General System Theory: Foundations, Development, Applications

by Ludwig Von Bertalanffy

The proposal of system theory was received incredulously as fantastic or presumptuous. Either—it was argued—it was trivial because the so-called isomorphisms were merely examples of the truism that mathematics can be applied to all sorts of things, and it therefore carried no more weight than the “discovery” that 2 + 2 = 4 holds true for apples, dollars and galaxies alike; or it was false and misleading because superficial analogies—as in the famous simile of society as an “organism”—camouflage actual differences and so lead to wrong and even morally objectionable conclusions. Or, again, it was philosophically and methodologically unsound because the alleged “irreducibility” of higher levels to lower ones tended to impede analytical research whose success was obvious in various fields such as in the reduction of chemistry to physical principles, or of life phenomena to molecular biology.