LA CAPACIDAD DE ADQUISICIÓN DE CONOCIMIENTO

The following will demonstrate what Floridi (2004) calledprematurity, or alternatively, a case of regression, depending on one’s perspective and sources. The case in point is the discipline ortopic

ofsystemics, a subject label used by François (1997; 1999; 2002) to describe a cluster of systems

theories and most of their precursors and offshoots, including first- and second-order cybernetics – therefore also radical constructivism (4) – and General System Theory. In this regard, it might be noted that Bertalanffy (1968a, p. 21) saw cybernetics as a restricted application or sub-topic of system theory, which highlights again the fuzzy aspect oftopicality.

Generally, the conceptual confusion surrounding this area starts with the question ofwhat the

topic of this family of approaches is; we would tend to generalize the statement about cybernetics, which forms an element of theumbrella category, and suggest that a likely topic are “the abstract

principles of organization in complex systems” seen not in terms ofwhat they consist of, but of how they function (Heylighen, (4)).

As this relates to practicallyanything, a distinction can be made in terms of what phenomena

such fields of study apply themselves to; one mayor branch is social systems theory, which can be seen as sub-sub-culture within the social sciences (Abercrombie, Hill, and Turner, 2006, system theory). This would make systemics a field of the social sciences. To complicate matters, this conception co-exists and overlaps another branch of systemics which is seen as a field of

information theory, here in general terms understood as the theory of information science (Wersig, 2003). The construct is associated with the names Talcot Parsons, Niklas Luhmann, and, to a

lesser extent,Jürgen Habermas17_.

Thenames of people18seem generally to be the best measure of determining the extent of this topic (and possibly many others, especially in the human sciences and philosophy). In Figure

6.5, we can see a representation of the “social network” around the cybernetics-founderNorbert Wiener, who can be seen as a prototypical proponent of first-order cybernetics. In Figure 6.6,

by contrast, we see that ofHeinz von Förster, who was widely associated with the second-order

cybernetics movement.

17_{The latter two connected in terms of a public debate (Kjaer, 2006, Budin, 1996b, p. 96); an analogous and}

related debate will be discussed in (8.2.2).

18

Strictly speaking, associations between people are a procedural aspect of disciplinarity but might be included here on the grounds that they are situated in a time-frame. As noted, the distinction of the contents of the model of anythick concept is entirely arbitrary and only serves to illustrate.

Figure 6.5: Representation of people associated with Norbert Wiener.

Figure 6.6: Representation of people associated with Heinz von Förster.

The representations have been generated by an experimental product named Constellations

developed by the company Exalabs (2011) that was briefly available during 2010 or 2011. The product itself was ill documented and there is no indication of what database had actually been used to generate the representations, nor was there any indication of what the relations signify. A similar product namedtouchgraphhad relied on representing cross-references inamazon.com

or the link structure of websites (Smarty, 2009). It is also no longer available in this form. A cross- check against the academic sources (i.e. those used in the present section) shows however that the gist of the representation is in fact correct – only marginal connections, like the connection betweenWiener andEinstein remain doubtful or unverifiable.

Using lists of the names of people (or, in knowledge engineering terms, named entities19)

19

seems a viable method of ordering fields with a high variance of discipline labels, but this will be addressed in the concluding remarks. It is noteworthy that successful experiments regarding the description of philosophical currents of thought along the lines of social relations have already been conducted, e.g. by Athenikos and Lin (2009).

In the context of regression or prematurity as creation mechanisms for philosophical termi-

nology, the precise extent of the subject field or topic only plays a role inasfar as it used as a

measure for evaluating claims to this effect.

According to this fragment, for example, the discipline or movement or topic of systemics

marks a partly regressed, partly converged context, whereby the author based his observation on a review of the “key works” of the discipline, which are likely those written by the people charted above. In his interpretation, the works

momentarily create the impression that systems theory could have been the center of a new form of scientific and theoretical methodology that was to emerge from the unexpected success of neurophysiology, the shocking effects of World War II, the appearance of computers and the intellectual climate of 1960s. It is now however a largely historical phenomenon, systems theory having lost out in the competition for university faculties, research funds and placement in publisher’s catalogues against the cognitive sciences, the foundations of which it helped establish. However, its traces

still remain visible.

