GENERAL SYSTEMS THEORY: A BRIDGE BETWEEN TWO CULTURES. THIRD ANNUAL LUDWIG von BERTALANFFY MEMORIAL LECTURE by Anatol Rapoport University of Toronto
This is the third Ludwig von Bertalanffy Memorial Lecture, delivered at the 1976 Annual Meeting of the Society for General Systems Research in Boston. PCJ
issue of Universitas, an interdisciplinary journal published in Germany devoted to discussion of the sciences, humanities and philosophy, there was an article by Walter Schulz entitled, “What Philosophy Is There Still Today?“ To find an answer to this question we could, of course, peruse philosophical journals with the view of forming an idea of the problems with which professional philosophers are concerned. But such an approach would be based on the tacit assumption that the set of philosophers coincides more or less with the set of contributors to philosophical journals. Arguments about definitions are futile, and if any one wishes to identify the two sets, that is his business. Whether the identification of contemporary philosophy with the content of philosophical journals will shed light on the question raised in Universitas is, to say the least, uncertain. The point is that a t the time when philosophy flourished in Europe, say in the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. and in the 17th, 18th and early 19th centuries, there were few, if any, philosophical journals. Philosophy a t that time was defined not by whose ideas were published where, but by the content of the ideas. So another legitimate approach to the question posed would be to try to abstract the essential features of the ideas that have contributed to philosophy in its heyday and to see whether similar ideas are of sufficient vitality in
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our day to warrant being called philosophy.
KEY WORDS: Bertalanffy memoral lecture, philosophy of science, cognition, general systems theory, scientific analogy.
During the two Golden Ages of philosophy in Europe three sorts of questions occupied a central position. One class of questions was about the nature of the world in which our lives are immersed. On these questions Greek thought was illurninated by the speculations of Thales and Aristarchus, the Pythagoreans, and of Aristotle. Each of these philosophers had something to say about the principles on which the universe was organized. These speculations ranged from vague generalities, such as Heraclitus’ insistence that “War is the father of all things,’’ or of the Pythagoreans, that the universe was governed by numerical relations, to highly specific prototheories, foreshadowing modern ideas of chemistry and physics. The atomic theory of Democritus may be taken as an example; Aristotle’s (erroneous) law of falling bodies as another. The second constellation of ideas central in philosophy revolved around the theory of cognition: the question of how we know what we know and how reliable is our knowledge. Plato wrote a great deal on this question, maintaining, in effect, that deduction from truths perceived by intuition is the only source of certainty, explicitly denigrating the reliability of the senses. The Eleatics and the Sceptics also had a great deal to say about this problem. The third class of ideas had to do with ethics. Plato and Aristotle, the Stoics and the Epicureans were all passionately con-
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A BRIDGEBETWEEN Two CULTURES cerned with the problem of distinguishing good from evil, whether or not they believed this problem to be solvable. The great system philosophers of postRennaissance Europe took up the same classes of problems. Descartes and Hegel both constructed theories of how the universe is run. Locke and Hume concerned themselves about the nature of human experience and its relation to knowledge. Spinoza and Kant formulated systems of ethics. Even while these great minds labored, however, another mode of thinking uppeared on the intellectual horizon of Europe, namely positivist science. For some time, what we now call natural science was still called natural philosophy. But the scientific method with its insistence that empirical evidence is always the last court of appeal in questions pertaining to truth practically drove out the philosophical mode. In the light of Newton’s Principia, Descartes’ physics appear impotent. Hegel’s “demonstration” that there can be no more than five planets besides the Earth appears ludicrous. Schelling’s N a turphilosophie could not be taken seriously by any one conversant with the most elementary findings of astronomy and physics. Compared with the hypotheticodeductive method of physical science with its formidable apparatus of mathematical deduction, the philosophical approach lost its appeal to thinkers genuinely concerned with the question of how the universe was run. The philosophical method in psychology, however, lingered on. In fact, the philosophical writings of Locke and Hume dealt energetically with problems of cognition. Eventually, however, positivist science invaded also psychology with its insistence on empirical evidence, its concentration on what is overtly observable, its glorification of the controlled experiment, and its denigration of introspection. Even the question of certainty, deeply rooted in the philosophical, introspective mode of thought, dissolved into technicalities under the onslaught of mathematical analysis. Two examples will suffice. Kant thought that he established the synthetic a priori, that is,
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certainty about some fundamental aspects of the physical world without recourse to empirical evidence. He thought that our minds are so constructed that we cannot imagine any “laws of geometry” except those derivable from Euclidean postulates. Shortly thereafter the non-Euclidean geometries of Bolyai and Lobachevsky, and later of Riemann, made their appearance, and Kant’s remarkable intellectual achievement crumbled. The other example is known to philosophers as the scandal of induction. It was initiated by Hume who showed that the certainty of an inductive inference could not be logically demonstrated. This is so, as far as it goes, but Hume’s scepticism completely ignored the question, “How certain is certain?” If we give up the futile quest for absolute certainty, we can turn our attention to degrees of certainty of inductive inferences. The theory of probability gives us interesting and a t times eminently useful answers on this score. In this way, experimental psychology and inferential statistics invaded the second principal area of traditional philosophy, the theory of cognition. What about ethics, then? We know that traditional philosophy was dominated by theological doctrines, and that traditional ethical theories derived from religious beliefs. Positivist science broke with theistic religion and turned to questions apparently divorced from concerns with good and evil. Finally, cultural anthropology revealed the multiplicity of ethical systems and, as a reaction to ethnocentrism, which seriously interfered with the methods of modern anthropology, advanced the idea of ethical relativism wherein all notions of good and evil made sense only within a particular cultural framework. It is not surprising, therefore, that questions such as “What philosophy still exists today?” are raised in good faith, a half century after Ludwig Wittgenstein, an exponent of the Vienna logical-positivist school declared all questions of philosophy meaningless. The dismissal of traditional philosophic questions by the logical positivists as meaningless was not unfounded. It was the result of semantic analysis which at-
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tempts to relate the terms embodied in a question to referents. If no referents can be found, the terms are semantically devoid of meaning and so is the question. Or else, if any possible answer to the question is found to be contradictory, the question is also meaningless. Take the age-old question about whether there is free will or whether all our actions and even thought, desires, etc., are determined. One can define words like free will and determinism by other words, and these by still other words, ad infinitum. But if one cannot state a verifiable criterion that would answer the question either way, the question has no meaning according to the definition of meaning as reference to a referent. Or take the old saw from theology about whether God, assumed to be omnipotent, can create a rock that he cannot lift. Whichever way one answers the question, the definition of omnipotence is violated. This renders the word omnipotence meaningless and with it all theological speculations involving the word. What goes for questions goes also for assertions. Heraclitus maintained that “war is the father of all things.’’ But any attempt to relate the word father used in this context to any referents related to experience fails. The assertion, wise as it may seem to some in whom it strikes a note of recognition and assent, is revealed as meaningless-not false, for a false assertion can be refuted by evidence - but meaningless. The same goes for Hegel’s insistence that reason rules the world and charts the course of history, and for Bergson’s similar remarks about elan vital, and all the teachings in the philosophies of the East about vibrations and transmigrations of souls. Once one has made the demand that language be somehow related to operationally describable and shareable experiences, the demand made by the logicalpositivist oriented semanticists, one has induced in oneself a mild, and sometimes not so mild, contempt for the most venerable questions and doctrines of philosophy. This demand is made only in a certain intellectual climate, namely where science flourishes and enjoys prestige. Science is precisely the mode of thought that strives
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at all times to meet the demand, that is, to discipline its discourse so that the terms therein are always related, albeit sometimes by long chains of elucidations and deduction, to operationally describable and shareable experience. A model exists for that sort of discourse; moreover, a model is to be emulated wherever science enjoys authority and prestige. So it came to pass that some questions that have perplexed philosophers for centuries were answered by science, to be sure, after being reformulated so as to become answerable. Foremost among these were questions concerning the structure and the organization of the external material world, including the interdependence of events. Other questions that could not be so reformulated lost their salience, just for this reason. Accordingly, where science reached the zenith of intellectual prestige, philosophy lost intellectual status proportionately. Nevertheless, I do not believe that ascent of science has permanently relegated philosophy to a secondary position and I say this without meaning in any way to detract from science as a superb and also the most salutary achievement of the human mind. There can be a meaningful division of intellectual labor between science and philosophy without relegating to philosophy questions that science has revealed to be either trivial or meaningless or has disposed of long since. Nor need these questions be abstruse, as they often are made by professional philosophers. They can be very simple questions related to experience, shared experience for that matter, but not operationally describable experience, therefore are questions excluded from the domain of scientific inquiry. Examples of shared but not operationally describable experience are easy to find. Think of some smell, say ammonia. I know what ammonia smells like; you know what it smells like. In imagining this smell, we are sharing an experience. But it is impossible to describe it. See how this frustration leads to a purely philosophical question: Is your experience when you smell, or imagine you smell, ammonia
