CONCLUSION

Our investigation of articles in which GST is mentioned reveals an expanded domain; it ranges from logics and mathematical attempts to build a new framework for GST over natural and social sciences to philosophical treatise. Many of the papers were based on former developments that tried to apply or make operable certain concepts of GST.

So, has there been a development of Bertalanffy's GST program as he intended it? GST was meant to become a unifying logico-mathematical approach. The works of Mesarovic Takahara, Klir and Lin are elaborated developments in this direction. Because works such as these are rarely used, however, a unification of science by means of GST has not yet been achieved. No common 'language' for all system research, nor a uniting of several disciplines, have yet been established. The various system attempts in the investigated literature are still rather fragmented. We found little interconnection between the various strands in GST among the topics in the 161 articles. However, the appearance of rather different views and concepts is nothing new. As the following quotation shows, variations in perspective are not necessarily negative: "The fact that 'system theories' by various authors look rather different is, therefore, not an embarrassment or the result of confusion, but rather a healthy development" (Bertalanffy, 1972, p. 30).

Some more recent developments run parallel to each other, although their connection to system theory in general is obvious. Direct connections from GST to the related fields of complexity research, chaos theory and concepts or techniques such as cellular automata, neuronal nets or autopoiesis are rarely made.

We realized from consulting recent anthologies of papers of 'system thinkers' such as Klir's Facets of Systems Science (Klir, 2001), Midgley's Systems Thinking (Midgley, 2003) or Baecker's Schlusselwerke der Systemtheorie (Baecker, 2005) that many of the important articles had already been written long ago and only a few key articles or books had been added in the last 20 years. Significantly, those recent anthologies, together with Francois' International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics (Francois, 2004), several websites, societies and conferences, reflect an active, vivid interest in the topic. Nonetheless, the common baseline–to a rather small community–seems only to be that system approaches are valuable.

We further recognized that system thinking in a broad sense, in the way Bertalanffy understood it, was rare. How authors received system theory, and especially Bertalanffy's GST, reflected a great variety of interpretations. Some of these were questionable in that they either selected only isolated issues from GST or they misunderstood that GST belongs to naive realism. Finally, even though Bertalanffy linked a world view to GST, we found little mention of this link in the investigated literature, which also included philosophical journals.

GST is still considered useful in overcoming reductionism. Within the investigated articles, however, many attempts were restricted to only certain specific problems and ignored the generality of the original intention.

Within system approaches many attempts-which may not have had an explicitly reductionist tendency–had narrow or restricted foci. Perhaps a reductionist tendency exists in science. At the same time complementary system approaches, for example systems biology, also appear in many fields (medicine, economics and biology).

Date: 2015-01-11; view: 841