organization of human life, this interpretation (or even their very constitution as issues) and the type of solution that was searched for were connected to systemological axiology and praxeology, and thus, open to various ideological influences. 3.7.1. Objects and functions of systems technology Two main directions can be observed in systems technology. They are manifest in the evolution of its foci of interest and of the nature of its productions. The first domains of an application, namely computer science and technologies of automation and physical control, were typical of the fifteen years following Second World War and connected to the history of early cybernetics. They characterized a systems technology focused on what Bertalanffy and others called the “hardware” (or “hard systems”) (Bertalanffy 1968a, xx). Their importance gradually decreased on behalf of another systems technology mainly represented by operations research and management sciences, oriented toward “software” (or “soft systems”), i.e. the multitude of organizational issues arising in contemporary society. In the 1970s, notably with the impetus of Peter Checkland, the dichotomy between “hard” and “soft systems” took a polemical sense in referring to differences in the approach of human systems. Ultimately, it referred to a split between an “objectivist” approach of these systems that focused on their functional efficiency and bore an instrumental view of human, and an “interpretative” approach that claimed to take into account the role of individuals and values (Checkland 1989, 11, Hammond 2003, 253–256, Larses and El-Khoury 2005, 6, 24). The General Systems yearbooks and the journal Behavioral Science (also published by the S.G.S.R.) provide many examples of contributions to systems technology. However (especially from the point of view of our present time), the most emblematic ones are probably Gerard’s and Miller’s contributions to the creation of the Internet (Brown, Miller, and Keenan 1967; Heterick 1998), and the second report to the Club of Rome on the “limits to growth” (Mesarović and Pestel 1974). 3.7.2. Ambivalent views on systems technology The essential point to be observed here is the low proportion of Bertalanffy’s, Rapoport’s and Boulding’s reflections dedicated to systems technology. They most certainly integrated it in their common project: systems technology was meant to fulfil the praxeological purposes of general systemology. Particularly in his rough classification, Bertalanffy thus logically granted a full place to systems technology while emphasizing the necessity of its development: Modern technology and society have become so complex that traditional ways and means are not sufficient any more but approaches of a holistic or systems, and generalist or inter-disciplinary nature became necessary. This is true in many ways. Systems of many levels ask for scientific control: ecosystems the disturbance of which results in pressing problems like pollution; formal 230 D. Pouvreau organizations like a bureaucracy, educational institution or army; the grave problems appearing in socio-economic systems, in international relations, politics and deterrence […] These are essentially “systems” problems, that is, problems of interrelations of a great number of “variables”. The same applies to narrower objectives in industry, commerce and armament. (1968, xx) Downloaded by [Pouvreau David] at 07:26 06 February 2014 Interestingly, even when Bertalanffy was not concerned with frontally attacking the technocratic trends of the systemicians and their role in the construction of a society which he abhorred – a type of attack that he and Boulding used to develop (Pouvreau 2013a, 842–847) – he did not resist the temptation to allude to those trends: Professions and jobs have appeared in recent years which, unknown a short while ago, go under names such as systems design, systems analysis, systems engineering and others. They are the very nucleus of a new technology and technocracy; their practitioners are the “new utopians” of our time (Boguslaw, 1965) who – in contrats to the classic breed whose ideas remained between the covers of the books – are at work creating a New World, brave or otherwise. The roots of this development are complex […] Self-controlling machines have appeared, from the humble domestic thermostat to the self-steering missiles of World War II to the immensely improved missiles of today. Technology has been led to think not in terms of single machines but in those of “systems” […] Innumerable problems are arising in production, commerce and armament. Thus a “systems approach” has become necessary. A certain objective is given; to find ways and means for its realization requires the systems specialist (or team of specialists) to consider alternative solutions and to choose those promising optimization at maximum efficiency and minimal cost in a tremendously complex network of interactions. This requires elaborate techniques and computers for solving problems