GENERAL THEORY OF SYSTEMS: Performance criteria
| Collection | International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics |
|---|---|
| Year | 2004 |
| Vol. (num.) | 2(1) |
| ID | ◀ 1411 ▶ |
| Object type | General information |
L. TRONCALE, who also prefers to speak of General Theory of Systems instead of General Systems Theory, proposes the following criteria for its satisfactory use: “It would:
- consist of precisely defined concepts
- be context-independent, invariant across all scales of magnitude, demonstrable in all disciplines
- require the use of the full set of isomorphies, that is the minimal, sufficient, and necessary set (probably large)
- require many specific linkages between isomorphies
- unobservable in one discipline
- unverifiable, unfalsifiable, even unrefinable, in one or a few disciplines
- apply to both descriptional and operational views
- describe both continuous and discrete systems
- be limited in its range of application only by the current state of applied knowledge
- possess built-in rules for desabstraction, scale translation protocols, or correspondence principles
- possess a built-in operational taxonomy
- have isomorphies and linkages that were self-organizing“ (1985, p.79).
Most of these conditions do already exist, but merely in an implicit way. It should be the responsability of every systemist to understand and apply them in order to avoid the very nullification of systemic thinking and of its practical use as a global scientific methodology.