A BRIDGEBETWEEN Two CULTURES the same as mine? Intersubjective verification will not answer the question. It is easy enough to let each of us smell several substances and note that what you call ammonia I call ammonia. This was not the question posed. The question posed was whether what you in your inner world experience as the smell of ammonia is identical to what I in my inner world experience. Perhaps this question has no practical significance. As long as both of us will identify the same substance by the same name, identical designation of shared though not describable experience, we can go about doing business involving ammonia. So let us take another similar question: Do plants feel pain? There is no conceivable way of answering this question. Yet most of us would, I am quite sure, answer it in the negative. But let us go on. Do oysters feel pain? Insects? Reptiles? By the time we get to cats and dogs, most of the answers will be in the afirmative, justified I suppose, by patterns of behavior somehow analogous to our own in similar circumstances. But the question was not about behavior patterns. The question was about pain, which you and I have experienced and which we are convinced are shared experiences even though the worlds of inner consciousness of different people are hermetically separated from each other. The question “How does it feel to be you?’ is forever unanswerable by any method of science, not for lack of instrumentation, but in principle, because if you were told that my inner consciousness was somehow projected on yours, you could never verify the truth of this statement. Yet to deny the importance of questions like “What does it feel like to be him?” is to deny the humanity of the other and with it, of course, one’s own humanity. Note that I have just made a statement whose truth or falsehood is not verifiable by any means known to science. Yet many will accept this statement as meaningful, and, perhaps, even will agree with it. The questions I have raised, such as, “Do dogs feel pain?’ or “What does it feel like to be you?’ have obvious ethical implications. But they also have some semantic implications. To see this, take a somewhat
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related question, fashionable nowadays: Do computers think? I have seen some lively controversies about this. Proponents of the affirmative draw analogies between human reasoning and the processes within the computer. Proponents of the negative insist that computers do not think because they have no consciousness. Since there is no way of tapping the consciousness of a computer, if it did exist (or, for that matter of any other being except oneself), the answer in the negative is semantically meaningless, unless one chooses to give it meaning by spelling out the ethical imperatives associated with our classification of a n entity as thinking or not thinking. Generally speaking, these imperatives operate relative to a being to whom we attribute thinking but not to one to whom we do not attribute thinking. Thus, if a being from another planet appeared among us and gave evidence of being friendly and rational, most of us would insist that his life should be protected. On the other hand, if it were necessary to dismantle or smash a machine because a person or animal had become enmeshed in it, few of us would hesitate. Thus, attributing consciousness to other beings, or degrees of consciousness as in the case of beings on the evolutionary scale or a t least having different degrees of similarity to ourselves, is not a mere intellectual exercise but a basis for generally accepted rules of behavior. I have used these somewhat homely examples to illustrate my thesis. Philosophy can play a vitally important role in our intellectual life by addressing itself to questions that arise from experiences that are shared, yet are not definable in operational terms as demanded by science. Thus, the whole realm of ethics and esthetics, except purely empirical investigations of what is valued as good or beautiful, remains firmly within the sphere of philosophy. My concern, however, is with questions of cognition and questions related to the organization of portions of the world. We are gathered to honor the memory of Ludwig Bertalanffy and so to talk about general systems theory with which his name will be forever linked.
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GENERAL SYSTEMS THEORY
Definitions of general systems theory differ, but they have a common denominator. Those concerned with general systems theory agree that certain portions of the world can be singled out as systems and deserve special attention. Moreover, once such portions of the world have been singled out, something nontrivial can be said that applies to all of them. The content of these observations would be a general theory of systems. This is about as far as agreement goes. Once one tries to be more specific, various approaches begin to diverge. The divergence begins when attempts are made to define a system. I will illustrate by two definitions, one mathematical and analytic, the other intuitive and holistic. The mathematical definition, favored by physical scientists and engineers, begins with singling out a set entities or elements. These are primitive terms and cannot be further defined, but they can be exemplified. For instance, the elements may be the molecules of a gas enclosed in a volume, or the planets of the solar system, or the individuals of a species, or the species of a circumscribed region like a lake. Having specified the elements, one defines the state of the system. The state is defined by a set of values taken by operationally defined variables related to the elements. For instance, the state of a gas may be the distribution of temperatures o r pressures within it. These, in turn, are determined by certain statistical results of interactions among the molecules. The state of the solar system is usually taken to be the totality of positions and velocities of the planets. The state of a lake, conceived as a biological system, could be defined by the distribution or densities of species in it. Finally to qualify as a system according to this definition, the portion of the world so conceived must exhibit some predictability, a t least in the statistical sense, of its succession of states. The well nigh perfect predictions of the motions of heavenly bodies attests to the triumph of system analysis in that special case. But because the solar system is a very special instance of a system, celestial mechanics does not
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qualify as an achievement of general system theory. This immediately raises the question of whether any general system theory can be constructed on the basis of the rigorous mathematical definition given. Are not; all systems, defined in terms of entities and their specific laws of interaction, special systems? The answer is yes and no. Certainly the solar system is a very special system, but every planetary system will yield to the same sort of analysis. Therefore, there can be a general theory of planetary systems. This observation is not by itself particularly illuminating. But general system theory rooted in the mathematical definition goes further. Since a system is defined in abstract terms- entities of arbitrary nature and interactions among them specified mathematically, that is, aside from specific content - the classification of systems can be made on the basis of types of mathematical structure rather than on the basis of content. Thus we encounter the concept of mathematical analogy, a powerful unifying principle in mathematicized science. The classical example of the complete analogy between a mechanical harmonic oscillator and the electrical system with a source of alternating current, a resistance, and a capacitance is well known. To the extent that a system of chemical reactions can be described by a system of differential equations of the first order and second degree, such a system is mathematically analogous to an ecological system in which encounters between members of the same or different species correspond to encounters between molecules of the same or different substances. To the extent that conservation of mass must operate in a chemical system but conservation of p p u lations need not operate in an ecological system, the two differ. What general system theory brings out is the specific dimensions along which the two kinds of systems can be considered to be similar and the specific dimensions along which the analogy breaks down. Mathematical analogy is a remarkably powerful tool of scientific cognition. It is enlightening to examine the metaphors of
A BRIDGEBETWEEN Two CULTURES scientific language induced entirely by mathematical analogy. In accoustical and communication engineering one speaks of white noise. Offhand, the designation seems absurb, but not when one realizes that both light and sound can be analyzed in terms of component frequencies and that the term white refers to a uniform distribution of frequency amplitudes in both white light and white noise. In electrodynamics one speaks of magnetic flux although nothing actually flows. The reference is to the mathematical description of flow that happens to be the same in hydrodynamics and electrodynamics. In thermodynamics entropy is defined in terms of the relation between energy and temperature. In communication theory entropy refers to the uncertainty associated with messages. A more far fetched connection is difficult to imagine, but it has been conclusively demonstrated by the mathematical isomorphism between the two. Are these finds and metaphorical extensions of language contributions to philosophy? I think so, specifically to the philosophy of cognition. A traditional form of a philosophical question has been “What is X?” Or, “Is X a case of Y?” Interminable and futile disputes revolved about such questions. In practically all cases the disputes, if they were indeed about the questions posed and not camouflaged struggles for power or allegiance, arose from a failure to come to a preliminary agreement concerning the basis of classification. Mathematical general system theory provides a basis which, once accepted, removes all ambiguities. This basis derives not from intuitively perceived syndromes but from specifiable structural properties. We find, however, that what is the source of power in the mathematical approach to general system theory is also the source of its overriding weakness. The singling out of the relevant entities and the specification of the relations among them can be done only in very special cases. An attempt to do so in the most common manifestation of a system inevitably fails. I am referring to the class of systems called living organisms. Clearly an attempt to define such a sys-
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tem in terms of entities and to specify the laws of interaction among these entities must fail because the complexity of the organism defies any such attempt. If we stick to the definition of system given above, then we must exclude living organisms for not being able to define them in those terms. Such an exclusion would certainly defeat the purpose of pursuing general system theory in the first place. The point is that historically the living organism has precedence over the physical system as an object of investigation of general system theory. Recall that the impulse instigating Bertalanffy’s formulation was the erroneous argument of the vitalists, in particular that of H. Driesch, to the effect that physical laws cannot account for the equifinality principle that appears to govern the development of embryos. Driesch, it will be recalled, cut the embryo of a sea urchin in half and demonstrated that both halves developed into normal sea urchins instead of into two halves of a sea urchin, as they presumably should have done if governed by purely mechanical laws. Of course, Driesch‘s argument was based on a nonsequitur. The environment of two halves of the sea urchin embryo is not the same as the environment of a whole embryo. In the first case, the right half has the “outside” to the left of it; in the second case, the right half has the left half to the left of it. Given different initial conditions, even mechanical laws will lead to different results. Bertalanffy, however, saw a different implication of Driesch’s challenge in the contention that equifinality can be exhibited only by living systems and hence requires a special principle to explain it. Bertalanffy pointed out that equifinality could be exhibited by open systems, whether living or not. In contrast to closed systems, isolated thermally and mechanically from their environment and therefore doomed to approach a n equilibrium with complete degradation of energy, open systems, maintaining an exchange of matter and energy with the environment, can maintain dynamic equilibria and so some degree of internal differentiation and hence organization. Moreover, it can be
