The Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity by Robert Frodeman;Julie Thompson Klein;Roberto Carlos Dos Santos Pacheco;

Author:Robert Frodeman;Julie Thompson Klein;Roberto Carlos Dos Santos Pacheco;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: OUP Premium
Published: 2017-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

21.3 SYSTEMS PHILOSOPHY

The worlds of science, technology, and philosophy do not exist in isolation from each other. Because philosophy raises questions that are fundamental for science and technology, one could argue that philosophy is by nature an interdisciplinary endeavor. For the sake of clarity, it is therefore useful to distinguish some of the various meanings in which the term “systems philosophy” can be used, each standing for different themes and a different role of philosophy in the systems field.

First, systems philosophy deals with the fundamental philosophical issues involved in the realm of systems science. Such a fundamental issue in biology is the question “What is life?” or “How do we understand the phenomena of life?” As discussed, von Bertalanffy advocated a so-called organismic conception—the view that the organism is a whole or system, transcending its parts when these are considered in isolation. Searching for a satisfying understanding of the Aristotelian dictum of the whole that is more than its parts, von Bertalanffy at the same time took a stand on another fundamental problem of Greek philosophy. There is the famous statement of Heraclitus: “Panta rhei,” everything is in flux, arguing against Parmenides, who taught that only static being was real and that change is an illusion. In this controversy, which has persisted in one form or another across the whole of Western philosophy and science, systems science adopts the Heraclitean point of view. The model of the organism as an open system implies that life has to be understood as primarily a stream of life. Forms and structures that manifest themselves in living nature are in von Bertalanffy’s view secondary, just like social structures are secondary in Luhmann’s understanding of social phenomena. Systems science thus manifests a totally dynamic view of reality in which enduring structures seem to evaporate and become volatile and dynamic.

Second, systems philosophy concerns the philosophical foundations of the systems approach in technology and management. Comparing Ackoff with von Bertalanffy, one notices that they agree that society is going through an important intellectual revolution that will usher us into a new era of science and society—in Ackoff’s wording, going from a machine age to a systems age. One of the important characteristics of systems science, as we have seen above, is the priority given to the dynamic and flowing character of reality. The same characteristic seems to hold for systems research when Ackoff (1981, p. 16) points out that there is a turn from analysis to synthesis, which implies a turn to a functional understanding of the thing to be explained in terms of its role or function within its containing whole or environment. The synthetic approach does not exclude analysis, but in the systems age synthesis has priority over analysis, and function over structure. The turn from the machine age to the systems age even implies a different understanding of reality. Characteristic of the machine age is the deistic view in which God is regarded as the creator of the world as a machine that runs according to fixed laws.

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