MacrosystemExosystemMicrosystemIndividualChild.docx

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BRONFENBRENNER’S ECOLOGICAL MODEL
■ Research Paper
General Systems Theory: Its Past and
Potential†
Peter Caws1,2*
1 Department of Philosophy, The George Washington
University, Washington, DC, USA
2 American Association for the Advancement of Science,
Washington, DC, USA
This paper has three parts. First, I discuss what I take as the
original stimulus and the pur-
pose of general systems theory (GST) to be, why I think it is
important, and how I came to
be involved in it. I reflect on von Bertalanffy’s general system
(sic) theory and the early
debates on the topic, stressing the essential concept of
isomorphism, with its rewards in
following up parallel developments in different domains, and its

risks and temptations
in the projection of grand and all-inclusive systems. Second, I
discuss the direction my
own work took after my term as President of the Society for
General Systems Research
(1966–1967), and how it diverged from the early program, in
particular in its emphasis
on the difference between system and structure and on the
essential role of individual
subjectivity in the latter. I stress the importance of the concept
of ‘relation’ as underlying
that of ‘system’, and in particular the difference between
relations as embodied in physical
systems and relations as components of intentional structures
that may or may not corre-
spond to physical systems. In the third and final part, I discuss
the place of GST in the
philosophy of science, especially in connection with the unity
of science movement, and
its potential for the organization of this domain. I ask what light
the concept of system
can throw on our knowledge of the universe and its worlds (a
distinction explained in
the paper), and what the risks are of assuming tight
isomorphisms between mathematical
structures and physical systems, for example, in cosmology and
quantum mechanics.
Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Keywords general system theory (GST); philosophy of science;
unity of science; isomorphism;
history of the systems movement
PART 1
It is an honor to have been invited to appear

before you today; the more so because this
lecture is named for Ludwig von Bertalanffy. It
is also an unexpected honor – I did not know until
recently that this meeting was even happening,
* Correspondence to: Peter Caws, Webb 101, Mount Vernon
Campus,
The George Washington University, Washington, DC 20052,
USA.
E-mail: [email protected]
† The Ludwig von Bertalanffy Memorial Lecture delivered at
the annual
conference of the International Society for the Systems Sciences
(ISSS),
Washington, DC, USA, on July 2014 was presented as twinned
presenta-
tions by Peter Caws and David Rousseau, under the joint title
‘General Sys-
tems Theory: Past, Present and Potential’. This paper represents
Peter Caws’
contribution reflecting on the past and potential of general
system theory.
Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Systems Research and Behavioral Science
Syst. Res. 32, 514–521 (2015)
Published online in Wiley Online Library
(wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/sres.2353
and although my name has regularly appeared
on the list of the Board of Distinguished Advisors
of this Society I have, as far as I can recall, never
given it any advice, distinguished or otherwise. It

is a coincidence that the meeting should be
taking place in Washington, not only at my own
university but also in my own neighborhood,
within 10-min walk from my apartment – a case
of the meeting coming to me rather than me having
to go to the meeting. It is also a coincidence that
Tom Mandel (to whom I owe my thanks – I am
sorry he cannot be with us) should have had the
idea of bringing back, on this particular occasion,
some of the early participants in the International
Society for the Systems Sciences (ISSS) or its
precursor. If it had not been for all these things, I
probably would not have been here at all. But I
am very glad I am.
Some of what I have to say will inevitably be
autobiographical. My claim to attention is pre-
sumably that I was once President of the Society
for General Systems Research, the precursor of
your own ISSS. Bringing back a former President
after almost 50 years has its risks. For one thing,
unless he has been following things closely, which
I have not, he was bound to be out of touch. For
another, anyone who has had the responsibility
of addressing an annual meeting as its President,
and who has taken that responsibility seriously,
probably is, or at any rate was, pretty opinionated.
I thought I had a necessary task back in 1966,
and I tried to carry it out; but it was not popular.
At that time, I took my job to be deflationary.
People were getting carried away by the idea of
an overarching, all-embracing system, of which
all the sciences were to be partial instantiations.
I remember in particular a paper, which I had
especially in mind in writing my address, that