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demonstrated mathematically that these states of dynamic equilibrium can be independent of initial conditions, which is precisely what equifinality means. A simple example will illustrate the fundamental difference between a closed and an open system. Consider a number of substances thermally and mechanically isolated from the environment, hence a closed system. If left alone, the chemical reactions therein will reach an equilibrium state. The concentrations of substances in that equilibrium state will depend on the concentrations in the initial state. This is guaranteed by the law of conservation of matter. Because of this dependence, the system will not exhibit equifinality: a different initial condition will lead to a different final state. Now imagine such a system that does exchange matter with the environment, that is, has sources and sinks for the different substances. It can be shown that such a system will reach a final dynamic equilibrium that is independent of the initial concentrations of the substances in it. If we intervene and disturb this dynamic equilibrium, the system will return to it as soon as the intervention is over. In other words, it will exhibit quasi-teleological behavior, simulating a living organism. When Bertalanffy first formulated a program for general system theory, he proposed an approach to the living organism conceived as an open system, i.e., one that is enabled to maintain dynamic steady states that resist the disorganizing enchroachments of the environment. The connection between this approach and the thermodynamics of open systems is apparent. E. Schroedinger in his little book What I s Life?,now a classic, has amplified the same idea. “Life feeds on negative entropy,” he wrote, referring to the way a living organism maintains its organization by ingesting substances low in entropy (high in free energy) and exuding substances high in entropy (low in free energy). In this way the decrease in entropy exhibited by living systems a t least in their early stages of development, as evidenced by increasing complexity and organization, turns out not to contradict the Second Law of Thermodynamics as the
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vitalists once maintained. The living system organizes itself and maintains its organization by disorganizing and degrading the environment. The living organism was the first object of attention in the early formulation of the general systems approach. As we have pointed out, the living organism cannot be exhibited as a system in accordance with the mathematical definition given above. What, then, makes it a system? This brings us to a different definition of system, one that relies on intuitive recognition rather than a formal structural description: a system is a portion of the world that maintains some sort of organization in the face of disturbing influences. A system maintains its identity in spite of changes going on within it. The definition is not rigorous, at least does not satisfy the standards of rigor demanded by a mathematical definition of a system. Nevertheless, it is richly suggestive. If we understand intuitively what it means “to maintain one’s identity in spite of internal changes,” we will readily admit all living organisms as systems. The rnost remarkable property of a living organism is that it is recognizable as itself, even when all the material particles in it have been replaced, as they are in all living systems. On second thought, this property of maintaining an identity appears to be commonplace rather than remarkable. A river remains itself in spite of the fact that no part of it is the same. Heraclitus’s famous remark “You cannot step into the same river twice” is both true and false. Collections of living organisms are systems no less than the organisms that comprise them. A species is a system in spite of the fact that all its members are replaced in succeeding generations. Nor do we need to confine the concept of system to material entities. The English language retains its identity even though all the speakers of English are replaced in succeeding generations. Moreover, species and languages, although they are recognizable as themselves, nevertheless evolve, that is, undergo slow changes without losing their identity, just as species, genera, and families of living organisms do.
A BRIDGEBETWEEN Two CULTURES Indeed, the parallels among various kinds of evolution are striking. Compare the evolution of a species, a language, and a technological artifact. The nature of the evolving entities is widely different. A species is a living system. A technological artifact is a material system, but not a living one. A language is not even a material system. Yet all three evolving systems exhibit a common feature, namely, vestigial parts. In living systems these are remnants of anatomical structures that have lost functional significance or, at least the original function. Vestigial parts in a language can be most clearly illustrated in written languages with alphabets and conservative spelling rules. The silent k in knife is no more than a reminder that the word is derived from the Celtic canif; the silent gh in through is there only because it is present in the German cognate durch, that is, because once upon a time it was voiced. Examples of this sort are legion. As for technological artifacts, everyone knows that the first horseless carriages were carriages without horses, retaining even the whip holders. Even more striking is the vestige of the running board which was for a while a very narrow, utterly useless strip where the running board once had been. Faced with such evidence, only a pedantic champion of sternest empiricism will resist the temptation to speculate on the general principles of evolution, principles that transcend content and apply across the board to all evolving systems. Are there such principles? I submit that the question is of philosophical, not scientific nature. It is a question meant to guide inquiry, not to be answered by concrete evidence. As an example, consider the principle of natural selection, said to guide the course of biological evolution. Whether the principle is sufficient to explain all aspects of biological evolution -I have my doubts on this score-there is no denying the fact that it explains a great deal and has been demonstrated on experimental populations. The question before us is, “Does the principle operate elsewhere in other evolving systems, and if so, how?’ Clearly, the analogy does not hold up in all respects. Systems other than biological maintain
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identity by some sort of transmission of characteristics to succeeding generations of entities that comprise them. We need to redefine generation in contexts other than biological and we need to identify the mechanism of transmission, which, in the case of a language ar a technological artifact, is certainly not genetic. Now the search for mechanisms of transmission and for analogs of the natural selection principle is not, strictly speaking, scientific activity. Certainly it is not the application of scientific method as it is depicted in textbooks. I submit, however, that it is a form of intellectual activity closely akin to the scientific, in the sense of being a search for knowledge where stern discipline and severe self-criticism can be applied just as they are or supposed to be in rigorous scientific activity. Here, then, if you will, is an example of what still remains of philosophy today, a search for meaningful, not merely poetically inspired analogies. The search for scientifically fruitful analogies is essentially the content of general system theory, both in its mathematical and in its organismic sense. We have examined, in fact, both kinds of analogies - those suggested by isomorphic or homomorphic mathematical structures and those inspired by the universal tendencies of systems to maintain their identities and to resist encroachments on their organized structure, and, above all, by the tendencies of systems t o evolve. Indeed philosophy has always been a search for analogies. A recurring philosophic question is “What is X?’ It is an invitation to put X in a class and thus impose an order on the world by seeing what goes with what, what is analogous to what. With the advent of scientific inquiry the inadequacy of that question became apparent. One should not ask “What is X?” The question suggests that things in the world are already ordered in some predestined way and that the business of the philosopher is to discover that order. Rather we should ask, “To what aspect ofX should we pay attention in order to learn more about it?” The first scientific successes began with singling out precisely those aspects of
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phenomena that led to cumulative knowledge about them. In this way, the question, “What is the nature of . , . ?” was supplanted by the question, “What is the structure o f . . . ?” The question, “Why?” was supplanted by the question, “How?” Questions related to structure and process are central in the analytic-scientific approach of classical science. Bertalanffy often insisted that the time has come to transcend the purely analytic approach of classical science and to turn attention to holistic organismic aspects of systems. This sort of admonition is heard quite frequently, often from those who reject the scientific method of inquiry. The holistic approach need not supplant the analytic. It should complement it. There is no reason why both the trees and the forest cannot be studied, each in the proper context. We cannot dispense with the analytic method of classical science with its controlled experiment and its drastically simplified mathematical models that single out one or two aspects of a phenomenon a t a time. Its importance in revealing to us the structure of the world we live in should never be lost from sight. It is also true, however, that this method is impotent to deal with some crucially important aspects, especially of our own lives. As an example, take the development of scientific psychology along well-trodden lines of positivist analysis. At the center of the method is the controlled experiment and the processing of preferably quantitative data. Yet these data yield only miniscule bits of information about the reactions of an individual to stimuli imposed upon him under proper controls. The importance of controlled experiments is not to be minimized. Nor am I impressed with arguments raised in some quarters that treating a person as a n experimental animal bars the way forever to insights into characteristically human psychology. There is good reason to suppose that in some ways the human psyche does have features in common with that of a rat or a pigeon. There is no reason why those aspects should not be studied. But there are some other aspects to the human psyche. Unless we understand them, we shall never un-
