HYPOTHETICALITY

Charles François (2004). HYPOTHETICALITY, International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics, 2(1): 1598.

Collection	International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics
Year	2004
Vol. (num.)	2(1)
ID	◀ 1598 ▶
Object type	General information, Epistemology, ontology or semantics

The nature of “situations in which we have to make life-or-death decisions but are unable to perform the experiments or tests needed to gain much-needed information about the situation before having to make the decision ”. (J. CASTI, 1997, p.8 - after Wolf HAEFELE, former director of the German Nuclear Research Center in Juelich).

The situations alluded to are complex ones, in which an important number of elemental processes in interaction should be considered simultaneously , In such cases the dynamics of the situation generally becomes chaotic and predictability is possible only within the limits of a statistically reduced determinism .

In J. WARFIELD words, our problen in such cases is to “transform complexity into understanding ” (1999, work in progress, pers. comm.)

See also