argued from a local distribution of small-mouth
bass to a layered hierarchy of systems from the
microscopic to the cosmic. I thought this was
extravagant, if not megalomaniacal, and would
give systems theory a bad name, so I was at pains
to point out its limitations. As I put it in the intro-
duction to the reprinting of the address, in my
book Yorick’s World,
‘among some of my colleagues in the Society I
had detected a rampant tendency to suppose,
somewhat after the manner of Hegel, that
ontology could be read off from logic – that if
one could build a layered edifice of theoretical
systems the world must contain somewhere
their real counterparts. The argument of the
address served as a gentle rebuke to these
pansystematists’(Caws,1993, 16).
Some of my listeners probably thought I was a
killjoy – although I admit that I took some satis-
faction in the fact that, after I had made my point
in the presidential address, Anatol Rapoport
thanked me for making it and said he wished
he had done it himself.
All this was, of course, partly von
Bertalanffy’s fault, because he was something
of an evangelist for what he originally called
general system theory, in the singular, that is,
the theory of a system that would embrace the
diversity of the sciences and subsume the partic-
ular systems that he was confident would be
found repeating themselves at various levels of
complexity. To do him justice, he himself did

not yield to the lofty pretensions I was gunning
for. In his ‘Response’ to the papers offered to
him on his 70th birthday, compiled by Ervin
Laszlo as The Relevance of General Systems Theory,
he says: ‘I did not find ultimate truth or “noth-
ing-but” solutions, and never aspired toward
…. a secular “extra ecclesiam nulla salus.”
Rather, whatever I may have been able to con-
tribute, leaves plenty for others to do better’
(Laszlo, 1972, p.483),
Von Bertalanffy started at a middle level, that
of biological systems, where he introduced an
essential and most fruitful distinction between
closed and open systems, the latter providing
as the former did not for metabolic exchanges
across boundaries. Boundaries, as the theme of
this conference suggests, are crucial. However,
it is worth pausing here. Open systems can be
open in all sorts of ways – and they can be
closed by the selective admission of adjacent
elements. So the extent of the system becomes
a matter of choice – what are its elements, in
what relations, across what boundaries? This
is consistent with the definition of ‘system’ it-
self, deriving as it does all the way from its
Greek origin as nothing more specific than ‘a
Syst. Res. RESEARCH PAPER
Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Syst. Res. 32, 514–
521 (2015)
DOI: 10.1002/sres.2353
General Systems Theory: Its Past and Potential 515

whole compounded of several parts or mem-
bers’. But that is entirely indeterminate – what
is the whole in question?
There seems to be no obvious answer to this a
priori, as is evident from the astonishing variety
of submissions to the present conference – no
prescribed field of study, no limitations on scope.
The scope is sometimes virtually all-embracing,
as in the case of large-scale systems engineer-
ing, whose practitioners have what may seem
the grandiose task of anticipating all possible
boundary crossings at all degrees of scale or
detail and in all interacting domains, whether
natural or social, financial or logistical, physical
or biological, ecological or meteorological, etc.,
not missing any contingencies but not
overestimating any either, with huge conse-
quences for budgets and human welfare hanging
on every decision.
But I am getting ahead of myself here. I pro-
mised some reflection on what the field was like
when I got into it. I arrived in the United States,
with a degree in Physics under my belt but
not otherwise committed, at an exciting time,
catching the wave of what Gregory Bateson
characterized as
‘the growing together of a number of ideas
which had developed in different places dur-
ing the second world war. We may call the
aggregate of these’, he continued, ‘cybernet-
ics, or communication theory, or information