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derstand the nature of human society and so the species, a very special kind of living system, will elude our understanding. To understand Homo sapiens, that is, ourselves, we must single out the most crucial aspect of being human. That is the striking dependence on symbols. Living in the world of symbols has enabled our species, a n animal with at best a second-rate adaptation to a tropical environment. to invade the entire globe and to bend the forces of nature to its will. It is also the same dependence on symbols that makes us frightfully maladapted to the environment that we ourselves have created, which includes the megadeath technology that threatens us with collective suicide. And even the so-called peaceful, technological environment now threatens us with extinction or at least with degradation in the wake of an ecological catastrophe. This is not all. The world of symbols is itself a part of our environment. We live in an ocean of words, concepts, slogans, ideas, beliefs, loyalties, and enmities as literally as we live in a n atmosphere. And we breathe that semantic environment as literally as we breathe air. The symbols impinge on our nervous systems and make us what we are, for the most part obedient to ruling elites, the most powerful of which are in a very real sense crazy. The idea that humans live in a symbolic or a semantic environment that is as real as the physicochemical environment was not generated by carefully controlled observations or by processing quantitative data. It was frankly generated by a perceived analogy between the physicochemical environment and the ocean of words in which we are immersed from the second year of our lives. Pursuing the analogy further, it is natural to arrive at the idea that the semantic environment becomes polluted, no less than the physicocheniical environment. It becomes polluted by images, notions, maxims and slogans that may have had survival value a t one time but have become poisonous. They nevertheless persist because, impinging on our psyches, they continue to be nourished by our behavior. The vicious cycle is closed. One might think that the study of the
A BRIDGEBETWEEN Two CULTURES human semantic environment as a system that maintains its identity, resists change, and yet evolves, would have high priority on any program purporting to give the species a chance through a better understanding of itself. However, that is not where the most intensive and the most expensive investigations are directed. They are directed by inertia into the same old channels well-trodden by reliable science that produces practical results, where practical means translatable into technology without regard for the changed role of megatechnology in the world governed by a polluted semantic environment. What I have said so far may serve as a partial answer to the question posed at the outset: What philosophy is there still today? In particular, I have suggested that general system theory has made a significant contribution to a revitalization of philosophy in a world intellectually dominated by science. Let me reiterate the position. Traditional natural philosophy has been supplanted by natural science whose methods proved to be immensely more powerful than those of speculative philosophy. This does not mean, however, that the method of philosophy has been made obsolete. It means simply that philosophy must raise new questions, still unanswered by science for lack of appropriate methods of investigation and, in particular, must suggest a direction for developing such appropriate methods. This is where general system theory has made its intellectual contribution. It has revived the role of speculative analogy, more sophisticated, one would hope, than the naive analogies pursued by prescientific philosophers, deriving intellectual nourishment from advanced ideas of science. It has revived organismic thinking as a complement to analytic thinking, has suggested concepts appropriate to a holistic approach to both a conception of reality and to a theory of cognition. There remains the third important area of philosophy, ethics. I submit that the systemic view of the world has the most profound ethical implications. For the systemic view of the world emphasizes the interdependence of all life on this planet.
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The very real concerns of the environmentalists and the conservationists are all founded on the systemic view of closest interdependence. In the most concrete and practical sense, the rejection of all sorts of technical fixes is based on an awareness of their long term implications. Of course, chemical fertilizers raise short-term agricultural yields, but they amount to a conception of agriculture as a mining operation instead of a cultivating one. Mining exhausts the resources mined. Of course, insecticides get rid of so-called pests, but they also get rid of beneficial insects and, through disturbing the food chain of birds, with possible disastrous ecological consequences. System thinking pursued to the full has the most far-reaching ethical consequences in politics. Politics viewed as a technique inevitably degenerates into a struggle for power whether in domestic politics or in the international arena. Socalled realism in politics is not only a recognition of the power struggle as the prime mover of political life, but also a complete acceptance of this fact of life. Systemic thinking views struggles for power in the context of the entire global system and from this vantage point sees it as a scandalous dissipation of resources, attention, commitments, and efforts. The social Darwinists of the last century rationalized competition as the social analog of the biological struggle for existence, supposedly insuring the survival of the fittest. System oriented evolutionary theory reveals that natural selection operates not only on an individual but also on groups, species, i.e., genetic pools, and even on entire ecosystems. In innumerable biological situations cooperation appears as a most pronounced mechanism of survival. It would be a sorry anthill indeed if the individual ants competed with each other. Yet competition for resources, strategic command of the oceans (as if we lived in the days of the Spanish-American War), technical extravaganzas, nuclear overkill, or, as the sugarcoated phrase has it, the “hearts and minds of men,” still direct the course of global politics. The men who gave you Vietnam now tell you Americans
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that what you could not do in the jungles of Indochina you can do in the jungles of Southwest Africa. The systemic view clarifies the nature of the ethical imperative. At the heart of the ethical problem is the problem of identification. Hobbes would have it that every one was everyone else’s natural enemy and that the only way men could avoid mutual extermination would be by surrendering their autonomy to an absolute monarch. Being a philosopher, Hobbes did not feel any obligation to support his model of humanity by evidence. On the basis of anthropological evidence we can suppose that we were social long before we became human. We are heirs to mammalian heritage that has built into our psyches a t least an identification with mates and children and possibly with the comembers of a troop or a tribe. Let me offer some tentative evidence for the existence of instinctual identification with a t least others of the same species. One can play imitation games with a baby of about a year of age even if the baby has never seen a mirror. That is, one touches one’s nose, and the baby imitates. Question: How does the baby know that its nose corresponds to your nose if it has never seen its nose? The conclusion is inescapable that there is some sort of mapping of the body parts of others on one’s own body parts. That is, the so-called ego is not strictly bound by one’s own skin. These conjectures are highly speculative, of course, and a great deal more evidence is needed to clarify them, let alone support them. I submit, however, that questions pertaining to these phenomena, roughly speaking, questions pertaining to ego boundaries, are of prime psychological and ethical importance even though they cannot yet be couched in terms acceptable to a strict positivist. Now, as has been noted, our uniqueness is determined by our dependence on the world of symbols in which we live. This world determines our ego boundaries, the extent to which we identify with only what is inside our own skin or with a few selected individuals or with a clan, a tribe, a
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nation, humanity, or the totality of life. At various times in various cultures, these boundaries have varied. But they have always defined a n outside as well as an inside. The definition of self or of us implied also a definition of other or alien or them. So the extension of self did not really result in a total increase of cooperation in our species, let alone a n integration of the total ecological system.. The firming of solidarity depended traditionally on the identification of the enemy. Ironically, the circumstances in which people are capable of most cooperation and most altruism are those of war. OUTLOOK
The systemic view must always look beyond the given boundaries of a system in order to see the interaction of the system with the environment. It must always, therefore, look askance at any hedonistic criteria of happiness. It must subject to critical scrutiny all optimization procedures which put a t the center of attention the financial health of a firm, the efficiency of a particular piece of technology, or the relative power of a state. Each of these procedures delineates a system within boundaries and ignores the effects of optimizing some system state on the environment. One might ask whether the boundaries of the relevant system always must be extended so that each solution of the problem of identification only aggravates the solution of the next problem somewhat in the way the integration of societies in national states aggravated rather than alleviated the threat of mass violence and destruction within our species. Fortunately, there are natural boundaries to the relevant system. Our planet is finite and bounded. Spaceship Earth is a good description of it. It is farfetched to imagine a n enemy beyond the confines of the planet. Note that this was not the case when it seemed that the integration of societies into empires would insure peace. There were always rival empires or masses set in motion by population pressure. Integration on the planetary scale does promise at least a breathing
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spell from chronic warfare so that stock must be overcome, such as the pollution of can be taken of our position, of our chances the semantic environment and the psychoof survival and, who knows, perhaps even pathology of the entrenched power elites, of an existence freed from despair, torment constitutes the contribution of the system and degradation. This vision, spelled out view to the ethical component of contemin concrete terms involving the constraints porary philosophy. within which we are forced to act, such as limits on resources, and the obstacles that (Manuscript received May 4, 1976)
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This is the third Ludwig von Bertalanffy Memorial Lecture, delivered at the 1976 Annual Meeting of the Society for General Systems Research in Boston. PCJ
issue of Universitas, an interdisciplinary journal published in Germany devoted to discussion of the sciences, humanities and philosophy, there was an article by Walter Schulz entitled, “What Philosophy Is There Still Today?“ To find an answer to this question we could, of course, peruse philosophical journals with the view of forming an idea of the problems with which professional philosophers are concerned. But such an approach would be based on the tacit assumption that the set of philosophers coincides more or less with the set of contributors to philosophical journals. Arguments about definitions are futile, and if any one wishes to identify the two sets, that is his business. Whether the identification of contemporary philosophy with the content of philosophical journals will shed light on the question raised in Universitas is, to say the least, uncertain. The point is that a t the time when philosophy flourished in Europe, say in the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. and in the 17th, 18th and early 19th centuries, there were few, if any, philosophical journals. Philosophy a t that time was defined not by whose ideas were published where, but by the content of the ideas. So another legitimate approach to the question posed would be to try to abstract the essential features of the ideas that have contributed to philosophy in its heyday and to see whether similar ideas are of sufficient vitality in
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our day to warrant being called philosophy.
