About
The Bertalanffy Program. In 1956 the first “Yearbook of the Society for General Systems Research” was edited and published by Ludwig von Bertalanffy and Anatol Rapoport. The founding of the society itself was a result of the cooperation of Bertalanffy, Rapoport and other scientists of different scientific areas during the years before. One year before, in 1955, Bertalanffy already did mention in (Bertalanffy 1955) that “it seems, therefore, that a general theory of systems would be a useful tool providing, on the one hand, models that can be used in, and transferred to, different fields, and safeguarding, on the other hand, from vague analogies which often have marred the progress in these fields.” But being not very optimistic, he also did see at the very beginning of implementing such a theory that “general system theory will go a long way towards avoiding such unnecessary duplication of labour.”
The main idea was to build up a set of terms, formalisms and methods to implement general system theory as a new kind of universal science. In (Hall 1956) A. D. Hall and R. E. Fagen introduced a first general description of the system terminology: “A system is a set of objects together with relationships between the objects and between their attributes.” They also provided mathematical definitions for the used terms and gave examples for its instances. Furthermore a concept for defining systems in general using systems of equations like also Bertalanffy has discussed this in his articles before has been presented. The terminology and the system definition of this paper should have become the most accepted definition for general system theory within the whole Bertalanffy Program.
This of course was not satisfying because for developing practical applications, a more detailed model is needed - but all further approaches did either become too controversial or simply were too philosophical to adopt them into a formal model. So the members of the general systems community did continue with their work on aspects and chances of general system theory without a common model, which later did become the end of the Bertalanffy Program because it was not possible to develop applications without such a model. But at least it really was difficult to get an idea of how to build such formalism without having the knowledge of today’s computational methods, only using systems of equation and mathematical methods operating directly on them. At this point we will tie up to the ideas and approaches of Bertalanffy and his colleagues.
Therefore we need to define or redefine several aspects of a general systemic approach: (1) A scheme for organising concepts of the real world, we call it reductive levels here; (2) formal concepts that base on our reductive levels and provide the basic for practical application development for general system theory applications, we use formal ontologies based on a common system ontology to model this part of our approach; (3) because we are also interested in systemic development and change over time, we have to find a formalism to include this in our model: here we will use cellular automatas based on our ontologies to simulate the dynamic behaviour in practice; (4) therefore we need mappings between our ontologies and cellular automatas; (5) and last but not least we will argue about concepts like self-organization and emergence whithin this approach.