Systemics

On what you can and can’t grasp.

The analytical exploration of systems has taken many approaches over time. Some researchers have tackled the issue from established disciplines like mathematics, computer science, and philosophy. Others have developed approaches that treat systems as their starting point and main subject, such as cybernetics, systems theory, and ecology.

Due to the diverse nature of these approaches, integrating the knowledge derived from each field has always been a challenge. Attempts to address this challenge include general systems theory, systemics, and systems science. There is ongoing debate about what meta-discipline should group the collective knowledge related to systems — or even if such a meta-discipline is necessary. Some argue that the very nature of systems resists this type of consolidation.

For the purposes of this project, we will avoid this debate and assume the following:

Systems can have a meta-discipline that encompasses their broad analytical work.
For brevity, we will use the term ”systemics” to refer to this meta-discipline.
Systemics should not seek or force a total integration of concepts from each analytical approach.
Systemics should serve as an analytical upper bound and container for knowledge related to systems.

With that in mind, we define the following:

SYSTEMICS: A meta-discipline that groups different perspectives on the study of systems.

This meta-discipline prepares the foundation for our main topic: Conciliatorics.

CONCILIATORICS: A perspective within Systemics that aims to reconcile the ways we approach systems.

Those ways are how we interact with systems. Reconciling the ways we theorize about systems is a different task.

Conciliatorics is the container perspective: any concept used here has its proper analytical context. Systemics is the meta-discipline: concepts and ideas implemented here can coexist with other systems perspectives without the need for conceptual consolidation. We are not trying to absorb cybernetics, ecology, or mathematics into one vocabulary.

The purpose of this framework is to reconcile — hence its name. That work requires an abundance of properly bounded terms. On a first read, the multi-level approach may look like proliferation for its own sake. It is not. The world’s interactions are already this dense; the difficulty of representing them is part of the difficulty of reconciling them, conceptually and in practice. We remain open to revising any section that fails that test. We are not open to flattening the framework so that it appears simpler than the situations it is meant to hold.

We start from Behavior Dynamics.