KEY WORDS: Bertalanffy memoral lecture, philosophy of science, cognition, general systems theory, scientific analogy.
During the two Golden Ages of philosophy in Europe three sorts of questions occupied a central position. One class of questions was about the nature of the world in which our lives are immersed. On these questions Greek thought was illurninated by the speculations of Thales and Aristarchus, the Pythagoreans, and of Aristotle. Each of these philosophers had something to say about the principles on which the universe was organized. These speculations ranged from vague generalities, such as Heraclitus’ insistence that “War is the father of all things,’’ or of the Pythagoreans, that the universe was governed by numerical relations, to highly specific prototheories, foreshadowing modern ideas of chemistry and physics. The atomic theory of Democritus may be taken as an example; Aristotle’s (erroneous) law of falling bodies as another. The second constellation of ideas central in philosophy revolved around the theory of cognition: the question of how we know what we know and how reliable is our knowledge. Plato wrote a great deal on this question, maintaining, in effect, that deduction from truths perceived by intuition is the only source of certainty, explicitly denigrating the reliability of the senses. The Eleatics and the Sceptics also had a great deal to say about this problem. The third class of ideas had to do with ethics. Plato and Aristotle, the Stoics and the Epicureans were all passionately con-
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A BRIDGEBETWEEN Two CULTURES cerned with the problem of distinguishing good from evil, whether or not they believed this problem to be solvable. The great system philosophers of postRennaissance Europe took up the same classes of problems. Descartes and Hegel both constructed theories of how the universe is run. Locke and Hume concerned themselves about the nature of human experience and its relation to knowledge. Spinoza and Kant formulated systems of ethics. Even while these great minds labored, however, another mode of thinking uppeared on the intellectual horizon of Europe, namely positivist science. For some time, what we now call natural science was still called natural philosophy. But the scientific method with its insistence that empirical evidence is always the last court of appeal in questions pertaining to truth practically drove out the philosophical mode. In the light of Newton’s Principia, Descartes’ physics appear impotent. Hegel’s “demonstration” that there can be no more than five planets besides the Earth appears ludicrous. Schelling’s N a turphilosophie could not be taken seriously by any one conversant with the most elementary findings of astronomy and physics. Compared with the hypotheticodeductive method of physical science with its formidable apparatus of mathematical deduction, the philosophical approach lost its appeal to thinkers genuinely concerned with the question of how the universe was run. The philosophical method in psychology, however, lingered on. In fact, the philosophical writings of Locke and Hume dealt energetically with problems of cognition. Eventually, however, positivist science invaded also psychology with its insistence on empirical evidence, its concentration on what is overtly observable, its glorification of the controlled experiment, and its denigration of introspection. Even the question of certainty, deeply rooted in the philosophical, introspective mode of thought, dissolved into technicalities under the onslaught of mathematical analysis. Two examples will suffice. Kant thought that he established the synthetic a priori, that is,
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certainty about some fundamental aspects of the physical world without recourse to empirical evidence. He thought that our minds are so constructed that we cannot imagine any “laws of geometry” except those derivable from Euclidean postulates. Shortly thereafter the non-Euclidean geometries of Bolyai and Lobachevsky, and later of Riemann, made their appearance, and Kant’s remarkable intellectual achievement crumbled. The other example is known to philosophers as the scandal of induction. It was initiated by Hume who showed that the certainty of an inductive inference could not be logically demonstrated. This is so, as far as it goes, but Hume’s scepticism completely ignored the question, “How certain is certain?” If we give up the futile quest for absolute certainty, we can turn our attention to degrees of certainty of inductive inferences. The theory of probability gives us interesting and a t times eminently useful answers on this score. In this way, experimental psychology and inferential statistics invaded the second principal area of traditional philosophy, the theory of cognition. What about ethics, then? We know that traditional philosophy was dominated by theological doctrines, and that traditional ethical theories derived from religious beliefs. Positivist science broke with theistic religion and turned to questions apparently divorced from concerns with good and evil. Finally, cultural anthropology revealed the multiplicity of ethical systems and, as a reaction to ethnocentrism, which seriously interfered with the methods of modern anthropology, advanced the idea of ethical relativism wherein all notions of good and evil made sense only within a particular cultural framework. It is not surprising, therefore, that questions such as “What philosophy still exists today?” are raised in good faith, a half century after Ludwig Wittgenstein, an exponent of the Vienna logical-positivist school declared all questions of philosophy meaningless. The dismissal of traditional philosophic questions by the logical positivists as meaningless was not unfounded. It was the result of semantic analysis which at-
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tempts to relate the terms embodied in a question to referents. If no referents can be found, the terms are semantically devoid of meaning and so is the question. Or else, if any possible answer to the question is found to be contradictory, the question is also meaningless. Take the age-old question about whether there is free will or whether all our actions and even thought, desires, etc., are determined. One can define words like free will and determinism by other words, and these by still other words, ad infinitum. But if one cannot state a verifiable criterion that would answer the question either way, the question has no meaning according to the definition of meaning as reference to a referent. Or take the old saw from theology about whether God, assumed to be omnipotent, can create a rock that he cannot lift. Whichever way one answers the question, the definition of omnipotence is violated. This renders the word omnipotence meaningless and with it all theological speculations involving the word. What goes for questions goes also for assertions. Heraclitus maintained that “war is the father of all things.’’ But any attempt to relate the word father used in this context to any referents related to experience fails. The assertion, wise as it may seem to some in whom it strikes a note of recognition and assent, is revealed as meaningless-not false, for a false assertion can be refuted by evidence - but meaningless. The same goes for Hegel’s insistence that reason rules the world and charts the course of history, and for Bergson’s similar remarks about elan vital, and all the teachings in the philosophies of the East about vibrations and transmigrations of souls. Once one has made the demand that language be somehow related to operationally describable and shareable experiences, the demand made by the logicalpositivist oriented semanticists, one has induced in oneself a mild, and sometimes not so mild, contempt for the most venerable questions and doctrines of philosophy. This demand is made only in a certain intellectual climate, namely where science flourishes and enjoys prestige. Science is precisely the mode of thought that strives
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at all times to meet the demand, that is, to discipline its discourse so that the terms therein are always related, albeit sometimes by long chains of elucidations and deduction, to operationally describable and shareable experience. A model exists for that sort of discourse; moreover, a model is to be emulated wherever science enjoys authority and prestige. So it came to pass that some questions that have perplexed philosophers for centuries were answered by science, to be sure, after being reformulated so as to become answerable. Foremost among these were questions concerning the structure and the organization of the external material world, including the interdependence of events. Other questions that could not be so reformulated lost their salience, just for this reason. Accordingly, where science reached the zenith of intellectual prestige, philosophy lost intellectual status proportionately. Nevertheless, I do not believe that ascent of science has permanently relegated philosophy to a secondary position and I say this without meaning in any way to detract from science as a superb and also the most salutary achievement of the human mind. There can be a meaningful division of intellectual labor between science and philosophy without relegating to philosophy questions that science has revealed to be either trivial or meaningless or has disposed of long since. Nor need these questions be abstruse, as they often are made by professional philosophers. They can be very simple questions related to experience, shared experience for that matter, but not operationally describable experience, therefore are questions excluded from the domain of scientific inquiry. Examples of shared but not operationally describable experience are easy to find. Think of some smell, say ammonia. I know what ammonia smells like; you know what it smells like. In imagining this smell, we are sharing an experience. But it is impossible to describe it. See how this frustration leads to a purely philosophical question: Is your experience when you smell, or imagine you smell, ammonia
A BRIDGEBETWEEN Two CULTURES the same as mine? Intersubjective verification will not answer the question. It is easy enough to let each of us smell several substances and note that what you call ammonia I call ammonia. This was not the question posed. The question posed was whether what you in your inner world experience as the smell of ammonia is identical to what I in my inner world experience. Perhaps this question has no practical significance. As long as both of us will identify the same substance by the same name, identical designation of shared though not describable experience, we can go about doing business involving ammonia. So let us take another similar question: Do plants feel pain? There is no conceivable way of answering this question. Yet most of us would, I am quite sure, answer it in the negative. But let us go on. Do oysters feel pain? Insects? Reptiles? By the time we get to cats and dogs, most of the answers will be in the afirmative, justified I suppose, by patterns of behavior somehow analogous to our own in similar circumstances. But the question was not about behavior patterns. The question was about pain, which you and I have experienced and which we are convinced are shared experiences even though the worlds of inner consciousness of different people are hermetically separated from each other. The question “How does it feel to be you?’ is forever unanswerable by any method of science, not for lack of instrumentation, but in principle, because if you were told that my inner consciousness was somehow projected on yours, you could never verify the truth of this statement. Yet to deny the importance of questions like “What does it feel like to be him?” is to deny the humanity of the other and with it, of course, one’s own humanity. Note that I have just made a statement whose truth or falsehood is not verifiable by any means known to science. Yet many will accept this statement as meaningful, and, perhaps, even will agree with it. The questions I have raised, such as, “Do dogs feel pain?’ or “What does it feel like to be you?’ have obvious ethical implications. But they also have some semantic implications. To see this, take a somewhat
