College and Research Libraries


DAN BERGEN 

Implications of General Systems Theory 
for Librarianship and Higher Education 

Systems science has both theoretical and empirical dimensions. General 
systems theory investigates the isomorphism of concepts, laws, and 
models in the various domains of human inquiry. General systems 
theory has implications for both academic librarianship and the teach-
ing-learning process in higher education. With respect to the former, 
it promotes the conceptual reorganization of knowledge for storage 
and retrieval. With regard to the latter, it seeks to identify concepts 
whose organizing power transcends the artificial bounds of the aca-
demic disciplines. 

DURING the first quarter of the nine-
teenth century, American higher educa-
tion was attacked by those who deplored 
its theological orthodoxy and smug clas-
sicism. In defense of the existing order 
and in an attempt to define what the 
American college ought to be, the facul-
ty of Yale College issued its famous (or, 
depending upon one's point of view, in-
famous) report of 1828. The goals of 
liberal education were stated early in 
the report: "The two great points to be 
gained in intellectual culture, are the 
discipline and the furniture of the mind; 
expanding its powers and storing it with 
knowledge."1 Set in a mid-twentieth-
century context, these educational pre-
scriptions do not seem entirely irrelevant 
despite their defensive posture at the 
time of enunciation. In the 137 years 
since the issuance of the report, there has 

1 Quoted in Frederick Rudolph, The American 
College ·and University: A History (New York: Knopf, 
1962), p. 132. The Yale Report of 1828 was pub-
lished as "Original Papers in Relation to a Course 
of Liberal Education,'' The American Journal of 
Science and Arts, XV ( 1829), 297-351. It also ap-
peared in Reports on the Course of Instruction in 
Yale College: by a Committee of the Corporation and 
the Academical Faculty (New Haven [1828] ). 

Mr. Bergen is Chairman and Associate 
Professor, Department of Library Science, 
University of Mississippi. 

358 / 

seemed to develop, the countervailing 
efforts of this century notwithstanding, 
an imbalance in American higher educa-
tion in favor of one of its two emphases. 
Concerned with furnishing student 
minds with knowledge, mainly knowl-
edge of a low order of abstraction, Amer-
ican institutions of higher education 
have by and large underemphasized the 
goal of discipline, that is to say, the task 
of acquainting students with the means 
by which the knowledge they have been 
furnished may be ordered and made 
meaningful. It is precisely in this realm 
of discipline, or, put another way, in 
the imaginative organization of knowl-
edge for transmission from one genera-
tion to the next, that the major implica-
tions of general systems theory for li-
brarianship and higher education seem 
to lie. Only to the extent that these im-
plications are realized can Kenneth 
Boulding' s suggestion of a reorientation 
in educational thinking-from the exist-
ing norm of maximum knowledge trans-
mission to a new and more relevant norm 
of minimum knowledge transmission-
be accomplished. 2 It is to that very large 

2 See Boulding, The Image: Knowledge in Life ond 
Society (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Pr., 1956), 
pp. 162-63. 



Implications of General Systems Theory 1359 

end that this very modest paper seeks 
to contribute. 

The processes underlying the growth 
of human knowledge are undoubtedly 
very complex. The very complexity of 
these processes should not, however, de-
ter a search for pattern and order in 
them. One way of viewing the growth 
of knowledge historically is through the 
alternating dominance of raw empiricism 
and low order empirical theory on one 
hand, and speculative philosophy and 
logically and mathematically informed 
hypothetico-deductive theory on the 
other. To interpret the development of 
knowledge within such a cyclic frame-
work is to see its growth in terms of the 
dominant strategies employed over time 
in its generation. For example, the specu-
lative philosophy of the late medieval 
period can be depicted as hovering 
above, in its abstractness and formalism, 
the seeming disorder of the empirical 
world much like a hovercraft hovers di-
rectly above a point on land or water 
without ever settling on it. The intel-
lectual formulations of the fourteenth 
century have been characterized as "ver-
bal, logic-chopping, and abstract" as 
a consequence of their obsession with 
''discipline, method, and artifice." In con-
trast, a medieval schoolman reincarnated 
during the last quarter of the nineteenth 
century might well have deplored the ex-
cessive empiricism of the emergent aca-
demic specialties and their emphasis on 
''subject matter, experience, and nature," 
not to mention their inclination toward 
the "factual, pragmatic, and technical."3 