Baecker, 2005, my translation and emphasis

The fragment lists historical events, technological developments and organizational factors as contingencies that help explain this estimate. Baecker’s text, which was written in German,

seems however to refer to thelocal situation. This English-language fragment presents a different

picture:

In terms of the development and applications of systems theory, while many of its concepts are traceable to the ideas of Von Bertalanffy and Ashby (and the earlier ideas of the nineteenth-century philosophes Auguste Comte and Henri Saint-Simon), in its recent manifestations in management and computer science, the practical use of systems theory can be understood to be the product of a series of converging de- velopments that have taken place both during and after the Second World War. [... A time when systems theory was heavily utilized in military “operations research”. Military and civilian applications continued afterwards, e.g. in terms of the space program, PBN ...] Thus systems theory, particularly in the USA, became considered as a viable means to address the social problems surrounding the redesign of cities, the elimination of poverty and the improvement of education. Systems theory continues to be a central tenet of more recent developments in the study of complexity in orga- nizational environments. Examples include work by Senge (1990), who describes the

important contribution of ‘systems thinking’ to the understanding and development of organizational learning and who continues to be ofmajor influence for researchers in the managerial and social sciences.

Wilson, 2003, pp. 626/627

So, while the larger historical circumstances described in both fragments appear similar, the estimate of the continued “existence” of the subject ortopic remain doubtful on a global scale,

2010, which is also the source of the term. Interest in proper names has likely been marginal in terminology, perhaps because of the obviously referential nature of proper names (Rey, 1995, pp. 26/27; 70), and it seems largely restricted to the application of terminological principles to the standardization of metadata for the so-calledgazetteers, which are registries of place names (Rogers and Wright, 2006; Wright, 2007).

given the relative success in the USA and the relative failure in Germany or German-speaking countries. We have in any case encountered the suggestion that the theoretical legacy of sys- temics – and therefore its terminology – have converged with or been absorbed by two successor

disciplines, cognitive science and computer science, respectively. Given that there are still au-

thors who refer tosystemics as discipline that is still evolving (François, 1999), one would need

to assume that they have reverted to philosophical discourses (Heylighen and Joslyn, 2001 on the second-order movement) by associating with aregressed discipline:

von Glasersfeld’s aim is to discover how we perceive and construct reality, to retrace the ways we follow to construct concepts and to elaborate abstractions, and to better understand the relation of the self with others and with the environment in general. Such a work amounts to a cybernetic-systemic theory of knowledge, which is needed

to put the whole of cybernetic-systemic thinking into perspective

François, 1999, p. 216

And then there are also those who regard the ideas associated with theprototypical exponents of

the discipline aspremature, i.e. suggest that the movement or sub-sub-culture has never reached

the status of a scientific paradigm in the first place:

PI [Philosophy of Information; PBN] was perceived to be transdisciplinary like

cybernetics or semiotics, rather than interdisciplinary like biochemistry or cognitive

science. [...] Even if PI had not been premature or allegedly transdisciplinary, the philosophical and scientific communities at large were not ready to appreciate its im- portance. There were strong programs of research, especially in various philosophies of language [...] They attracted most of the intellectual and financial resources, and kept a fairly rigid agenda, which did not foster the evolution of alternative paradigms. Mainstream philosophy cannot help being conservative, not only because values and standards are usually less firm and clear in philosophy than in science, and hence more difficult to challenge, but also because [...] this is the context where a culturally dominant position is often achieved at the expense of innovative or unconventional approaches. As a result, researchers like Church, Shannon, Engelbart, Simon, Tur-

ing,Von Neumann, orWiener were essentially left on the periphery of the traditional

canon.

Floridi, 2004, my emphasis

Here, some of the lineage associated with first-order cybernetics (compare Figure 6.5) is claimed for the philosophy of information, which, by the gist of Floridi’s argument and examples, can be categorized somewhere between systemics, philosophy, and theoretical developments within

both cognitive science and computer science.

If one takes this categorization as a criterion for subject delimitation, then the works ofFran- cis Heylighen and the Principia Cybernetica Project (2001) which have frequently been used in

this thesis also fall under the heading of philosophy of information and are considered unasso- ciated with the above approach by contingency; however, a difference here is that “philosophy

of complexity”, when used as a synonym for systemics, does not consider itself in opposition to

esp. postmodern conceptions of the philosophy of language but builds on their observations for modeling complexity (Heylighen, Cilliers, and Gershenson, 2007).

By contrast, Floridi’s fragment suggests that a regression to philosophy – if one assumes it to

terminology of premature fields20 does not readily dissolve into general philosophical discourse,

as has apparently been the case with the terminologies of obsolescent scientific theories, nor does it seem to blend readily into its (sub-)disciplinary landscape.

6.3 Subject delimitation, declarative disciplinarity and