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related question, fashionable nowadays: Do computers think? I have seen some lively controversies about this. Proponents of the affirmative draw analogies between human reasoning and the processes within the computer. Proponents of the negative insist that computers do not think because they have no consciousness. Since there is no way of tapping the consciousness of a computer, if it did exist (or, for that matter of any other being except oneself), the answer in the negative is semantically meaningless, unless one chooses to give it meaning by spelling out the ethical imperatives associated with our classification of a n entity as thinking or not thinking. Generally speaking, these imperatives operate relative to a being to whom we attribute thinking but not to one to whom we do not attribute thinking. Thus, if a being from another planet appeared among us and gave evidence of being friendly and rational, most of us would insist that his life should be protected. On the other hand, if it were necessary to dismantle or smash a machine because a person or animal had become enmeshed in it, few of us would hesitate. Thus, attributing consciousness to other beings, or degrees of consciousness as in the case of beings on the evolutionary scale or a t least having different degrees of similarity to ourselves, is not a mere intellectual exercise but a basis for generally accepted rules of behavior. I have used these somewhat homely examples to illustrate my thesis. Philosophy can play a vitally important role in our intellectual life by addressing itself to questions that arise from experiences that are shared, yet are not definable in operational terms as demanded by science. Thus, the whole realm of ethics and esthetics, except purely empirical investigations of what is valued as good or beautiful, remains firmly within the sphere of philosophy. My concern, however, is with questions of cognition and questions related to the organization of portions of the world. We are gathered to honor the memory of Ludwig Bertalanffy and so to talk about general systems theory with which his name will be forever linked.
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GENERAL SYSTEMS THEORY
Definitions of general systems theory differ, but they have a common denominator. Those concerned with general systems theory agree that certain portions of the world can be singled out as systems and deserve special attention. Moreover, once such portions of the world have been singled out, something nontrivial can be said that applies to all of them. The content of these observations would be a general theory of systems. This is about as far as agreement goes. Once one tries to be more specific, various approaches begin to diverge. The divergence begins when attempts are made to define a system. I will illustrate by two definitions, one mathematical and analytic, the other intuitive and holistic. The mathematical definition, favored by physical scientists and engineers, begins with singling out a set entities or elements. These are primitive terms and cannot be further defined, but they can be exemplified. For instance, the elements may be the molecules of a gas enclosed in a volume, or the planets of the solar system, or the individuals of a species, or the species of a circumscribed region like a lake. Having specified the elements, one defines the state of the system. The state is defined by a set of values taken by operationally defined variables related to the elements. For instance, the state of a gas may be the distribution of temperatures o r pressures within it. These, in turn, are determined by certain statistical results of interactions among the molecules. The state of the solar system is usually taken to be the totality of positions and velocities of the planets. The state of a lake, conceived as a biological system, could be defined by the distribution or densities of species in it. Finally to qualify as a system according to this definition, the portion of the world so conceived must exhibit some predictability, a t least in the statistical sense, of its succession of states. The well nigh perfect predictions of the motions of heavenly bodies attests to the triumph of system analysis in that special case. But because the solar system is a very special instance of a system, celestial mechanics does not
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qualify as an achievement of general system theory. This immediately raises the question of whether any general system theory can be constructed on the basis of the rigorous mathematical definition given. Are not; all systems, defined in terms of entities and their specific laws of interaction, special systems? The answer is yes and no. Certainly the solar system is a very special system, but every planetary system will yield to the same sort of analysis. Therefore, there can be a general theory of planetary systems. This observation is not by itself particularly illuminating. But general system theory rooted in the mathematical definition goes further. Since a system is defined in abstract terms- entities of arbitrary nature and interactions among them specified mathematically, that is, aside from specific content - the classification of systems can be made on the basis of types of mathematical structure rather than on the basis of content. Thus we encounter the concept of mathematical analogy, a powerful unifying principle in mathematicized science. The classical example of the complete analogy between a mechanical harmonic oscillator and the electrical system with a source of alternating current, a resistance, and a capacitance is well known. To the extent that a system of chemical reactions can be described by a system of differential equations of the first order and second degree, such a system is mathematically analogous to an ecological system in which encounters between members of the same or different species correspond to encounters between molecules of the same or different substances. To the extent that conservation of mass must operate in a chemical system but conservation of p p u lations need not operate in an ecological system, the two differ. What general system theory brings out is the specific dimensions along which the two kinds of systems can be considered to be similar and the specific dimensions along which the analogy breaks down. Mathematical analogy is a remarkably powerful tool of scientific cognition. It is enlightening to examine the metaphors of
A BRIDGEBETWEEN Two CULTURES scientific language induced entirely by mathematical analogy. In accoustical and communication engineering one speaks of white noise. Offhand, the designation seems absurb, but not when one realizes that both light and sound can be analyzed in terms of component frequencies and that the term white refers to a uniform distribution of frequency amplitudes in both white light and white noise. In electrodynamics one speaks of magnetic flux although nothing actually flows. The reference is to the mathematical description of flow that happens to be the same in hydrodynamics and electrodynamics. In thermodynamics entropy is defined in terms of the relation between energy and temperature. In communication theory entropy refers to the uncertainty associated with messages. A more far fetched connection is difficult to imagine, but it has been conclusively demonstrated by the mathematical isomorphism between the two. Are these finds and metaphorical extensions of language contributions to philosophy? I think so, specifically to the philosophy of cognition. A traditional form of a philosophical question has been “What is X?” Or, “Is X a case of Y?” Interminable and futile disputes revolved about such questions. In practically all cases the disputes, if they were indeed about the questions posed and not camouflaged struggles for power or allegiance, arose from a failure to come to a preliminary agreement concerning the basis of classification. Mathematical general system theory provides a basis which, once accepted, removes all ambiguities. This basis derives not from intuitively perceived syndromes but from specifiable structural properties. We find, however, that what is the source of power in the mathematical approach to general system theory is also the source of its overriding weakness. The singling out of the relevant entities and the specification of the relations among them can be done only in very special cases. An attempt to do so in the most common manifestation of a system inevitably fails. I am referring to the class of systems called living organisms. Clearly an attempt to define such a sys-
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tem in terms of entities and to specify the laws of interaction among these entities must fail because the complexity of the organism defies any such attempt. If we stick to the definition of system given above, then we must exclude living organisms for not being able to define them in those terms. Such an exclusion would certainly defeat the purpose of pursuing general system theory in the first place. The point is that historically the living organism has precedence over the physical system as an object of investigation of general system theory. Recall that the impulse instigating Bertalanffy’s formulation was the erroneous argument of the vitalists, in particular that of H. Driesch, to the effect that physical laws cannot account for the equifinality principle that appears to govern the development of embryos. Driesch, it will be recalled, cut the embryo of a sea urchin in half and demonstrated that both halves developed into normal sea urchins instead of into two halves of a sea urchin, as they presumably should have done if governed by purely mechanical laws. Of course, Driesch‘s argument was based on a nonsequitur. The environment of two halves of the sea urchin embryo is not the same as the environment of a whole embryo. In the first case, the right half has the “outside” to the left of it; in the second case, the right half has the left half to the left of it. Given different initial conditions, even mechanical laws will lead to different results. Bertalanffy, however, saw a different implication of Driesch’s challenge in the contention that equifinality can be exhibited only by living systems and hence requires a special principle to explain it. Bertalanffy pointed out that equifinality could be exhibited by open systems, whether living or not. In contrast to closed systems, isolated thermally and mechanically from their environment and therefore doomed to approach a n equilibrium with complete degradation of energy, open systems, maintaining an exchange of matter and energy with the environment, can maintain dynamic equilibria and so some degree of internal differentiation and hence organization. Moreover, it can be