3 Richard P. McKeon, "The Liberating Arts and 
the Humanizing Arts in Education," in Arthur A. 
Cohen (ed.), Humanistic Education and Western Civi-
lization: Essays for Robert M. Hutchins (New York: 
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964, pp. 169-70. A 
modem analogue of the postulates of speculative 
philosophy are the mathematically formulated deduc-
tive postulates of theoretical physics which tend to 
be judged more on a basis of aesthetic excellence 
than on any criterion of empirical validation. See 
Peter Caws, The Philosophy of Science: A Systematic 
Account (Princeton, N.J.: Van Nostrand, 1965), 
pp. 283-84. 

Peter Caws has interpreted the pro-
gression of science as a continuing dia-
lectic or interplay between its logical 
and experimental aspects, the former 
involving ''the rational investigation of 
connections between concepts, without 
special regard to the adequacy of the 
concepts to experience" and the latter 
"the empirical investigation of connec-
tions between events, without special re-
gard to the significance of these events 
in any total scheme of things."4 The re-
lationship between logical construction 
and empirical investigation in the de-
velopment of knowledge viewed both 
holistically and in its man-defined sub-
divisions seems indeed to be reflected 
in a mutual feedback which drives the 
structure of knowledge, over the long 
term, toward a kind of homeostatic 
steady state. It has been suggested that 
the output of empirical knowledge in 
the various academic disciplines ( and 
therefore, by extension, in knowledge as 
a whole) is controlled by the differen-
tial integrative capacities of those disci-
plines.5 Thus it follows that where a 
discipline's logical or theoretic-deduc-
tive component is well developed the 
production of empirical knowledge will 
be facilitated. This hypothesis also sug-
gests, at least for the modern intellectual 
disciplines, that any imbalance between 
theoretic and empiric dimensions is ulti-
mately corrected by the internal logic 
of equilibrium. Still, over the short term, 
the empiric is capable of outrunning the 
theoretic and vice versa. From the stand-
point of organizing knowledge for trans-
mission, the seriousness of theoretical 
knowledge outdistancing empirical 
knowledge is not so great as that of em-
pirical investigation outrunning integra-

4 Caws, op. cit., p. 331. 
5 See Norman W. Storer and Talcott Parsons, "The 

Disciplines as a Differentiating Force," in Dan Bergen 
( ed.), The Foundations of Access to Knowledge 
(Syracuse, N.Y.: School of Library Science, Syracuse 
University, in Press), (pp. 23-24 in the mimeographed 
form). 



3601 College & Research Libraries • September, 1966 

tive capacity.6 It is this latter type of 
imbalance that can lead to the crisis of 
a civilization incapable of meaningfully 
integrating its knowledge. To counter 
such imbalance would seem to be a 
most worthy rationale for general sys-
tems theory. 

In an anthropomorphic sense, the 
growth of knowledge may be viewed in 
evolutionary perspective as a process of 
progressive differentiation of the total 
domain of inquiry. Even though philoso-
phy embodied the bulk of human knowl-
edge from the classical Greek period to 
the eighteenth century, some differentia-
tion could already be observed during 
medieval times. If the grammar, rhetoric, 
and logic of the trivium were not strict-
ly subjective matters, the remaining lib-
eral arts of the quadrivium (arithmetic, 
geometry, astronomy, and music) had 
the character of nascent academic disci-
plines.7 There were also, in the medieval 
universities, separate faculties of law, 
theology, and medicine. By the early 
eighteenth century, philosophy itself had 
developed two identifiable branches-
moral philosophy, which remained large-
ly speculative and normative in charac-
ter, and natural philosophy, which was 
scientific mainly in the enumerative or 
taxonomic sense of that term. The mod-
em scientific disciplines did not evolve 
out of natural philosophy until well into 
the nineteenth century. It is widely held, 
at the present time that the individual 
disciplines of the physical, biological, 
and social sciences are distinguished 
from one another by the different objects 

6 Caws , op. cit., pp. 331-34. Karl W. Deutsch has 
discerned that the interplay between the empirical-
inductive and theoretical-deductive components in sci-
ence define a continuum along which the different 
disciplines may be located in terms of the relative 
importance of these two dimensions within them. See 
his "Scientific and Humanistic Knowledge in the 
Growth of Civilization," in Harcourt Brown { ed. ) , 
Science and the Creative Spirit: Essays on the Hu-
manistic Aspects of Science {Toronto: Univ. of Toron-
to Pr., 1958), p. 8. 

