DAN BERGEN Implications of General Systems Theory for Librarianship and Higher Education

ed, and concrete systems. Differentiating abstracted systems from conceptual systems by suggesting that the former are more likely to have empirically determined components, Miller argues that the unification of the sciences would proceed more rapidly if all of the sciences were oriented to either con115 Easton, op. cit., pp. 65-66. 11o Ibid., pp. 27-30, 33-34, 44-45, 64-66. ur See Alfred North Whitehead, "Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology," in F. S. C. Northrop and Mason W. Gross (eds.), Alfred North Whitehead: An Anthology (New York: Macmillan, 1953 ), pp. 567-84. 384 I College & Research Libraries • September, 1966 crete or abstracted systems.118 Concrete systems, it is important to note, can most generally be ordered hierarchically according to their complexity, an observation not at all startling when one recalls that the world evolved toward complexity from simplicity.119 In order to reorganize knowledge for transmission in the educational process, and to develop library systems which are supportive of that reorganization, some decisions must be made about what knowledge is important and what is not.120 It is the writer's view that economic structure is all-important and that, to quote Boulding, "if a single theoretical principle can be shown to apply over a wide area of the empirical world, this is economy in the learning process."121 The economy provided higher education by such metatheories is important to con118 James G. Miller, "Living Systems: Basic Concepts," Behavioral Science, X (October 1965), 202, 204, 207. Easton has been inclined to make a similar differentiation between behaving systems and symbolic systems, op. cit., p. 26. Parsons has distinguished theoretical (what Miller might be inclined to call abstracted) systems from empirical systems. He writes: "Methodologically, one must distinguish a theoretical system, which is a complex of assumptions, concepts, and propositions having both logical integration and empirical reference, from an empirical system which is a set of phenomena in the observable world that can be discovered and analyzed with a theoretical system." Talcott Parsons, "Social Systems and Subsystems," in David L. Sills ( ed.), International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (New York: Free Press of Glencoe; in press). The citation is to p. I of the mimeographed version of the article. = Simon reasons that our ability to hierarchically order empirical systems is based on the fact of the dynamics of intrasystem interaction. See his "The Architecture of Complexity," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, CVI (December 1962), 477, 481-82. See also Kenneth Boulding, "General Systems Theory-The Skeleton of Science," General Systems, I ( 1956 ), 13-16, and Charles Morris, Signification and Significance: A Study of the Relations of Signs and Values (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1964), pp. 20-21. 120 This is a principle, suggests Richard McKeon, of which "the philosophers of Greece, the summists of the thirteenth century, the universal men of the Renaissance, and the polymaths of the eighteenth century" were well aware. Se McKeon in Cohen, op. cit., p. 17 4. 121 Boulding, The Image: Knowledge in Life and Society, pp. 162-63. Alvin Weinberg has expressed his concern that university science, and the elementary secondary school science curricula which university scientists are helping to shape, overemphasizes the specialized search activities of pure science at the expense of the important and legitimate scientific function of codification. See his "But Is the Teacher also a Citizen?" Science, CXLIX (August 1965), 603-604. template in view of the complaints about the length of the typical undergraduate, graduate, and professional programs and what, in my judgment, are the pseudocomplaints of faculty ~embers about .. having too much material to cover" and the "explosion of knowledge."122 The organization of knowledge is the key to the problem and it rests, by and large, on the "set of related definitions, assumptions, and propositions which deal with reality as an integrated hierarchy of matter and energy."123 For a general systems theory to develop fully, great care must be exercised in identifying isomorphic system principles. And analogies must be carefully drawn between theoretical systems which have empirical linkages.124 It is one of the great beauties of general systems theory that it is free to identify isomorphism in the principles which are operative in social, as well as physical and biological systems.125 The randomness, uncertainty, and organized com122 It is my intuitive notion that the phrase "explosion of knowledge" is in some respects a myth. To be sure, there is a gradual expansion of basic or fundamental theoretical knowledge, but there is by no means an explosion of deductively fecund conceptual systems. What there seems to be is a publication explosion reflecting the exponential increase in knowledge which is crudely empirical or of low theoretical order. 123 Miller, "Living Systems ..• ," op. cit., p. 193. 124 Kenneth Boulding has reminded us that analogies are only as good as the empirical linkages to the theoretical systems from which they are drawn. See his "General Systems as a Point of View," in Mihajlo Mesarovic (ed.), Views on General Systems Theory (New York: Wiley, 1964), p. 32. 125 Early attempts at identifying general theories, based on the isomorphism of lower order generalization, led, for example, to the observation that the exponential law of mathematics applied to a range of behaviors from radioactive decay to the death rate of bacteria under certain conditions to the rate of decrease in human and animal populations where the mortality rate exceeds the birth rate to (it might be added) the growth rate of the literature of science. Now James Miller has developed some one hundred and sixty-five different hypotheses which are crosslevel in the sense that they apply to the behavior of living systems at different levels of complexity. It is interesting to note that in the process of developing these hypotheses, Miller also identified discontinuities like longevity, size, and diffusion. He has employed matter, energy, and information as his fundamental analytical concepts. See his "Living Systems: Basic Concepts," op. cit., pp. 193, 216; his "Living Systems: Cross-Level Hypotheses," Behavioral Science, X ( October 1965), 380-411; and, finally, his "Living Systems: Structure and Process," Behavioral Science, X (October 1965), 337-79. ; Implications of General Systems Theory I 385 plexity present in all three kinds of systems render them open to the application of mathematical methods which were unnecessary in classical, mechanistic science.126 In the process of identifying metaprinciples, general systems theory can be said to be combatting entropy at a very high level. The operations of imagination, correlation, and systematic thought which go into the identification of such general theories of systems result, it has been suggested, in the creation of new information or negative entropy. Therefore, the "form" in the word information is precisely what it suggests, that is to say, formative and structural.127 What are the prospects for general systems theory as a curricular integrating principle in undergraduate, and perhaps even graduate level, general education? Boulding already teaches a course entitled "General Systems" to honor seniors at the University of Michigan. In this course, general systems is presented as a point of view rather than a set of techniques. The course objectives seem to follow a perspective on general systems theory shared by Boulding with von Bertalanffy. The course prospectus reads as follows: The object of this course is to examine the general structure of theoretical systems in many different branches of learning, with a view to establishing relationships among the theories which pertain to various em126 Like finality, equifinality, hierarchical order, and the like. Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Problems of Life: An E valuation of Modern Biological and Scientific Thought (New York: Harper, 1952), pp. 189-90, 199, 202. Also his, " General Systems TheoryA Critical Review," General Systems, VI ( 1962), 2. 127 See Miller, "Living Systems: Basic Concepts," op. cit., p. 194; Henry Quastler, The Emergence of Biological Organization (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Pr. , 1964), pp. 3-4; and Leon Brillouin, Scientific Uncertainty, and Information (New York: Academic Press, 1964), pp. 17-18, 21. For a discussion of the analogy between the linguistic theory of Noam Chomsky and the tiered way in which one can view the structure of science, see Israel Scheffier, The Anatomy of Inquiry: Philosophical Studies in the Theory of Science (New York: Knopf, 1963), p . 7. Of particular interest is the analogy between grammatical units of cross-linguistic relevance· (for example, nouns) and the structural terms of science (for example, theory) which have cross-disciplinary application. pirical subject matters. By so doing it is hoped that the student will come to appreciate certain basic unities which underly the universe of knowledge.128 In discussing the relationship between systems theory and systems research as two elements in a systems science, Russell Acko:ff projects a different point of view. As early as the 1950's, he expressed his concern about the excessive generalization, operational insignificance, and almost metaphysical point of view which he thought pervaded the systems movement.129 Acko:ff suggests that where systems theory seeks to identify theories with cross-disciplinary generality, systems research views knowledge as a product of the application of scientific method applied not to phenomena defined by disciplines but to nature viewed holistically, typically in terms of some problem. He would argue that nature does not share the disciplinary organization of universities and that for systems theory to accept such arbitrary divisions is a constraint on its proclaimed holism. For Acko:ff the direction of abstraction vis-a-vis system principles is from the complex to the simple, not the reverse. He is unsettled about the apparent removal of systems theory from the empirical world-a two-stage removal if one considers general systems theories as inductively formulated on the bases of a common principle observed to be operative in a limited set of concrete systems. Therefore, Acko:ff argues, more limited theories must be: ( 1 ) deduced from the general theories for application to newly identified systems; and ( 2) 12s Prospectus for General Systems (College Honors 498), taught by Kenneth Boulding at the University of Michigan. One scholar has observed that the symbiosis between a professor and undergraduates who lack a full initiation into the ethos of the discipline which he represents can result in a critical examination of the formal foundations of the field, which the symbiotic relationship between a professor and his graduate students or professional colleagues might never elicit. See Richard Wolfgang, " Pure Research, Cultism, and the Undergraduate,'' Science, CL (December 1965), 1564. 129 Russell L. Ackoff, "Games, Decisions, and Organizations,'' General Systems, IV ( 1959), 145. 386 1 College & Research Libraries • September, 1966 either validated or invalidated empirically. In sum, however, Ackoff sees good work ongoing in systems theory as well as systems research and seems to suggest that a viable systems science may well require activity in both domains.130 It is apparent that both systems theory and systems research can contribute to a systems-oriented undergraduate program of general education. It is of concern in some quarters, however, that general systems theory, especially when it is viewed as a set of postulates or inductively determined theories from which more limited disciplinary theories can be derived and checked against reality, is open to the logical fallacy of affirming the consequent. In the logic of science it can be maintained that a system principle derived from a more general theory of systems is falsified-and with it the general theory of systems-if it does not agree with empirical reality; and it is confirmed, without really confirming the general systems principle, if it agrees with the empirical world. The logic of (a) falsification and (b) confirmation is as follows: (a) If Y, then X; X is not the case, therefore, Y is not the case and (b) If Y, then X; X is the case, therefore, Y is the case. However, in the process of confirmation, if X is the case, Y may not necessarily be uniquely the case. Therefore, one observes formal validity where there is falsification and formal invalidity where there is confirmation. This is so because the confirmation of X (a logically derived disciplinary theory which has been deduced from a general theory of systems ) does not guarantee that Y (the general theory of systems) is uniquely the case. It is entirely possible, for example, that a different general theory of systems, Z, could also logically give rise to the dis130 Russell L. Ackoff, "General Systems Theory and Systems Research : Contrasting Conceptions of Systems Science" in Mesarovic ( ed.) op. cit., pp. 51-60. This is obviously, as Anatol Rapoport has pointed out, a task for the philosophy of science. See his "Reflections on General Systems Theory," in Mesarovic ( ed.) op. cit., p. 171. ciplinary theory X. In brief, if Y then X; X is the case; but also Z then X; X is the case.131 The theories and concepts which .are employed in systems activity are an interesting lot to observe and compare.132 Alfred Kuhn's attempt to unify the knowledge centered in sociology, political science, and economics resulted in the development of concepts like deC1SIOns, communications, transactions, organizations, and their combinations.133 Ackoff speaks of theories of allocation, queuing, sequencing, routing, replacement, competition, .and search and discusses gaming and sequencing in his book, Scientific Method: Optimizing Applied Research Decisions.134 The role of mathematics is clear from the frequent mention of Bayesian statistics and Monte Carlo method. Of inventory theory, Ack-