theory, or systems theory. …. All these sepa-
rate developments in different intellectual
centers dealt with communicational prob-
lems, especially with the problem of what
sort of thing is an organized system’
(Bateson, 1972, p.483).
This is worth dwelling on too, given how
cybernetics, and information, and communica-
tion, and our own systems, have been rivals for
dominance ever since. As David Rousseau
remarked to me yesterday, everyone wants to
be the mother ship.
I was able to switch fields to philosophy, thanks
to the generosity of Yale and my mentor there,
Henry Margenau, who used to work closely with
C. West Churchman, at that time, one of the edi-
tors of the journal Philosophy of Science, in which
I published some of my early papers. In my dis-
sertation work in 1956, I realized the importance
of the concept of isomorphism as it applied to
conceptual schemes and their mirroring (pace
Rorty) of physical structures. I did not then know
von Bertalanffy’s work, or that he had spoken
about ‘the structural isomorphy of laws in the dif-
ferent fields of science and reality’ (von
Bertalanffy, 1951), although I may have been
indirectly influenced by it, because one of my
professors was Carl G. (‘Peter’) Hempel, who
had commented on the paper in which von
Bertalanffy used the expression and may possibly
have referred to it in class.
By an accident of academic fate, my first teach-

ing job was not in philosophy but in ‘general
science’, which meant that I had to read up on
chemistry and genetics and geology, to add to
the meteorology to which I had been introduced
in school by an eager young physics teacher fresh
out of the Air Force. This constituted a pretty
good basis for doing comparative work. I special-
ized in the philosophy of science – and I have
always believed that scholars who do that must
have a first-hand acquaintance with as broad a
range of the natural and social sciences as
possible.
I gravitated naturally enough to the American
Association for the Advancement of Sciences
(AAAS) and gave my first paper to its annual
meeting during that first year of teaching. All
sorts of interesting developments were coming
to light, particularly in studies on the brain and
nervous system, and I remember being intro-
duced to the work of McCulloch and Pitts, and
reading Ross Ashby’s (1960) Design for a Brain
and of course his Introduction to Cybernetics
(1956). I do not remember how I first came across
it, but one of the formative influences at the time
was the work of an eccentric society called the
Artorga Research Group (for ARTificial ORGAnism),
whose president was Oliver D. Wells and whose
committee consisted of Gordon Pask, Heinz von
Foerster, Ross Ashby and Stafford Beer. Add in
Kenneth Boulding, Anatol Rapoport, Gregory
Bateson and Margaret Mead, and you get some
idea of the firepower of these early pioneers. I
did not know all of them personally, but some-
how between Artorga, the young Society for

RESEARCH PAPER Syst. Res.
521 (2015)
DOI: 10.1002/sres.2353
516 Peter Caws
General Systems Research, the AAAS (of which I
became Vice-President for Section L in 1967) and
my first book on the philosophy of science (Caws,
1965), I found myself delivering the address to
which I have referred in 1966.
I want to pay special tribute to Oliver Wells, a
neglected figure in this history. He self-published
a series of periodical pamphlets for Artorga and
one small book, HOW COULD YOU Be So Na-
ïve? (Wells, 1970) from his home in southern En-
gland, and was responsible for bringing a lot of
original work to the attention of his mailing list.
I am not sure whether to mention this, but I re-
member being startled at the time, and maybe
you will be too: one of the articles he
republished in his book bore the title ‘Science
Fiction – Sex for Ever: A New Cybernetic Project
called Interfuck’ (Wells, 1970, 140-143), which
proposed ‘the development of a group of sys-
tems for the two-way transmission of sensory-
sexual information’, based on the apparatus
developed by Masters and Johnson for measur-
ing the human sexual response. It contained
the laconic remark ‘the project is difficult to
name in English,’ although Oliver Wells seems

