CHAPTER 31 Systems thinking

Systems thinking is one form that interdisciplinarity has adopted since the middle of the twentieth century. It is a catchall term for different postwar developments in a variety of fi elds, such as cybernetics, information theory, game and decision theory, automaton theory, systems engineering, and operations research. These developments concur, however , inasmuch as, in one way or another, they relate to a basic reorientation in scientifi c thinking attempting to overcome ever-increasing specialization, and trying to make a shift from reductionist to holistic thinking, while acknowledging the unity of reality and the interconnections between its different parts and aspects. There have been a number of attempts to defi ne interdisciplinarity and identify its different types. Of particular interest in the present case is Margaret Boden (1999), who distinguishes six forms ranging from weak to strong: encyclopedic, contextualizing, sharing, cooperative , generalizing, and integrative types of interdisciplinarity. Encyclopedic interdisciplinar-ity requires no exchange or sharing between any disciplines involved, whereas integrative interdisciplinarity demands rigorous interaction. The latter is thus, according to Boden, the most genuine kind of interdisciplinarity as 'an enterprise in which some of the concepts and insights of one discipline contribute to the problems and theories of another—preferably in both directions'. Artifi cial intelligence (AI), a fi eld in which Boden has a scholarly reputation, is in her view an excellent example of integrated interdisciplinarity. Each of the main types of AI, traditional or symbolic AI, connectionism, and 'nouvelle AI' , has borrowed concepts from other disciplines such as philosophy, logic, psychology, and neurophysiology. How does systems thinking fi t into this typology? Boden labels the proposal for a 'gen-eral systems theory' that was launched by Ludwig von Bertalanffy and others in the middle of the twentieth century and Norbert Wiener's closely related idea of cybernetics as examples of 'generalizing interdisciplinarity' , defi ned as 'an enterprise in which a single theoretical perspective is applied to a wide range of previously distinct disciplines'. Also the more recent developments in the area of complexity studies can be regarded as an example of this type. Boden (1999, p. 20) correctly notes that it is no accident that these examples are all heavily mathematical: 'The abstractness of mathematics enables it to be applied, in principle, to all other disciplines' .