Commentary on Roth: Adding a conceptual systems perspective

Abstract

Recently, Roth (2019) provided a well-written, informative, and thought-provoking article arguing "that the concepts of openness and closure are highly amenable to moralization with adverse implications for the development of the present-day systems theoretic thought" (Van Assche, Valentinov, & Verschraegen, 2019, p. 252). Plainly put, Roth explains a prejudicial tendency for scholars to write in favor of "open systems." That tendency may be understood as unnecessarily simplistic as a system may be in some ways open and closed at the same time. Roth's view generates substantial implications relating to the way we evaluate theoretical perspectives with serious implications for the development of general systems theory (GST), open systems theory, and other theories of the systems sciences. The present commentary will strive to explore some of those implications. Roth's article could be enhanced by a discussion of "conceptual systems," as his argument relates to the difficulty of using one conceptual system (moral perspective/stance/code) to understand and choose another (open systems over closed). To provide some context, this commentary begins with brief definitions and reviews some common systems concepts/perspectives to clarify how they relate to conceptual systems.

Understanding and improving the usefulness of conceptual systems: An Integrative Propositional Analysis‐based perspective on levels of structure and emergence

“…Those with higher levels of structure are more open to data but less open to changes in conceptual components. Those with lower levels of structure are more closed to data, but more open to changes in conceptual components' (Wallis, 2020a).…”

Of wolves and dogs and other false distinctions: A rejoinder to Wallis

“…In his “Commentary on Roth: Adding a conceptual systems perspective,” Steve Wallis (in press) shares most valuable insights of how my article on the “prejudicial tendency for scholars to write in favour of ‘open systems&';;;” could be enhanced by a “conceptual systems” approach. Whereas there is very much correspondence between our lines of thought, there are certain discrepancies that deserve further comments.…”

“…This is true for biological systems, the observation of which has triggered the very turn to open systems theory that was a main topic of the commented article (Roth, ) and the special issue of SRBS on “Ludwig von Bertalanffy and his enduring relevance” (van Assche, Valentinov, & Verschraegen, ) it was published in. Moreover, in his comment, Wallis (in press) himself refers to yet another type of systems that are neither covered by nor can be reduced to either physical or conceptual ones: social systems.…”

“…In such a context, meaning is less about degrees of interconnectedness and equilibria between the individual elements of a system, but more an implication of the complexity differentials that result, not least, from the inevitable self‐implication of any observing system in its object of observation. This and further aspects of the autopoietic condition systematically undermine the credo of “(m)ultiple streams of research” that “show that conceptual systems of more interconnected parts have more meaning (are more useful for understanding situations)” (Wallis, in press), and it is worth mentioning that such simplistic the more, the better approaches contradict Wallis&';; own work, co‐authored with Vladislav Valentinov (Wallis & Valentinov, , p. 738), on sustainable theory and the “conceptual construct of the complexity‐sustainability trade‐off.” At least part of this contradiction, however, might emerge because the observation of a trade‐off between sustainability and complexity is not inherent to either complexity or sustainability but again based on a false distinction. A translation of this false into two true distinctions following the tetralemmatization strategies presented in Roth (, p. 91f; 2019b, p. 284f) would clearly illustrate that systems are not necessarily either sustainable or complex but may also be both complex and sustainable or neither complex nor sustainable.…”

“…The detection of such contradictions, however, is the moment when attempts at “measuring the structure of systems theory” (Wallis, in press) could be complemented by attempts at coding paradigm‐neutral theory debuggers, which most probably require a digital transformation of both social and systems theory (Rivero Blanco, ; Roth, , ; Roth, Dahms, Welz, & Cattacin, ).…”