to have had no trouble with this. It seems to
me a case of boundary crossing worth drawing
to your attention. I also owe to Wells a pithy
formula, ‘the brain computes the world’, which
summed up admirably a causal theory of per-
ception that still holds water today.
Artorga engaged in a collective effort to build
a self-reproducing machine, based on some ge-
netic work by Lionel Penrose. In the Penrose
archive at University College London, I recently
came across an interview with Wells, in French,
in the journal Science et Vie, in which the
interviewer, Gerald Messadié, expressed his ad-
miration for the systems work going on in the
English-speaking world and concluded rather
enviously:
‘There is today no creative mind which does
not direct all its wishes to a profound re-
newal of all the ideas with which we live. In-
numerable original works are sleeping in the
files of scientists and technologists. It is per-
haps Artorga that is preparing the synthesis
and the reorganization that are necessary, a
veritable work of the Encyclopedists [quite
a compliment for a Frenchman]. It only re-
mains for France to join in’ (Messadié, 1961).
In view of the plethora of systems literature to
which Gerald Midgley referred the other day, it
would seem that this work is as urgent as ever.
In my Presidential address, which I entitled
‘Science and System: on the Unity and Diversity

of Scientific Theory’, I commented on the change
from ‘theory’ to ‘research’ in the name of the soci-
ety, which seemed to me to mark a becoming
modesty. A theory, as I pointed out, is really a
way of looking at things – theoros in Greek meant
an official observer, who accompanied people to
the consultation of oracles or to competition in
the regional games, to ensure that things were
done in proper order and reported correctly. So
a theory is not just any old way of looking, but
one which carries some gravitas and will stand
against challenge. A general theory would be a
way of looking at many things, perhaps at all
things, in a similar way.
The further transition from ‘theory’ to ‘science’
makes a stronger claim. What rendered all those
conjectured isomorphisms suspect was that theo-
retical possibilities do not always map onto phys-
ical actualities. Natural systems come into being
as they do, with the contingency of evolutionary
accidents and pressures – many niches remain
unfilled, so we cannot assume totality or even
generality. It was a good move on the part of
the International Society for the Systems Sciences
to drop the ‘General’ of the Society for General
Systems Research.
Already in my dissertation, I was stressing the
need for the theoretician to accompany and ani-
mate the theory, which could I suppose be taken
as a version of the view that the observer has to
be considered along with what is observed. That
view, however, has to be handled with care. That
there might be a theory of theories, a science of
science, seemed obvious to me, but that did not

mean that there was anything wrong or naive in
trying for a science free of observer bias, and in-
deed that is a condition of success in most of
the physical, as opposed to the social or human,
sciences. The essential conditions for a science,
it still seems to me, are three:
521 (2015)
DOI: 10.1002/sres.2353
(1) Object constancy across knowing subjects,
including agreed nomenclature (this means
being sure we are talking about the same thing);
(2) Replicable observations and predictions, sub-
ject to common reporting standards (this means
looking at the same elements of the world in the
same way); and
(3) Theoretical consistency, including to the
extent possible, simplicity and plausibility
(this means arguing openly and convincingly
in the face of doubt or criticism).
These last conditions are sometimes definitive.
One notable case for the test of simplicity is the
switch from the Ptolemaic to the Copernican
account of the solar system. As I pointed out in
an earlier paper (Caws, 1963), the advent of com-

puters would have made predictions according
to the Ptolemaic view quite feasible, but the
simpler Copernican picture was easier to visua-
lize and its predictions quicker to compute. A
contemporary challenge to the test of plausibility
is presented by Big Bang theory and particularly
by inflationary cosmology, which make extra-
ordinary claims on belief in matters of time and
causality.
PART 2
There followed a series of changes in my field of
work, although not all at the same time. One of
them was an existentialist turn, thanks to
students in Kansas who persuaded me to read
Kierkegaard and Sartre with them, in spite of
my appointment in logic and the philosophy of
science. Later, there was a structuralist turn,
thanks to the French (their answer to Messadié?).
In the summer of 1966, at the conference center of
Cerisy-la-Salle in Normandy, I met a young
French scholar of whom I inquired what was
going on of interest in French philosophy at the
time. Knowing that I taught philosophy in the
United States, she tried to pin me down: ‘was I
a positivist?’ ‘No’, I said. ‘A Marxist, then?’ ‘Not
that either’. ‘So you must be a structuralist’,
she said. I did not know what that was, not at
any rate as a philosophical position. But the inter-
esting philosophical work is not going on in
philosophy, she said – you should talk to the
anthropologists and the literary critics and the
psychoanalysts and the linguists.