7 McKeon in Cohen { ed.), op. cit., p. 165. 

and events which they seek to explain. 8 
Russell Ackoff has observed, however, 
that the intellectual disciplines are sim-
ply a reflection of man's effort to or-
ganize nature and not necessarily there-
fore reflective of the inherent structure 
of nature. Academic disciplines, as a con-
sequence, are differentiated less on the 
basis of unique subject matters than on 
a determination of their attention to dif-
ferent aspects of reality and by the vari-
ous ways in which they explain the same 
phenomena. 9 This distinction is impor-
tant since it calls into question the exis-
tence of a correspondence between the 
structure of knowledge as embodied in 
the disciplines, and the structure of na-
ture. This difference will be discussed 
in greater detail later in the paper when 
the distinction between conceptual and 
concrete systems is considered. 

It has been intimated above that the 
development of individual disciplines, 
indeed the growth of knowledge as a 
whole, may be viewed cybernetically as 
the interplay or mutual feedback of theo-
retical and empirical components. Saul 
Gorn has conceptualized this process in 
terms of information storage and re-
trieval using file growth as an analogy: 

What happens is that there must be a bal-
ance, as the file grows, between the retriev-
ability of the information and the needed 
communication flow of the information; the 
control of the information due to the struc-
ture of its arrangement must balance the 
method by which it is communicated. What 
has happened, then, is that the continuum 
of a domain of knowledge when a revolu-
tion is due, either splits into distinct fields 
or changes phase radically by a change in 
the structure of its arrangement. That is, 

8 This is one of the criteria specified by Caws, op. 
cit., p. 280. This criterion for the differentiation of 
disciplines is shared by Marc Belth. See his Education 
as a Discipline: A Study of the Role of Models in 
Thinking {Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1965), p. 6. 

9 See Russell L . Ackoff, Scientific Method: Optimiz-
ing Applied Research Decisions {New York: Wiley, 
1962), p. 419. 



Implications of General Systems Theory 1361 

once the mass of information got beyond 
the critical mass, usually either fission or 
fusion occurred. Fusion is the change in the 
structure of the individual science itself to 
make it a much more compact carrier of 
information; for example, general laws are 
highly compact bouillon cubes of informa-
tion. Fission is the breaking up into various 
areas of specialization, which we have al-
ready mentioned. The fission or fusion oc-
curred in each case because the information 
got beyond our capacity, and its former 
control began to require too much time to 
retrieve. In order to be able to retrieve 
the information, you either have to have 
separate specialized lumps or have a vio-
lent change in structure.lO 

Viewed macroscopically from the 
standpoint of knowledge as a whole the 
discrete disciplines yielded by man-di-
rected fission can be re-fused through 
the imposition of man-inspired constructs 
which correlate, in some meaningful 
way, the empirically validated principles 
of the various academic disciplines. 
Viewed microscopically, from the stand-
point of a particular discipline, the he-
gemony of either fission or fusion is de-
pendent in very large measure upon that 
discipline's stage of development. The 
thrust of fission is strongest during a 
discipline's initial or taxonomic stage of 
growth. This first stage of inquiry, called 
by F. S. C. Northrop the "natural his-
tory" stage, is concerned with classifica-
tion "whether dealing with pure com-
pounds in chemistry, minerals in geolo-
gy, species in botany, structures in anat-
omy, or specific functions in physiol-
ogy."11 The second level of a discipline's 
development is that of empirically-based 
theory, what Caws has called the nomo-

10 Saul Com, "Computers, Communications, and 
Science-Extending Man's Intellect," in Lowell H. 
Hattery and Edward M. McCormick ( eds.), Informa-
tion Retrieval Management (Detroit: American Data 
Processing, 1962 ), p. 126. 