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demonstrated mathematically that these states of dynamic equilibrium can be independent of initial conditions, which is precisely what equifinality means. A simple example will illustrate the fundamental difference between a closed and an open system. Consider a number of substances thermally and mechanically isolated from the environment, hence a closed system. If left alone, the chemical reactions therein will reach an equilibrium state. The concentrations of substances in that equilibrium state will depend on the concentrations in the initial state. This is guaranteed by the law of conservation of matter. Because of this dependence, the system will not exhibit equifinality: a different initial condition will lead to a different final state. Now imagine such a system that does exchange matter with the environment, that is, has sources and sinks for the different substances. It can be shown that such a system will reach a final dynamic equilibrium that is independent of the initial concentrations of the substances in it. If we intervene and disturb this dynamic equilibrium, the system will return to it as soon as the intervention is over. In other words, it will exhibit quasi-teleological behavior, simulating a living organism. When Bertalanffy first formulated a program for general system theory, he proposed an approach to the living organism conceived as an open system, i.e., one that is enabled to maintain dynamic steady states that resist the disorganizing enchroachments of the environment. The connection between this approach and the thermodynamics of open systems is apparent. E. Schroedinger in his little book What I s Life?,now a classic, has amplified the same idea. “Life feeds on negative entropy,” he wrote, referring to the way a living organism maintains its organization by ingesting substances low in entropy (high in free energy) and exuding substances high in entropy (low in free energy). In this way the decrease in entropy exhibited by living systems a t least in their early stages of development, as evidenced by increasing complexity and organization, turns out not to contradict the Second Law of Thermodynamics as the
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vitalists once maintained. The living system organizes itself and maintains its organization by disorganizing and degrading the environment. The living organism was the first object of attention in the early formulation of the general systems approach. As we have pointed out, the living organism cannot be exhibited as a system in accordance with the mathematical definition given above. What, then, makes it a system? This brings us to a different definition of system, one that relies on intuitive recognition rather than a formal structural description: a system is a portion of the world that maintains some sort of organization in the face of disturbing influences. A system maintains its identity in spite of changes going on within it. The definition is not rigorous, at least does not satisfy the standards of rigor demanded by a mathematical definition of a system. Nevertheless, it is richly suggestive. If we understand intuitively what it means “to maintain one’s identity in spite of internal changes,” we will readily admit all living organisms as systems. The rnost remarkable property of a living organism is that it is recognizable as itself, even when all the material particles in it have been replaced, as they are in all living systems. On second thought, this property of maintaining an identity appears to be commonplace rather than remarkable. A river remains itself in spite of the fact that no part of it is the same. Heraclitus’s famous remark “You cannot step into the same river twice” is both true and false. Collections of living organisms are systems no less than the organisms that comprise them. A species is a system in spite of the fact that all its members are replaced in succeeding generations. Nor do we need to confine the concept of system to material entities. The English language retains its identity even though all the speakers of English are replaced in succeeding generations. Moreover, species and languages, although they are recognizable as themselves, nevertheless evolve, that is, undergo slow changes without losing their identity, just as species, genera, and families of living organisms do.
A BRIDGEBETWEEN Two CULTURES Indeed, the parallels among various kinds of evolution are striking. Compare the evolution of a species, a language, and a technological artifact. The nature of the evolving entities is widely different. A species is a living system. A technological artifact is a material system, but not a living one. A language is not even a material system. Yet all three evolving systems exhibit a common feature, namely, vestigial parts. In living systems these are remnants of anatomical structures that have lost functional significance or, at least the original function. Vestigial parts in a language can be most clearly illustrated in written languages with alphabets and conservative spelling rules. The silent k in knife is no more than a reminder that the word is derived from the Celtic canif; the silent gh in through is there only because it is present in the German cognate durch, that is, because once upon a time it was voiced. Examples of this sort are legion. As for technological artifacts, everyone knows that the first horseless carriages were carriages without horses, retaining even the whip holders. Even more striking is the vestige of the running board which was for a while a very narrow, utterly useless strip where the running board once had been. Faced with such evidence, only a pedantic champion of sternest empiricism will resist the temptation to speculate on the general principles of evolution, principles that transcend content and apply across the board to all evolving systems. Are there such principles? I submit that the question is of philosophical, not scientific nature. It is a question meant to guide inquiry, not to be answered by concrete evidence. As an example, consider the principle of natural selection, said to guide the course of biological evolution. Whether the principle is sufficient to explain all aspects of biological evolution -I have my doubts on this score-there is no denying the fact that it explains a great deal and has been demonstrated on experimental populations. The question before us is, “Does the principle operate elsewhere in other evolving systems, and if so, how?’ Clearly, the analogy does not hold up in all respects. Systems other than biological maintain
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identity by some sort of transmission of characteristics to succeeding generations of entities that comprise them. We need to redefine generation in contexts other than biological and we need to identify the mechanism of transmission, which, in the case of a language ar a technological artifact, is certainly not genetic. Now the search for mechanisms of transmission and for analogs of the natural selection principle is not, strictly speaking, scientific activity. Certainly it is not the application of scientific method as it is depicted in textbooks. I submit, however, that it is a form of intellectual activity closely akin to the scientific, in the sense of being a search for knowledge where stern discipline and severe self-criticism can be applied just as they are or supposed to be in rigorous scientific activity. Here, then, if you will, is an example of what still remains of philosophy today, a search for meaningful, not merely poetically inspired analogies. The search for scientifically fruitful analogies is essentially the content of general system theory, both in its mathematical and in its organismic sense. We have examined, in fact, both kinds of analogies - those suggested by isomorphic or homomorphic mathematical structures and those inspired by the universal tendencies of systems to maintain their identities and to resist encroachments on their organized structure, and, above all, by the tendencies of systems t o evolve. Indeed philosophy has always been a search for analogies. A recurring philosophic question is “What is X?’ It is an invitation to put X in a class and thus impose an order on the world by seeing what goes with what, what is analogous to what. With the advent of scientific inquiry the inadequacy of that question became apparent. One should not ask “What is X?” The question suggests that things in the world are already ordered in some predestined way and that the business of the philosopher is to discover that order. Rather we should ask, “To what aspect ofX should we pay attention in order to learn more about it?” The first scientific successes began with singling out precisely those aspects of
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phenomena that led to cumulative knowledge about them. In this way, the question, “What is the nature of . , . ?” was supplanted by the question, “What is the structure o f . . . ?” The question, “Why?” was supplanted by the question, “How?” Questions related to structure and process are central in the analytic-scientific approach of classical science. Bertalanffy often insisted that the time has come to transcend the purely analytic approach of classical science and to turn attention to holistic organismic aspects of systems. This sort of admonition is heard quite frequently, often from those who reject the scientific method of inquiry. The holistic approach need not supplant the analytic. It should complement it. There is no reason why both the trees and the forest cannot be studied, each in the proper context. We cannot dispense with the analytic method of classical science with its controlled experiment and its drastically simplified mathematical models that single out one or two aspects of a phenomenon a t a time. Its importance in revealing to us the structure of the world we live in should never be lost from sight. It is also true, however, that this method is impotent to deal with some crucially important aspects, especially of our own lives. As an example, take the development of scientific psychology along well-trodden lines of positivist analysis. At the center of the method is the controlled experiment and the processing of preferably quantitative data. Yet these data yield only miniscule bits of information about the reactions of an individual to stimuli imposed upon him under proper controls. The importance of controlled experiments is not to be minimized. Nor am I impressed with arguments raised in some quarters that treating a person as a n experimental animal bars the way forever to insights into characteristically human psychology. There is good reason to suppose that in some ways the human psyche does have features in common with that of a rat or a pigeon. There is no reason why those aspects should not be studied. But there are some other aspects to the human psyche. Unless we understand them, we shall never un-