far transcending the capacity of an individual mathematician. Both the “hardware” of computers, automation and cybernation, and the “software” of systems science represent a new technology […] These developments have not been limited to the industrial-military complex. Politicians frequently ask for application of the “systems approach” to pressing problems. (Bertalanffy 1968a, 3–4) In fact, Bertalanffy, Rapoport and Boulding (and their followers) had an ambivalent view of systems technology. While considering its development necessary from the historical viewpoint as well as for the implementation of the systemological project, they were afraid that the latter would be reduced to its technological expressions. Consequently, they regularly felt the need to reassert a contrario the purely scientific and philosophical (particularly axiological) vocations of general systemology. Modern system theory should be viewed not only as a set of techniques for solving problems arising in conventional frameworks of thought, such as problems of increasingly complex technology, but also as a harbinger of a new outlook, one that is better equipped to cope with the accelerating rate of historical change. (Rapoport 1970, 25) Their fears focused on the “dangers of the new cybernetic world” and on the inclination of the proponents of systems technology to be “trapped” by the “anti-humanist trends” in order to serve objectives that were antithetic to the values fostered by general systemology (Bertalanffy 1968a, 10; Rapoport 1974, 249). They were acutely aware of the both destructive and liberating potentials of systems science and systems technology, of their ability both to spread death and to serve life, to plunge the world into such a corruption that science and humanity itself are threatened, or on the contrary to further “a world society which is more secure and satisfactory” (Boulding 1958, 6–7): The contribution of the systems view to man’s betterment depends crucially on which systems are singled out for scrutiny and from what perspectives. (Rapoport 1973b, 190) International Journal of General Systems 231 Downloaded by [Pouvreau David] at 07:26 06 February 2014 4. Conclusion We are separated by four decades from Rapoport’s latter statement, but who would venture to assert its obsolescence? Have its promise and its warning ever had more relevance than in our present time? Nonetheless, very few researchers who recognize themselves as systemicians consider Bertalanffy’s works other than condescendingly or with respectful indifference. His oeuvre is most certainly scattered, repetitive, uneven in the force and scope of its productions, and often legitimately subject to criticism due to its many imprecisions. As the present paper demonstrates, it is nonetheless possible to spot in his works the material for a systematic reconstruction of the collective project of general systemology that he instigated. From this perspective, his contribution is considerable in many regards. For one, Bertalanffy’s works on general systemology have indisputably given a significant impulse to a scientific and philosophical movement that has (unevenly) continued during several decades; hundreds of researchers originating from many disciplinary fields have significantly used his reflections as part of their inspiration. More fundamentally, his impressionistic oeuvre is a considerable contribution because it remains the only one presenting all the elements enabling to reveal the architecture and meanings of general systemology, and because he is one of the systemologists who has the most furthered the implementation of this project. He was the first and remains one of the few who explored some still essential fields of philosophical systemology (the perspectivist theory of knowledge and a philosophical anthropology enabling the foundation of the systemological building). In conjunction with Rapoport and Boulding, he has moreover provided important contributions to the development of almost all other components of this pole of general systemology, particularly from the viewpoint of the philosophy of “systems science” and of the assertion of an original systemological humanism. Bertalanffy was however more than merely a philosopher and prophet. He was also, most certainly with less force than some other systemologists, a major architect of basic theoretical systemology. Finally, he also remains a figurehead of applied theoretical systemology: his general model of the “organized system” remains an enduring source of inspiration, and his mathematical theory of organic growth continues to be one of the best “concrete” expressions of the hermeneutical project that he instigated. In the final analysis, systems technology is the only systemological “pole” to which Bertalanffy abstained from contributing, thus mostly reflecting ethical and ideological motives related to his deep-rooted anti-modernist tropism. My reconstruction of general systemology has, however, also pointed out certain