11 R. W. Gerard, "Quantification in Biology," in 
Harry Woolf ( ed.) Quantification: A History of the 
Meaning of Measurement in the Natural and Social 
Sciences (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1961 ), p. 210. 

logical stage, after the Greek "nomos" 
or "law." The Pythagorean Theorem, for 
example, defined a relationship existing 
between the sides of all of the right tri-
angles, regardless of size, which were 
classified as such during the first, or taxo-
nomic, stage of discipline development. 
In the third and final period of growth, 
deductive systems based on very broad 
postulates from which less general prop-
ositions can be logically derived are seen 
to develop. A substantial part of physics 
has entered this final, often highly math-
ematical, stage. Chemistry and that part 
of biology which has a mathematical 
orientation are moving gradually into it. 
Since the late nineteenth century, a vast 
number of deductive systems have come 
into existence. Providing great impetus 
to the proliferation of such systems was, 
of course, the realization by mathema-
ticians of the century just past that the 
axioms of Euclidean geometry, particu-
larly that which proclaimed that through 
a point not on a given line only one line 
could be drawn parallel to the given 
line, were not self-evident truths or giv-
en a priori to the intuition, as Kant and 
scholars in general had believed for 
some two thousand years. 12 Other de-
ductive systems in geometry, as a con-
sequence of this discovery, seemed en-
tirely possible and were presented as 
such. Even this last stage of inquiry, 
where systems of immep.se deductive fer-
tility are seen to exist and promote fu-
sion, has its serious limitations. The gen-
eral faith of mathematical logicians in 
the viability of axiomatic systems was 
shaken in the early 1930's by the young 
Viennese mathematician Kurt Geode! 
who demonstrated that any consistent 
system which is strong enough to pro-
duce natural numbers and operations 

12 While Euclid's axiom still holds for everyday 
kinds of lines, it is not relevant for Einsteinean space 
where parallel lines do not exist. See Michael A. 
Arbib, Brains, Machines, and Mathematics (New York: 
McGraw-Hill, 1964), p. 120. 



362 1 College & Research Libraries • September, 1966 

like addition and multiplication can also 
contain formulae which are meaningful 
and true even though they cannot be 
proved with the system itself. Neverthe-
less, an academic discipline which has 
matured to this final stage has made a 
robust advance. There is a vast differ-
ence, as Northrop is wont to point out, 
between the immediately sensed color 
"blue" of the natural history stage of in-
quiry and the conceptual notion of 
''blue" in the final, or deductively for-
mulated theory, stage of inquiry where 
that color is defined by its hue (or wave-
length), its intensity ( or the amount of 
energy it reflects per square centimeter 
per second), and its saturation, all of 
these characteristics deriving their mean-
ing from the system of postulates of 
which they are a p.art. 13 

It would be a mistake, however, to 
view all activities within a particular 
discipline as being at the same level of 
development and sophistication. Indeed, 
in the field of biology the taxonomic ac-
tivity of the botanist, or entomologist, 
or zoologist, and the process-oriented 
studies of the mathematical biologist can 
prove mutually reinforcing, as the mor-
phogenetic studies of Edmund Sinnott 
on the relationships between form and 
function seem to suggest. One authority 
even suggests that physics, much of 
which is concerned with deductive sys-
tems, has its descriptive and nomo-
logical areas. And the social sciences are 
still, despite efforts to formulate a "so-
cial physics," by and large restricted in 
their activity to the descriptive and 
nomological levels. 14 Although fission 
and fusion strategies are capable of co-
existence (indeed must coexist in some 
manner), one will usually be dominant 
at a given point in a historical time. 
Corn, it has been learned, sees either fis-
sion or fusion vis-a-vis the body of 
knowledge as capable of solving the 

13 F. S. C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and 
the Humanities (New York: Meridian, 1959), pp. 102-
104. 