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derstand the nature of human society and so the species, a very special kind of living system, will elude our understanding. To understand Homo sapiens, that is, ourselves, we must single out the most crucial aspect of being human. That is the striking dependence on symbols. Living in the world of symbols has enabled our species, a n animal with at best a second-rate adaptation to a tropical environment. to invade the entire globe and to bend the forces of nature to its will. It is also the same dependence on symbols that makes us frightfully maladapted to the environment that we ourselves have created, which includes the megadeath technology that threatens us with collective suicide. And even the so-called peaceful, technological environment now threatens us with extinction or at least with degradation in the wake of an ecological catastrophe. This is not all. The world of symbols is itself a part of our environment. We live in an ocean of words, concepts, slogans, ideas, beliefs, loyalties, and enmities as literally as we live in a n atmosphere. And we breathe that semantic environment as literally as we breathe air. The symbols impinge on our nervous systems and make us what we are, for the most part obedient to ruling elites, the most powerful of which are in a very real sense crazy. The idea that humans live in a symbolic or a semantic environment that is as real as the physicochemical environment was not generated by carefully controlled observations or by processing quantitative data. It was frankly generated by a perceived analogy between the physicochemical environment and the ocean of words in which we are immersed from the second year of our lives. Pursuing the analogy further, it is natural to arrive at the idea that the semantic environment becomes polluted, no less than the physicocheniical environment. It becomes polluted by images, notions, maxims and slogans that may have had survival value a t one time but have become poisonous. They nevertheless persist because, impinging on our psyches, they continue to be nourished by our behavior. The vicious cycle is closed. One might think that the study of the
A BRIDGEBETWEEN Two CULTURES human semantic environment as a system that maintains its identity, resists change, and yet evolves, would have high priority on any program purporting to give the species a chance through a better understanding of itself. However, that is not where the most intensive and the most expensive investigations are directed. They are directed by inertia into the same old channels well-trodden by reliable science that produces practical results, where practical means translatable into technology without regard for the changed role of megatechnology in the world governed by a polluted semantic environment. What I have said so far may serve as a partial answer to the question posed at the outset: What philosophy is there still today? In particular, I have suggested that general system theory has made a significant contribution to a revitalization of philosophy in a world intellectually dominated by science. Let me reiterate the position. Traditional natural philosophy has been supplanted by natural science whose methods proved to be immensely more powerful than those of speculative philosophy. This does not mean, however, that the method of philosophy has been made obsolete. It means simply that philosophy must raise new questions, still unanswered by science for lack of appropriate methods of investigation and, in particular, must suggest a direction for developing such appropriate methods. This is where general system theory has made its intellectual contribution. It has revived the role of speculative analogy, more sophisticated, one would hope, than the naive analogies pursued by prescientific philosophers, deriving intellectual nourishment from advanced ideas of science. It has revived organismic thinking as a complement to analytic thinking, has suggested concepts appropriate to a holistic approach to both a conception of reality and to a theory of cognition. There remains the third important area of philosophy, ethics. I submit that the systemic view of the world has the most profound ethical implications. For the systemic view of the world emphasizes the interdependence of all life on this planet.
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The very real concerns of the environmentalists and the conservationists are all founded on the systemic view of closest interdependence. In the most concrete and practical sense, the rejection of all sorts of technical fixes is based on an awareness of their long term implications. Of course, chemical fertilizers raise short-term agricultural yields, but they amount to a conception of agriculture as a mining operation instead of a cultivating one. Mining exhausts the resources mined. Of course, insecticides get rid of so-called pests, but they also get rid of beneficial insects and, through disturbing the food chain of birds, with possible disastrous ecological consequences. System thinking pursued to the full has the most far-reaching ethical consequences in politics. Politics viewed as a technique inevitably degenerates into a struggle for power whether in domestic politics or in the international arena. Socalled realism in politics is not only a recognition of the power struggle as the prime mover of political life, but also a complete acceptance of this fact of life. Systemic thinking views struggles for power in the context of the entire global system and from this vantage point sees it as a scandalous dissipation of resources, attention, commitments, and efforts. The social Darwinists of the last century rationalized competition as the social analog of the biological struggle for existence, supposedly insuring the survival of the fittest. System oriented evolutionary theory reveals that natural selection operates not only on an individual but also on groups, species, i.e., genetic pools, and even on entire ecosystems. In innumerable biological situations cooperation appears as a most pronounced mechanism of survival. It would be a sorry anthill indeed if the individual ants competed with each other. Yet competition for resources, strategic command of the oceans (as if we lived in the days of the Spanish-American War), technical extravaganzas, nuclear overkill, or, as the sugarcoated phrase has it, the “hearts and minds of men,” still direct the course of global politics. The men who gave you Vietnam now tell you Americans
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that what you could not do in the jungles of Indochina you can do in the jungles of Southwest Africa. The systemic view clarifies the nature of the ethical imperative. At the heart of the ethical problem is the problem of identification. Hobbes would have it that every one was everyone else’s natural enemy and that the only way men could avoid mutual extermination would be by surrendering their autonomy to an absolute monarch. Being a philosopher, Hobbes did not feel any obligation to support his model of humanity by evidence. On the basis of anthropological evidence we can suppose that we were social long before we became human. We are heirs to mammalian heritage that has built into our psyches a t least an identification with mates and children and possibly with the comembers of a troop or a tribe. Let me offer some tentative evidence for the existence of instinctual identification with a t least others of the same species. One can play imitation games with a baby of about a year of age even if the baby has never seen a mirror. That is, one touches one’s nose, and the baby imitates. Question: How does the baby know that its nose corresponds to your nose if it has never seen its nose? The conclusion is inescapable that there is some sort of mapping of the body parts of others on one’s own body parts. That is, the so-called ego is not strictly bound by one’s own skin. These conjectures are highly speculative, of course, and a great deal more evidence is needed to clarify them, let alone support them. I submit, however, that questions pertaining to these phenomena, roughly speaking, questions pertaining to ego boundaries, are of prime psychological and ethical importance even though they cannot yet be couched in terms acceptable to a strict positivist. Now, as has been noted, our uniqueness is determined by our dependence on the world of symbols in which we live. This world determines our ego boundaries, the extent to which we identify with only what is inside our own skin or with a few selected individuals or with a clan, a tribe, a
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nation, humanity, or the totality of life. At various times in various cultures, these boundaries have varied. But they have always defined a n outside as well as an inside. The definition of self or of us implied also a definition of other or alien or them. So the extension of self did not really result in a total increase of cooperation in our species, let alone a n integration of the total ecological system.. The firming of solidarity depended traditionally on the identification of the enemy. Ironically, the circumstances in which people are capable of most cooperation and most altruism are those of war. OUTLOOK
The systemic view must always look beyond the given boundaries of a system in order to see the interaction of the system with the environment. It must always, therefore, look askance at any hedonistic criteria of happiness. It must subject to critical scrutiny all optimization procedures which put a t the center of attention the financial health of a firm, the efficiency of a particular piece of technology, or the relative power of a state. Each of these procedures delineates a system within boundaries and ignores the effects of optimizing some system state on the environment. One might ask whether the boundaries of the relevant system always must be extended so that each solution of the problem of identification only aggravates the solution of the next problem somewhat in the way the integration of societies in national states aggravated rather than alleviated the threat of mass violence and destruction within our species. Fortunately, there are natural boundaries to the relevant system. Our planet is finite and bounded. Spaceship Earth is a good description of it. It is farfetched to imagine a n enemy beyond the confines of the planet. Note that this was not the case when it seemed that the integration of societies into empires would insure peace. There were always rival empires or masses set in motion by population pressure. Integration on the planetary scale does promise at least a breathing
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spell from chronic warfare so that stock must be overcome, such as the pollution of can be taken of our position, of our chances the semantic environment and the psychoof survival and, who knows, perhaps even pathology of the entrenched power elites, of an existence freed from despair, torment constitutes the contribution of the system and degradation. This vision, spelled out view to the ethical component of contemin concrete terms involving the constraints porary philosophy. within which we are forced to act, such as limits on resources, and the obstacles that (Manuscript received May 4, 1976)
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