shortcomings and limits of his contributions. Clearly, this reconstruction has only been possible by means of a historically, scientifically and philosophically justified consideration of the often more significant elaboration and implementation of this project by other systemologists such as Rapoport, Rosen and Klir. It thus underlines the complementarity and unity of their respective works, bringing into light the blind spots of Bertalanffy’s writings as well as the full meaning of the works of his colleagues. The purpose of this paper will be fulfilled if it convinces the reader of the richness and potential coherence of the project of general systemology, of the benefits that contemporary systemicians may derive from a precise examination of its origins and developments during the three decades following World War II, and of its relevance for contemporary research. These positive aspects go beyond the undeniable shortcomings of the systemological works that have existed so far. Acknowledgements Michael Stachowitsch (Department of limnology and bio-oceanography, University of Vienna) linguistically corrected the proofs of this paper, supported by the Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science. The author gratefully thanks both of them, as well as Manfred Drack (Department of theoretical D. Pouvreau 232 biology, University of Vienna) and Wolfgang Hofkirchner (Technical University of Vienna). Special thanks also to George J. Klir (State University of New York, Binghamton) for his critical comments and suggestions on the manuscript of this paper. Notes 1. Downloaded by [Pouvreau David] at 07:26 06 February 2014 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. The term “systemology” had been used in 1973 by Ackoff (2001) and Kamarỳt (1973), but we discovered this fact afterwards. Moreover, the specific meaning and relevance of this term was not discussed in their respective writings. I here extend upon Frey’s reflections (1970, 24, 35–40 in particular). This essay can be found in Bertalanffy’s archives. Frey showed that although one can associate those methods to natural sciences and social sciences, respectively, they are always intertwined in practice and are actually merely ideal types, “opposed poles of the scientific method in general”: both methods are empirical and require experimentations which, even in natural sciences, are always interpretable in many different ways; and both are hypothetical, creating models which are competing interpretations of a single set of observables. The only difference would be that the natural sciences can in general compel to decide between these competing interpretations, because they can repeat the necessary experimentations. Bertalanffy and Hempel’s correspondence, BCSSS Archives. For everything that follows in this section, see Pouvreau (2009b, 2013a). Jöhr and Bertalanffy’s correspondence (10/1948–12/1949); letters from Hayek to Bertalanffy (05/ 14/1949, 04/15/1950), BCSSS Archives. Letter from Bertalanffy to Schönfeld (04/26/1949), BCSSS Archives. BCSSS Archives, in particular the letter from Bertalanffy to Hayek (05/02/1950). Letter from Jonas to Black (02/23/1950), BCSSS Archives. Letter from Bertalanffy to Jonas (04/01/1950), BCSSS Archives. Letter from Bertalanffy to Hempel (11/06/1950), BCSSS Archives; see also Brauckmann (1997, 11–12). See his correspondence between 1948 and 1952 with the psychologists Trigant Burrow, David Krech, Abraham Maslow and Egon Brunswik, the psychiatrist Karl A. Menninger, the sociologist Hugo O. Engelmann and the philosopher Arthur F. Bentley, BCSSS Archives. The term “meristic” was apparently coined by Anderle in 1961, in a paper that Bertalanffy read (Anderle 1961, 149–150). Bertalanffy (1954). Letter from Bertalanffy to Ankel (11/25/1957), BCSSS Archives. Hammond (2003, 6–9, 217). Letters from Bertalanffy to Ankel (11/25/1957), from Bertalanffy to Hayek (03/19/1958), from Hayek to Bertalanffy (03/26/1958) and from Bertalanffy to the Ford Foundation (06/20/1958), BCSSS Archives. Bertalanffy, preamble to (1955a). See also Boulding (1972, 80), (1973, 951) and (1977, 2). Meier (1957). See also General Systems Bulletin, vol. III, no. I, May 1971, 46. See General Systems Bulletin, vol. VII, no. 2, Winter 1977, 25–27 (anonymous) about those new statutes. “History and purpose of the S.G.S.R”, General Systems Bulletin, vol. III, no. 1, May 1971, 46 (anonymous). Five papers from Soviets were translated in General Systems V (1960). Klir published one paper in General Systems X (1965), before his emigration to America. Were also published Schredrovitsky (1966), and then, in 1972, four papers written by Soviets. Rapoport (1972c, ix): “Where to draw the line between enlightening and misleading or sterile analogies is a question that has kept the editors of General Systems in a chronic quandary. The degree of rigour of a proposed analogy is not the issue. In mathematical isomorphisms between two or more theories, we have examples of completely rigorous analogies. By their nature, however, those can be found only in mathematicized theories, typically end-products of theoretical conceptualization rather than the cutting edge. If general systems thinking are to be spiked with challenging – not to say provoking – ideas, some attention must be paid to ventures in analogical thinking that do not meet criteria of rigour. On the whole, the editors have probably tended to err on the side of leniency in publishing papers devoted to uninhibited speculative analogizing”. See also Hempel (1951, 315–316). International Journal of General Systems 21. 