14 Caws, op. cit., pp. 280-81. See also Gerard in 
Woolf (ed. ), op. cit., p. 210. 

problem of information storage and re-
trieval. From the vantage of one whose 
primary concern is with meaning and 
cohesiveness as the compelling reasons 
underlying any effort to restructure 
knowledge the strategy of fusion seems 
far more promising and imperative. 15 

The fused character of knowledge and 
its interconnectivity may be seen his-
torically in man's employment of primi-
tive models to explain his largely un-
differentiated external reality, and later, 
after it was decided to organize the con-
tinuity of knowledge in fundamentally 
discontinuous disciplines, his adoption 
of more sophisticated models which, 
having their genesis in a particular dis-
cipline, proved their analogical sugges-
tiveness by rapidly penetrating other 
fields, scholars as diverse as the educa-
tional philosopher Marc Belth and the 
political scientist Karl Deutsch have seen 
in the study of the development and 
pervasive diffusion of models for orga-
nizing reality a principle which might 
well underlie the educative process. The 
earliest models by which man sought to 
explain the universe of phenomena 
which impinged upon him were, of 
course, anthropomorphic, that is to say, 
an .ascription of human qualities to the 
elements and behavior of nature. Later 
in the course of human history the 
wheel, the balance, the web of thread 
(with its implication of interaction), the 
pump and the clock (with their implica-
tion of mechanistic determinism), and 
the classical organism with its infused 
teleology or goal structure served as mod-
els.16 Models, as such, vary in character. 

1 5 Sigmund Koch suggests that recent introspection 
in science, education, and philosophy has reversed the 
emphasis on an analytico-reductive approach. See his 
"Psychology and Emerging Conceptions of Knowledge 
as Unitary," in T. W. Wann (ed.), Behaviorism and 
Phenomenology: Contrasting Bases for Modern Psy-
chology (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Pr., 1964), pp. 
1-4. 

16 Karl W. Deutsch, "Higher Education and the 
Unity of Knowledge: An Operational Approach to the 
History of Thought," in Lyman Bryson, Louis Finkel-
stein, and R. M. Maciver ( eds. ), Goals for American 
Education (Ninth Symposium of the Conference on 
Science, Philosophy, and Religion in Their Relation to 
the Democratic Way of Life [New York: Harper, 
1950] ), pp. 102-105. 



Implications of General Systems Theory 1363 

Some are mythic, that is to say, they 
explain unfamiliar and often frightening 
phenomena in terms of traditional myths 
such as that of Isis and Osiris in ancient 
Egypt, which was used, by analogy, to 
explain the changes of season.17 Such 
mythic models were most frequently in-
herited and learned by what Deutsch 
calls mimesis or unanalyzed imitation.18 

A typology of models would also include 
the scientific, the historical, and the 
ideological. Scientific models, which in 
theory were open to empirical validation 
or invalidation, were used to discover, 
control, and predict the course of natural 
processes. Newton's mechanism-based 
model of the motion of large aggregates 
would be an example of a scientific 
model. Historical models are, to quote 
Belth, "concerned with the relation in 
thought between particular events of 
one time and particular events of an-
other, and with the cumulative and di-
rective effect that events have upon one 
another in the minds of men."19 Like 
scientific models, historical models may 
be mathematical (usually, at least in 
more recent times, probabilistic); ana-
logical (like Marx's iron laws of history 
which find their analogue in both the 
determinism of classical physics and the 
psychological determinism of organismic 
growth in the sense of Teilhard de 
Chardin); or even theoretical with ana-
logical elements (such as the cyclic 
methahistory of a Toynbee or a Speng-
ler). Finally, there are ideological mod-
els which "are bound to the systematic 
image of an unambiguous, perfect, or-
derly reality, which serves as the instru-
ment for interpreting the imperfections 
which are all about us as w~ live out our 
lives."20 An example of an ideological 
model would be that historic form of 
utopianism which is the scriptural com-
munism of Marx and Lenin. 

17 Belth, op. cit., pp. 180-81. 
1 8 Deutsch in Bryson et al. ( eds.), op. cit., p. 79. 
19 Belth, op. cit., pp. 180-84. See also Henry Mar-

genau, Ethics and Science (Princeton , N.J.: Van 
Nostrand , 1964), pp. 65-66, 89-90. 

2 0 Belth, op. cit., pp. 180-84. 

