Report on "What is system science?"

[James Martin]

A group of systems scientists and systems engineers met for about a week in April 2018 in Linz, Austria for the biannual IFSR Conversation. This event is sponsored by the International Federation for Systems Research (IFSR). This group was investigating the question “What is Systems Science?”.    

The final report can be found here:

https://sites.google.com/site/syssciwg/collaboration/ifsr

The purpose of this conversation was to explore if we could make progress towards the unification of systems science as a coherent system. We felt that the time was right, since multiple perspectives, patterns in works of thought and practice from diverse sources and backgrounds indicated the potential of an emerging coherence. The motivation for the conversation was to determine if these various threads could somehow be woven together into a more integrated understanding, and to make progress towards the unification of systems science as a coherent systematic enterprise. We believe that systems science is analogous to where chemistry was before the Periodic Table of the elements: many phenomena have been described, many of them understood as individual concepts and theories, but this knowledge is not yet integrated around a single foundational structure.

The systems community has developed and applied some very effective systemic methodologies (e.g. Soft Systems Methodology, System Dynamics, Viable System Model, Architectural Frameworks and others) in several fields like systems engineering (INCOSE), Operational Research, Organisational Design and research. But without a unifying framework that everyone can refer to for understanding and communication, our ability to teach, develop coherently and practice system science has been limited. With a more unified system science, we may create sufficient coherence to address the global systemic issues confronting humankind and our future on this planet.

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Sent on behalf of Gary Smith who led this Conversation team. 

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James

[kall...@gmail.com]

Interesting. I *just* finished a discussion with a retired systems engineer (computer storage hardware theory and application) on the mind-boggling breadth and depth of the scientific concepts “out there” – only a small slice which may be relevant to “systems science”.

 

I can summarize our conclusion as: “Whatever you think Systems Science is, it’s way more than that.” I just (today) had a discussion with James Martin re: the bounded human focus in the contexts of depth of field and field of view of a “system of interest”. The propensity is to consider these as a reduction to “scope and scale”. Incomplete. It brought to my mind I. Prigogine’s “What We Do Not Know” (attached).

 

Ken Lloyd

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[Jon Awbrey]

James, All —

Scanning that report brought to mind
a comment I made on a related thread:

| Another thing to keep in mind here is the difference between
| General Systems Theory, following on Bertalanffy et al., and
| what is variously known as Dynamical Systems Theory (DST) or
| Mathematical Systems Theory (MST). GST spends a lot of time
| studying part-whole hierarchies while DST/MST deals with the
| state space of a system and the possible trajectories of the
| system through it.

For my part I have come to take the DST/MST approach as more
fundamental since it starts out with fewer assumptions about
the anatomy or architecture of the as-yet hypothetical agent,
making it one of the first and continuing tasks of the agent
to discover its own boundaries, potentials, and structures,


Of course that's not for everybody but I just thought
I'd throw that out there as a kind of minority report.

Regards,

Jon

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[Smith, Gary [UK]]

Here is a list of some of the references in case you wanted to find them.

BR Gary

Allen & Starr (2017), Hierarchy – Perspectives for Ecological Complexity, Chicago, 2017

Aslaksen (2013), The System Concept and Its Application to Engineering, Springer 2013

Bertalanffy L v, (1968), General Systems Theory, Braziller Press, 1968

Heylighen (1995), (Meta)Systems as Constraints on Variation—A classification and natural history of metasystem transitions. World Futures: the Journal of General Evolution 45, p. 59-85, 1995

INCOSE (2018) Fellows’ Initiative on Sys/DE Definitions, System Definitions Version 1.0, 1 June 2018

Francis, Matthew R (2018) Studying impossible systems, Physics World, August 2018

Norman (1990) The Design of Everyday Things, Doubleday 1990

Rosen R, Anticipatory Systems: Philosophical, Mathematical, and Methodological Foundations, 2nd Ed., Springer, 2012

Rousseau Wilby Billingham & Blanchfellner (2018), General Systemology: Transdisciplinarity for Discovery, Insight and Innovation, Springer, 2018

Sillitto (2016), Do Systems exist in the real world?, Chapter in Systems Thinking: Foundation, Uses and Challenges, Ed. Frank, Shaked & Koral-Kordova, Nova Publishing, 2016

Smith & Morowitz (2016), The origin and Nature of Life on Earth – the emergence of the fourth biosphere, Cambridge University press, 2016

Volk T (2017) Quarks to Culture – how we came to be; Columbia University Press, 2017

 

 

From: syss...@googlegroups.com [mailto:syss...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of James Martin
Sent: 11 December 2018 22:59
To: SSWG
Subject: [SysSciWG] Report on "What is system science?"

 

A group of systems scientists and systems engineers met for about a week in April 2018 in Linz, Austria for the biannual IFSR Conversation. This event is sponsored by the International Federation for Systems Research (IFSR). This group was investigating the question “What is Systems Science?”.    

--

The SysSciWG wiki is at https://sites.google.com/site/syssciwg/.
 
Contributions to the discussion are licensed by authors under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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