22. 23. Downloaded by [Pouvreau David] at 07:26 06 February 2014 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 233 See Miller (1965) for the first trend. See Boulding (1956b), Laszlo E. (1972a, 1972b) and Bunge (1968, 1979) for the second trend. Cavallo (1979, 30): “There exist a schism between those who commit to a reasonable understanding and appreciation of the necessary role that abstraction and mathematics play and those who are more influenced by the often pathetic (and at time potentially dangerous) abuses of this role”. General systems bulletin, vol. III, no. 2, December 1971 (managing director): “Perhaps a word is in order with respect to the frequency of the employment of the terms ‘cybernetics’ instead of ‘general systems’. It turns out that in the UK and on the Continent many people consider these two terms more or less interchangeable. My impression is that most of us in this country do not”. See also Hammond (2003, 252–254). Bertalanffy (1948a, 272), (1949b, 114), (1949e, 185), (1950b, 139); see also (1950a, 28). This issue had already been thoroughly discussed in (Klir 1985b). Its tasks were described as follows: (1) defining the systemic concepts; (2) classifying systems and discovering laws applicable to systems in general or to particular classes of systems; (3) constructing models of systemic behavior; (4) elaborating a special formal apparatus enabling to carry out the previous tasks and to create the general theoretical foundations for the conceptions of specific systems. Letter from Bertalanffy to Menninger (07/01/1959), BCSSS Archives. Bertalanffy (1968a, xxii–xxiii) and (1972f, xx) for this quotation, and (1971c, 38–41). As for Boulding, see (1956a, 19–28) and (1956b, 14–18). See also Rapoport (1976, 15), who emphasized “the idea that man lives in a symbolic or a semantic environment that is as real as his physicochemical environment” and that the former should be viewed as “a system that maintains its identity, resists change, and yet evolves”. Letter from Bertalanffy to Hempel (06/11/1950), BCSSS Archives and Bertalanffy (1953, 237). Boulding (1956a, 19–24, 1956b, 14–17, 1958, 2). Rapoport (1968, xxii). Gerard (1964, 122–123, 1969). Miller (1965, 1978). Gerard (1957, 432–433), (1964, 122–123), (1969, 227). See also Rapoport (1973c, 458): “Processes which constitute genesis determine structure; structure delineates the limits and potentialities of behavior. Behavior, in turn, i.e. the interactions of a system with its environment, may bring about changes in structure, particularly in the structure of a larger (super) system in which the system in question is imbedded”. Rapoport (1968, xx): “Once it is recognized that structure, function and evolution (or being, acting, and becoming) are fundamental aspects of all organized systems, the concept of organism can be broadened still further to include, for example, whole complexes of living organisms plus the inanimate artifacts functionally related to their structure, behavior, and development”. Rapoport (1966a, 9): “General system theory is primarily concerned with the structures of systems as defined by the relations which the parts of a system have to each other, with the way these relations determine the dynamic behavior of the system (its passage from state to state), and with the history of the system, i.e., its own development as a result of the interactions between it and its environment”. Especially Bertalanffy (1955a) and (1962a); Rapoport (1966), (1968), (1970), (1972b) and (1973c); Boulding (1956b), (1964) and (1973); Ashby (1958); Ackoff (1960, 1963); Klir (1972). Blauberg, Sadovsky, and Yudin (1973, 254–256) That is: (1) “The problem of the derivation of the characteristics of the whole from the characteristics of the elements”, and the reciprocal problem; (2) “The problem of the hierarchy, of the structure of systems and the search for the specific characteristics of the interconnections between different levels of the system objects, following from the structure hierarchy”; (3) “The problem of control as a specific way of managing the interconnections between different levels of the system”; (4) “The problem of individualization of system objects (which implies the necessity of admitting a certain number of different characteristics and degrees of freedom for such objects)”; (5) “The inadequacy of using solely deterministic or causal explanations of the structure and activity of a system, with the necessity of using a much wider range of notions and means”; (6) “The integrity of the description of the system and the description of the conditions of its existence”; (7) “The consideration of the fact that frequently an identical ‘material’ or substance may be present in a system in different shapes, with different characteristics, dimensions, and functions”. See Ropohl (1978, 14–31) for an elaboration of a synthetic concept of system unifying these three modes of description. This set-theoretic theory (Ashby 1956, 1962) did not exclusively rely on the formalism of differential systems. The “machine with input” was defined as a given set S of internal states, of a 234 36. 