The analogical suggestiveness of mod-
els for disciplines external to those par-
ticular disciplines in which such models 
have their genesis is demonstrated by 
the models of society currently employed 
in sociology, almost all of which have 
been imported from the biological sci-
ences, the physical sciences, or mathe-
matics. These include such models as the 
evolutionary, the organismic, the equili-
brium, the classical physical science, and 
the statistical-mathematical.21 The cas-
cading quality of analogical suggestive-
ness may be seen in the transposition of 
the notion of entropy from its original 
locus in thermodynamics to a central 
position in information theory and, via 
information theory, into numerous other 
disciplines. Using Claude Shannon's ar-
ticles on information theory in the July 
and October 1948 issues of the Bell Sys-
tem Technical ] ournal as a conceptual 
unit capable of diffusion, Randall Dahl-
ing traced, through the examination of 
publications, the way in which this con-
ceptual innovation penetrated the vari-
ous disciplines. In addition to its evoca-
tive qualities, Dahling determined that 
the notion of information theory spread 
because: ( 1) communication is a com-
mon ground for many disciplines; and 
( 2) because its mathematical formula-
tion and methodology was appealing to 
natural scientists and the increasingly 
sizeable _ group of social scientists which 
is oriented to quantification.22 In the 
final analysis the adoption of a concept-
ual innovation by scholars in disciplines 

21 See Alex Inkeles, What Is Sociology? An Intro-
duction to the Discipline and Profession (Englewood 
Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1964 ), pp. 28-46. 

22 Randall L. Dahling, "Shannon's Information 
Theory: The Spread of an Idea," in Studies of Innova-
tion and of Communication to the Public (Studies in 
the Utilization of Behavioral Science, XI [Stanford: 
Institute for Communication Research, Stanford Univ., 
1962] ), pp. 119, 136. Chronologically, the diffusion 
of the information theory concept followed this order: 
communications engineering, psychology, physiology, 
physics, linguistics, biology, sociology, optics, statistics, 
and journalism. It is to be anticipated that more can 
be learned about the spread of ideas from the cita-
tion network studies of Derek Price at Yale, Eugene 
Garfield at the Institute for Scientific Information, 
Ben-Ami Lipetz in Carlisle, Mass., and Norman 
Kaplan at George Washington University. 



364 I College & Research Libraries • September, 1966 

external to its source seems to rest with 
some notion of congruence or "fit" be-
tween the "culture" ( or set of intellectual 
commitments) of a potentially receptive 
discipline at a given point in time, and 
the nature of the new idea itseH. Incon-
gruence between a potentially pervasive 
concept and the existing W eltanschau-
ung shared by the set of potentially re-
ceptive scholars in an external discipline 
can result in a lag in the adoption of the 
concept whose implications, for a variety 
of possible reasons, cannot be immedi-
ately sensed.23 It is entirely possible, 
moreover, that the cross-disciplinary 
utility of concepts increases as such con-
cepts undergo an evolutionary process of 
refinement and reinterpretation in their 
disciplines of origin. Etymologically, for 
example, the concept of force had a 
strongly animistic cast. Its progressive 
refinement at the hands of Aristotle, 
Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Kant, Mach, 
and Hertz has resulted in the present 
period in a concept of force which is al-
most purely mathematical in meaning, 
that is to say, without immediate physi-
cal referents. 24 

The capacity to be able to predict the 
diffusion of an idea into adjacent do-
mains, even on a probabilistic basis, 
could have important implications for 
the ongoing organization of information 
in libraries, and for the restructuring of 
the bibliographic devices which provide 
access to that information. Even without 
such predictions, as Don Swanson has 
suggested, adequate circulation informa-
tion and the careful observation of in-
library user behavior would permit the 
association of users with those portions 
of the graphic record which they use, 

23 See Elihu Katz, Margin L. Levin, and Herbert 
Hamilton, "Traditions of Research in the Diffusion of 
Innovation," American Sociological Review, XXVIII 
(April 1963), 240, 249-50. 

24 The evolution of the concepts of space, force, and 
mass have been considered in several books by Max 
Jammer. See William R. Catton, Jr. , "The Develop-
ment of Sociological Thought," in Robert E. L. Faris 
( ed. ) , Handbook of Modern Sociology (Chicago: Rand 
McNally, 1964), p. 935. 

in such a way that the development of 
new fields like bionics (or artificial in-
telligence) might be anticipated on the 
basis of the significantly large common 
group of library users which is making 
intensive use of the literature of neurol-
ogy and information theory. 25 To be 

· sure, citation analysis might well pro-
vide information on patterns of concept 
diffusion, however, the time differential 
between the actual acceptance of an 
externally generated concept by a re-
ceptor field and the first publication in 
that field employing the concept is sub-
stantial enough to render such an ap-
proach overly a posteriori to be of real 
utility in the restructuring of biblio-
graphic arrangements. 

