Re: new member

Rolfe Windward (rwindwar who-is-at ucla.edu)
Wed, 14 Aug 1996 18:29:43 -0700

I was also interested in Matvey's allusion to systems theory but got
sidetracked in my response (ah well, it happens--especially to an addlepate
such as myself). I'd say that von Bertalanffy was actually rather
non-traditional. Certainly he was more expansive than either chaos theory,
which is essentially a way to express *deterministic* randomness, or
cybernetics which has become the rather limited surrogate for the humanistic
open-systems theory that von Bertalanffy was really trying to develop (see
Davidson, 1983; also Doll, 1993). I'd say that that John Casti (1994) does a
pretty good job of explaining complexity theory (which includes chaos theory
as one of its subdisciplines). And of course there is also Niklas Luhmann
but I'm still not happy with his reliance on cybernetics to explain the
relationship between society and environment. At least his major work (1995)
has been (finally) translated into English--not that I (still) understand
more than half of it.

Rolfe

Casti, J. L. (1994). _Complexification: Explaining a Paradoxical World
Through the Science of Surprise_. New York: HarperCollins.
Davidson, M. (1983). _Uncommon Sense: The Life and Thought of Ludwig von
Bertalanffy (1901-1972), the Father of General Systems Theory_. Los Angeles:
J. P. Tarcher.
Doll, W. E., Jr. (1993). _A Postmodern Perspective on Curriculum_. New
York: Teachers College Press.
Luhmann, N. (1995). _Soziale Systeme (Social Systems)_. (John Bednarz Jr.
with Dirk Baecker, Trans.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Rolfe Windward [UCLA GSE&IS: Curriculum & Teaching]
e-mail: rwindwar who-is-at ucla.edu (Text/BinHex/MIME/Uuencode)
70014.0646 who-is-at compuserve.com (text/binary/GIF/JPG)