37. 38. 39. Downloaded by [Pouvreau David] at 07:26 06 February 2014 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. D. Pouvreau set I of inputs and of a mapping F from the Cartesian product I × S on S; its “organization” was defined in specifying S and I. Ashby could thus formalize the concept of adaptation and challenge the concept of “self- organization”, regarded as contradictory since it admits a coupling of the internal states of a “machine” to another “machine”. See also Bertalanffy (1964b, 22, 1968a, 12). As well as Kant (1787, 812). Letter from Bertalanffy to Locker (04/11/1969), BCSSS Archives. Italics are mine. Letter from Klir to Bertalanffy (01/24/1972), BCSSS Archives. Draft of a letter from Bertalanffy to Klir, written after 27 January 1972. This handwritten draft is very hard to decipher, some parts (here in brackets) remaining uncertain and hence interpreted by the present author. Klir confirms that he received this letter in a typed version, but unfortunately also that this letter has been lost (private communication, 12/16/2013). Cavallo (1979, 78–79): “(1) The universe is ontologically continuous and coherent, i.e. a unified whole of interrelated parts; (2) Accurate knowledge of the universe will have an underlying epistemological unity which will model the nature of the unity of the universe; (3) The universe is a system of interrelated systems; (4) The universe is a hierarchy of systems (Bunge [1968, 19, 1979, 13–14] however did not agree with the term hierarchy, since domination relationships were not the point here); (5) All systems, forms of organization, have some characteristics in common and it is assumed that statements concerning these characteristics will be universally applicable generalizations; (6) These characteristics are relational universals, as opposed to substantive universals (which named existing entities and tried to constitute a taxonomy of existence); (7) Since the focus of any investigation is limited relative to the levels, complexity, and diversity of actual systems, it is necessary to have general terms which can be applied to any selected level on the hierarchy of systems. Consequently, the terms ‘system’, ‘subsystem’, and ‘super-system’ should not be associated with definitions peculiar to one level of system or another; (8) It is possible to identify relational universals which are applicable to all systems at levels of existence”. For example Bertalanffy (1967a, 46) mentioned a “scale of beings and of values in nature”, while asserting that the view of Man as “the highest product of terrestrial evolution” is justified by “objective criteria”. (1) The “naturalist” theory, essentially biologicist and utilitarian because it reduces human values to biological needs or drives, and every human behaviour to the search for stable equilibrium – with disregard for exploratory activities, creativity, culture in general and for the “immanent activity of every organism”. (2) The “humanistic” theory, centered on the notion of self-realization of the individual and which, because of this one-sided view, misses the “supra-individual” aspects of values. (3) The “ontological” theory, which on the contrary focuses on the latter aspects but fails in a conceptual realism in thinking the world of values as the manifestation of an “essence” of Man. See especially Lilienfeld (1978, 189–191) and his counter-critique by Eugene (1981, 112–117). Rapoport called “descriptive” every approach conceiving a system as pursuing an intrinsic purpose, the preservation of its identity – in other words, as an “entelechy” in the etymological sense of the term. Whereas a “normative” approach was defined as consisting in the conception of the system as existing for something else, hence as shaping its behaviour according to an extrinsic purpose. See also Rapoport (1969, 184–185): “In my opinion, the social sciences, as they harden, can become both significative and humane. They need not reject the ideals of rigor and objectivity in order to retain a fundamental value orientation and to serve all of mankind rather than specific power interests”. “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point is to change it”. For critical discussions of such trends, see Weingarten (1986), particularly 26–27, and Regelmann (1986, 76) See also Bramwell (1989). Bertalanffy (1960a, 214), (1962c), (1964a, 497), (1965b, 296), (1965c, 1096), (1967a, 11–18), (1968d, 10), (1971a, 83), (1971b, 102–103). See also Bertalanffy (1968a, 10): “Man in the Big System is to be – and to a large extent has become – a moron, button-pusher or learned idiot, that is, highly trained in some narrow specialization but otherwise a mere part of the machine. This conforms to the well-known principle, that of progressive mechanization – the individual becoming ever more a cogwheel dominated by a few privileged leaders, mediocrities and mystifiers who pursue their private interests under a smokescreen of ideologies”. Rapoport (1972a, 46). See already Rapoport (1966, 9) and Bunge (1970, 34). In applying the same principle to “conceptual systems”, Bunge (1970, 34) made it more precise and emphasized the relativity involved in this “derived” notion of isomorphism: “Two systems International Journal of General Systems 52. Downloaded by [Pouvreau David] at 07:26 06 February 2014 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 235 (concrete or conceptual) A and B are isomorphic with respect to a third system, the relational system F, just in case A and B are models of F. On this definition, in order to ascertain whether two systems are analogous in a strong sense, we must first produce their theories, if only in a sketchy way. Consequently, the isomorphism in question is relative to the theories employed in constructing the relational system F”. (1) The problem of “analysis” is the derivation of the system’s behaviour based on the knowledge of its structure and initial state. (2) The problem of “synthesis” is the derivation of the system’s structure that enables realizing a definite behaviour, based on the knowledge of this behaviour and on the various “permanent behaviors” of its elements. (3) The problem of the “black box” is the derivation of the system’s behaviour and organization based on the knowledge of its activity (relationships between inputs and outputs). Its principle was that the elements of a class of similar systems can be compared by means of homomorphisms (structure-preserving mappings). Classes of systems are then viewed as categories, the objects of which are systems, and the morphisms of which are the relations of similarity existing between them. Some functors establish “modelling relations” between those categories. The steps of the procedure would then be: “(1) the analysis of individual systems within a class of related systems; (2) the establishment of functorial relations between such classes of systems (interpreted in terms of modelling or realization), so that a particular mode of analysis within one class may be carried into other classes; (3) the establishment of notions of analogy between systems belonging to different classes, through the sharing of common models”. This would lead to “a web of inter-relationships between systems belonging to different classes” which is “manifested through the homomorphisms within classes and the functors between classes” and would be “the distinguishing characteristic of systems research itself”. Sadovsky (1971, 547–548): it would have to (1) define the concept of system and the related ones; (2) classify systems and “discover the laws ruling the systems in general and the particular classes of systems”; (3) “construct models of systems behavior (functioning, development) having various degrees of generality”; and (4) “elaborate a special formal apparatus (logical and methodological in particular) enabling to carry out the previous tasks and to create the general theoretical foundations for the conceptions of particular systems”. Boulding (1962, 2): “Just as it is important to perceive the similarities in different situations, so it is important to perceive the differences. These differences cannot be perceived, however, without a general theory to serve as a standard of comparison”. See also (1964, 37). Bertalanffy (1950b, 142), (1951b, 339), (1955a, 75–76), (1962a, 2), (1965b, 294) and (1965c, 1099). See Mesarović and Takahara (1989, 8). A “mathematical abstract systems theory” was according to them a “theory of structures dealing with the structural problems of systems and their properties” and “providing a theory for the real systems where the numbers cannot be properly assigned to observations”, thus opening perspectives for a “more appropriate mathematical theory” in such fields as biology and social sciences. See also Bertalanffy (1956c, 10), (1957c, 10) and (1956d, 3–4): “General system theory is in position to provide 'schematic explanations'; one can however not blame it for not bringing quantitative solutions for phenomena where the complexity of the processes and the lack of definition of appropriate parameters constitute insuperable obstacles”. See also Bunge (1970) for a reflection on the relationships between isomorphisms and simulation. Klir, in Cavallo (1979, 107): “Computer simulation allows the systems scientist to perform experiments in exactly