I proceeded to do just this, spending some-
thing like a decade in preparation for my book
on structuralism that came out some time later
(Caws, 1989, 2000). In the meantime I published
in the technical journals of all these fields, with
the exception of linguistics. Does that make me
then a jack of all trades? I suppose I may be said
to have earned my union card with my work on
Sartre, if not on structuralism itself, but just as
in the case of teaching general science I have
never regretted my apprenticeship in those other
fields. What they all had in common was
starting, not from the objects under investigation,
but from the minds that recognized, learned,
appreciated and, in the end, created those objects.
As I put it in Yorick, structuralism ‘is a view of
mind as a structuring agent, which puts together
a world of thought comparable in its complexity
to the world of experience’ (Caws, 1993, 110).
Reducing all this to the point now at issue, it
represented a shift from an interest in systems
to an interest in structures. This distinction is of
critical importance. As I see it, systems are sets
of independently existing elements in (func-
tional) relations with one another, whereas struc-
tures (leaving aside the everyday meaning of the
term as referring to physical buildings) are sets of
relations, whose elements come into being and
are defined by the very relations that determine
them. Systemic relations are embodied; structural
ones are intended. And it is important to know
what ‘relation’ means. There are relations (a) that
are straightforwardly embodied in physical
objects, (b) that are defined as ordered pairs of
elements, physical or otherwise (mapping or not

onto classes of type a) or (c) that are established
by intentionality and apposition. This last class
is by far the most interesting and important.
By intentionality, I mean the capacity human
beings have of directing thought towards chosen
objects (attention is the special case in which the
objects are presented; intention when they are
more freely chosen or even created), and by ap-
position I mean the companion capacity to take
any two such objects and hold them in relation
to one another. Obvious cases are naming, and
RESEARCH PAPER Syst. Res.
521 (2015)
DOI: 10.1002/sres.2353
518 Peter Caws
translating, and establishing hypothetical rela-
tions between given or chosen elements. Inten-
tional relations require a subject and can only be
sustained as long as the subject continues to
intend them.
This clearly gives them a status quite different
from the embodied relations of my class (a). For
the latter, a reasonable postulate is what I call
‘the realist hypothesis’, namely, the hypothesis
that there really are things in the world related
in just those ways, and that they are and remain
related in those ways, whether we pay any atten-

tion to them or not. But intentional relations do
not hold unless someone is paying attention to
them. Popper (1972) to the contrary notwith-
standing, there is no World III in which objective
problems exist, waiting to be solved. At the same
time, if I am not thinking about one of these prob-
lems, it is very likely that someone else is (this is a
general point, of wide application, which I do not
have time to develop) so the appropriate hypoth-
esis is what I call the ‘other-minds (or co-inten-
tional) hypothesis’. These hypotheses underlie
different modes of being of the objects of the
sciences, perceptual/physical versus intentional/
cultural.
So structural elements are defined as relational
and constitute whole domains of the objects that
are of the most interest to us – kinship, language,
law, literature, theory, etc. – and, I would claim,
the domains of mathematics and theology also.
A quick example of the sort of situation that
may arise: the Greek Simonides set a riddle,
‘The son is the father of his father’, the solution
to which is the observation that the father does
not come into being as a father until the son
brings him into being as such by being born to
him.
The great difference then is between relations
as embodied in physical systems and relations
as components of intentional structures that
may or may not correspond to physical systems.
The natural sciences deal with systems, what I
call the human sciences with structures. But
structures can be superimposed upon systems,
and this regularly happens when objects and

