Towards a Second Generation General System Theory

Dear Colleagues,

After Bertalanffy’s (1901–1972) introduction of General System Theory (GST), the concept of the “system” has been elaborated in almost every disciplinary field, and has allowed for interdisciplinary approaches to biology, chemistry, cognitive science, economics, education, medicine, physics, and sociology. GST has allowed the rise of, for instance, approaches and theories like Automata Theory, Catastrophe Theory, Chaos Theory, Control Theory, Cybernetics, Dissipative Structures, Game Theory, Systems Dynamics, and the Theory of Dynamical Systems.

However, after this very fecund period, on the one hand, new systemic approaches, concepts, and theories arose within the disciplines themselves, and on the other hand, GST had to deal with new problems of complexity.

Examples of new concepts are the ones introduced by network science, scale-invariance, power laws, and all the discoveries and elaborations that are quantum-based.

Examples of concepts of systemic complexity understanding focus on: coherence, development, dynamic usage of models to maintain coherences, emergence, entanglement, incompleteness, irreversibility, meta-structures, multiple non-homogeneity, multiplicity, network properties, non-linearity, non-symbolic, quantum, quasi, scenarios, self-organization, simultaneity, uniqueness, uncertainty, and incompleteness as resources.

On the other side, examples of concepts of GST pre-complexity understanding focus on anticipation, automata, completeness, context-independence, control, decisions, forecasting, growth, non-connectedness objectives, optimization, organization,  planning, precision, regulation, reversibility, separation, solutions, and standardization.

Extensions and updates of such GST concepts are not sufficient to maintain a unitary, systemic theoretical framework because of the different nature of new properties, and because of the problems involved in developing a new, theoretical unitary understanding.

This special issue will focus on the nature of new problems and their eventually common aspects and properties, on approaches that are already partially considered by different disciplines, and on new, possibly unitary, theoretical understandings.

Contributors are invited to present cases, proposals, approaches, models and theoretical frameworks to deal with the challenges of the post-GST age, for academic and disciplinary applications.

Prof. Dr. Gianfranco Minati
Prof. Dr. Eliano Pessa
Guest Editors

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