the same way other scientists do in their laboratories, although the experimental entities are in this case abstract structural properties (context-independent and interpretation-free) rather than specific properties of the real world”. See also Klir (1972, 4). Rapoport (1972a, 74), as well as (1960, 154) and (1973c, 441). See Foster, Rapoport, and Trucco (1957) for an excellent illustration. Whyte et al. (1969), Wilson (1969), Mesarović and Macko (1969), Mesarović, Macko, and Takahara (1970), Bunge (1979, 4–36). Inspired by Bertalanffy, Thompson regarded as “salutary” for psychology to take as starting point the trends to desequilibrium and emphasized the relevance in meteorology of the principle of “trigger action” (Anstoßkausalität) that Bertalanffy had discussed at the end of the 1930’s after Alwin Mittasch. Thompson based himself on Bertalanffy’s views in order to spot the organismic analogies in meteorology. In (1963), he discussed the simultaneous applicability of some concepts to meteorology and social sciences, among which equifinality. His works exposed a Bertalanffian inspired general system interconnecting meteorology, biology and social sciences. D. Pouvreau 236 64. 65. 66. Downloaded by [Pouvreau David] at 07:26 06 February 2014 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. Letter from Bertalanffy to Krech (10/15/1950), BCSSS Archives See especially Bertalanffy (1964c, 12): “We must postulate an isomorphism between the constructs of psychology and neurophysiology in order to relate them […] However, one must be careful not to take this isomorphism in a simple and naïve way. It does not imply any simple similarity between psychological and brain-physiological processes […] Rather, I see the unification of physiological and psychological theory in constructs which are generalized with respect to both, and in this sense are neutral with respect to physics and psychology”. These concepts as formulated in biological context have been explained in Pouvreau and Drack (2007) and more thoroughly in Pouvreau (2013a, 468–495). Bertalanffy for example found a “parallel” to the stratification of the cortex in three main “layers” (or “evolutionary steps”) – paleo-cortex, cortex and neo-cortex – with an isomorphic stratification of personality in three “layers”: “deep personality” (instincts, impulses, emotions), conscious perception and voluntary action, and symbolic activities. See Bertalanffy (1965c, 1101–1107) for the first relatively complete exposition of these analogical correspondences. See (1967a), (1967c) and (1968b) for detailed and systematic expositions. However, see also the bitter critiques formulated by Minary (1992, 46–69). See also (Weckowicz 1987). See also Anderle (1960, 149): the expressions used are almost the same. Its first cause is that Toynbee had just completed the “comparative history” of civilizations that he had started to write in 1934: this history, the first of this kind since Spengler’s, aroused many debates in reinstating the question of the legitimacy of a theoretical approach of history. The second cause is related to Anderle’s activities. Bertalanffy knew his works very well. Anderle, who himself relied on Bertalanffy’s works, was one of the main researchers involved in the controversies about Toynbee’s œuvre. From 1956 onward, he actively advocated the rehabilitation of “historical morphology” in papers that Bertalanffy read and annotated (Anderle 1956, 1958, 1960). This effort was expressed by the edition of the “Journal of holistic studies” (Zeitschrift für Ganzheitsforschung) from 1959 onward, and by the co-founding, in 1960 with Pitrim A. Sorokin, of the “International Society for the Study of Civilizations” (Sorokin 1966, 206). A probable third cause regards the contemporary controversies about the legitimacy of methodological holism in social sciences. These controversies arose after the publication, by Maurice Mandelbaum in 1957, of a paper demonstrating that one can dismiss methodological individualism (the “orthodox” position at that time) while acknowledging the existence of social laws which are irreducible to an aggregation of individual behaviors and which rule the functional relationships of specific aspects of social life. The determination of such laws, however, would imply neither the moral and political implications of historicism or organicism, nor any metaphysical holism (Mandelbaum 1957). Bertalanffy (1971a, 79): “There seem to be certain prototypes, as it were, which appear in different and independent cultures. In other terms, there appear to be basic ‘structures’ as described by Chomsky in linguistics, but probably also present in other fields of culture […] On the other hand, there are ‘idiographic’ or idiosyncratic features of the individual cultures and periods”. See Peter (1973, 131–139) and Pouvreau (2013a, 950) for analyses of their convergences, as well as Sorokin (1966, 29–30, 124). Notes on contributor David Pouvreau is French. He is post-graduated in mathematics (agrégation) and holds a doctorate in the history and philosophy of science (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris). He is a fellow of the Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science in Vienna and continues his research into the history and philosophy of “general system theory”, which has been the subject of his doctoral studies. He has published several papers on the subject, as well as a biography of Ludwig von Bertalanffy. International Journal of General Systems 237 Downloaded by [Pouvreau David] at 07:26 06 February 2014 References: Bertalanffy’s works von Bertalanffy, L. 1926. “Fechner und das Problem der Integrationen höherer Ordnung [Fechner and the Issue of the Higher Order Integrations].” PhD thesis. Universität Wien. von Bertalanffy, L. 1927. “Über die neue Lebensauffassung [On the New Conception of Life].” Annalen der Philosophie und philosophischen Kritik 6: 250–264. von Bertalanffy, L. 1932a. “Vaihingers Lehre von der analogischen Fiktion in ihrer Bedeutung für die Naturphilosophie.” In Die Philosophie des Als-Ob und das Leben. Festschrift zu Hans Vaihingers 80. Geburtstag, edited by D. Seidel, 82–91. Berlin: Reuther & Reichard. (english version in Bertalanffy, L. von. 1975: 67–73). von Bertalanffy, L. 1932b. Theoretische Biologie – Band I: Allgemeine Theorie, Physikochemie, Aufbau und Entwicklung des Organismus [Theoretical Biology - Volume I : General Theory, Physico-Chemistry, Construction and Development of the Organism]. Berlin: Gebrüder Borntrager. von Bertalanffy, L. 1934a. “Untersuchungen über die Gesetzlichkeit des Wachstums [Studies on the Nomothetic Character of Growth].” Wilhelm Roux’ Archiv Fur Entwicklungsmechanik Der Organismen 131: 613–652. von Bertalanffy, L. 1934b. “Wandlungen des biologischen Denkens [Transformations of Biological Thinking].” Neue Jahrbücher für Wissenschaft und Jugendbildung 10: 339–366. von Bertalanffy, L. 1937. Das Gefüge des Lebens [The Structure of Life]. Leipzig: Teubner. von Bertalanffy, L. 1940. “Der Organismus als physikalisches System betrachtet.” Die Naturwissenschaften 28: 521–531. von Bertalanffy, L. 1942. Theoretische Biologie – Band II: Stoffwechsel, Wachstum [Theoretical Biology - Volume II : Metabolism, Growth]. Berlin: Gebrüder Borntraeger. von Bertalanffy, L. 1945. “Zu einer allgemeinen Systemlehre [Toward a General Systemology].” Blätter für deutsche Philosophie 18 (3/4). (unpublished, available at the BCSSS). von Bertalanffy, L. 1947. “Vom Sinn und der Einheit der Naturwissenschaften. Aus einem Vortrag von Prof. Dr. Ludwig von Bertalanffy [On the Meaning and Unity of Natural Science].” Der Student (Wien) 2 (7/8): 10–11. von Bertalanffy, L. 1948a. “Das Weltbild der Biologie [The World View of Biology].” In Weltbild und Menschenbild, III. Internationale Hochschulwochen des österreichischen College in Alpbach, edited by S. Moser, 251–274. Salzburg: Tyrolia. von Bertalanffy, L. 1948b. “Arbeitskreis Biologie [Biology Working Group].” In Weltbild und Menschenbild, III. Internationale Hochschulwochen des österreichischen College in Alpbach, edited by S. Moser, 2655–2655. Salzburg: Tyrolia. von Bertalanffy, L. 1949a. “Goethes Naturauffassung [Goethe’s Conception of Nature].” Atlantis 8: 357–363. von Bertalanffy, L. 1949b. “Zu einer allgemeinen Systemlehre [Toward a General Systemology].” Biologia Generalis 195: 114–129. von Bertalanffy, L. 1949c. Das biologische Weltbild – Die Stellung des Lebens in Natur und Wissenschaft [The Biological World View - The Position of Life in Nature and Science]. Bern: Francke AG. von Bertalanffy, L. 1950a. “The Theory of Open Systems in Physics and Biology.” Science 111: 23–29. von Bertalanffy, L. 1950b. “An Outline of General System Theory [The World View of Biology].” The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science I: 134–165. von Bertalanffy, L. 1951a. Auf den Pfaden des Lebens – Ein biologisches Skizzenbuch [On the Path of Life - A Biological Outline-book]. Frankfurt/Main: Umschau Verlag. von Bertalanffy, L. 1951b. “General System Theory: A New Approach to Unity of Science.” Human Biology 23. (1. “Problems of General Systems Theory”: 302–312; 5. “Conclusion”: 336–345; 6. “Toward a physical theory of organic teleology – Feedback and dynamics”: 346–361). von Bertalanffy, L. 1951c. “Theoretical Models in Biology and Psychology.” Journal of Personality 20: 24–38. von Bertalanffy, L. 1953. “Philosophy of Science in Scientific Education.” Scientific Monthly 77: 233–239. von Bertalanffy, L. 1954. Preliminary Report, Memo a to the C.A.S.B.S. Accessed December 17. (unpublished, available at the B.C.S.S.S.). von Bertalanffy, L. 1955a. “General Systems Theory.” Main Currents in Modern Thought 11: 75–83. von Bertalanffy, L. 1955b. “An Essay on the Relativity of Categories.” Philosophy of Science 22: 243–263. von Bertalanffy, L. 1956a. “A Biologist Looks at Human Nature.” Scientific Monthly 82: 33–41. Downloaded by [Pouvreau David] at 07:26 06 February 2014 238 D. 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