their relations are named and made elements of
theoretical structures having empirical reference.
The natural sciences deal with objects that would
be as they are, whether or not anyone takes any
interest in them, and events that would happen
anyway once the relevant conditions are realized,
but the human sciences deal with objects that
come into being only through human intention
and intervention, events that are brought about
by human action.
Natural processes without contrivance do not
have ends but do have consequences. Natural
processes contrived for human ends (which we
call technology) lead in principle to desirable
consequences – but may also have undesirable
ones (often lumped under the catchall designa-
tion of ‘unintended consequences’). Human pro-
cesses that lead to action (always on the part of
individuals) are normally intended to have desir-
able consequences, but whether they do so
depends on the good will, the knowledge and
the wisdom of those individuals. A lot of work
remains to be done on such human systems.
Having introduced human agents, I should
perhaps make one further remark about putting
the observer into the system. The problem is this:
suppose system S to be observed by observer O,
O being external to the system under observation.
Bringing the two together, we have the more
inclusive system [S +O]. This in turn becomes an
object for theoretical reflection on the part of a sec-
ond observer, O′, who once again is external to
the system, yielding the new system [[S+O]+O′],

to be reflected on by a third observer, Oʺ, and so
on. This is a classic problem, going back at least
to the Hegelian System, which was supposed to
encompass everything – except, as Kierkegaard
pointed out, there was no room in it for Hegel him-
self. If we are to grasp the system, we have to have
a point of view outside it from which to do so. The
real advantage of the second-order cybernetic
strategy comes into play when the observer is also
an agent, but the distinction between the two roles
must be kept clear.
PART 3
What light can the concept of systems throw on
our knowledge of the universe and its worlds?
This again is a critical distinction: the concept of
‘world’ (and there are many worlds) is essentially
521 (2015)
DOI: 10.1002/sres.2353
related to the human, that of the universe (of
which there is only one, theories of the multiverse
to the contrary notwithstanding) transcends
human interests, even if human theorizing has
the ambition of encompassing it. Systems thinking
insists, then, that we regard worlds and the
universe as thoroughly interrelated totalities,

every part being accessible from every part, and
the interactions of the parts being in principle intel-
ligible and predictable.
What are the risks of assuming tight isomor-
phisms between mathematical structures and
physical systems, for example, in cosmology
and quantum mechanics? If my colleagues in
the 1960s jumped to unwarranted conclusions,
this need not have meant that they were alto-
gether on the wrong track. Even if not all
theoretical relations are physically instantiated,
that is no reason not to look for those that are.
So the assumption is premature, but as a goal,
it is worthy. One of the virtues of general sys-
tems theory was and is its breaking down of
the partitions between the sciences that left
each busy in its own domain without talking
of the synergy their cross-fertilization could
generate.
The supplementing of systemic relations with
structural ones means not only stressing but also
exploiting the distinction between what I have
been calling the natural sciences and the human
sciences, recognizing that they have different
ontologies and different dynamics. The natural
sciences deal with physical objects that behave
according to laws discernible through studies of
their behavior, while the human sciences deal
with cultural objects that behave according to
the beliefs and intentions of human agents. One
cardinal principle that emerges from a consider-
ation of this distinction is that it is futile to try
to solve problems in the human sciences with
tools appropriate to the natural sciences, for

example, by attempting to settle ideological
differences with weapons of war (the converse
case is not so clear-cut, partly because the objects
governed by the natural sciences have them-
selves to be conceptualized and subjected to
measurement).
The great lesson here is to keep the natural and
human sciences in a collaborative tension with
one another, and to regard them, if you will, as
components of a larger system; to have both as-
pects openly in mind in all our work, but not to
confuse them with one another; and to have per-
meable boundaries between domains (gates, not
just fences). We should learn everything possible,
even from apparently competing disciplines.
And we should maintain an active theoretical
stance, not allowing technology – invaluable as
it is – to supersede the intimate and immediate
working of the mind. Theories require observers
(remember the theoros), but they may make them-
selves practically unnecessary by being embod-
ied in technology, and in this lies a practical
danger. Think, to take a banal but telling exam-
ple, of how it used to be necessary for clerks in
stores to be adept at mental arithmetic, whereas
now all that mind work is done by an automated
cash register. It is not that the mind of the cashier
is necessary to compute the customer’s change –
it is rather than computing the customer’s
change would be useful for …

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