Another way of conceptualizing the 
growth of knowledge is within a frame-
work of progressive subordination, via 
hierarchical ordering, of old concepts, 
theories, and hypotheses to new ones. 
Such subordination imparts to the struc-
ture of knowledge a "nesting" effect in 
which newer, more abstract concepts 
serve as receptacles for the older, less 
abstract concepts which are their special 
cases. Another image would be that of 
intersecting continua. If a vertical con-
tinuum ranging from "less abstract" to 
"more abstract" is developed to intersect 
with a horizontal continuum moving 
from "less analogically suggestive" to 
"more analogically suggestive," the re-
lationship defined by the line xy in the 
following diagram could be expected to 
develop. 

The line xy, it can be seen, expresses 
the direct relationship between abstract-
ness and analogical suggestiveness. Lest 
the foregoing seem overly tautological, 
it can be speculated that the abstract 
concepts of "uncertainty" and "comple-
mentarity" (or the duality of wave and 
particle motion) in quantum physics, 

2 5 Don R. Swanson, "Dialogues with a Library Ma-
chine" (Chicago: Graduate Library School, Univ. of 
Chicago, n.d. [Mimeographed]), p. 9. 



Implications of General Systems Theory I 365 

More abstract Y 

/ 

/ 
/ 

Less More 
~~o~~llv------------~~-----------~~~o~~lly 
suggesttve suggestive 

/ 
/ 

Less abstract 

not to mention the emerging principles 
linking matter and anti-matter, will sug-
gest more about the nature of social 
phenomena and, by extension, about the 
limits of explanation in the social sci-
ences than any of the concepts hereto-
fore imported into this broad area of in-
quiry. Moreover, any general theory 
which claims to explain behavior in a 
plurality of phenomenal systems must 
be sufficiently abstract .and deductively 
fecund to account not only for already 
observed ismorphism in a diversity of 
behavioral realms but also for behavior 
in systems which have not yet been 
empirically identified. Returning to the 
hierarchical ordering of concepts accord-
ing to comprehensiveness, Boulding has 
observed that-

The old is almost invariably seen as a spe-
cial case of the new. Algebra generalizes 
the operations of arithmetic. The oalculus 
generalizes some operations of algebra. The 
theory of games is a generalization of the 
theory of simple maximization. In physics, 
Newtonian mechanics is seen .as a special 
case of the mechanics of relativity. In eco-
nomics, the Keynsian system is easily seen as 

the generalization of the classical system. 26 

The excellent studies of Thomas Kuhn 
on the revolutionary character on para-
digm change in science27 notwithstand-
ing, it would seem that there is a con-
tinuity in the development of knowledge 
which is remarkably antithetical to revo-
lution. Michael Polanyi suggested this 
continuity when he characterized the 
Copernican system as no less anthropo-
centric than the system of Ptolemy in 
that the former satisfied man's need to 
abstract as well as the latter exploited 
the enjoyment men find in the use of 
their senses.28 Indeed, Leonard Nash 

2e Boulding op. cit., pp. 77-78. See also Leonard 
Nash's dist:m'ction between "falsification" and "sub-
ordination" (or incorporation) in The Nature of the 
Natural Sciences (Boston: Little, Brown, 1963 ), pp. 
286-96. f s . ·.t:-

27 See Thomas Kuhn, The Structure o c'ent11"" 
Revolutions (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Pr., 1962). 

2s Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Toward a 
Post-Critical Philosophy (London: Routledge and 
Kegan Paul, 1958), pp. 3-4. It mi?ht not be un-
thinkable to suggest that the Ptolemaic system was a 
rape of precisely those capacities which distinguis~ 
man from lower orders of living systems, namely, his 
ability to abstract and theorize. Nash ~as observed 
that despite the overthrow of the Ptolemaic system by 
the Copernican, astronomers .continued ~o sp~ak of 
the regularity of motion, orb1ts, and obJects m the 
sky. See Nash, op. cit., pp. 284-92. 



366 I College & Research Libraries • September, 1966 

has used the term evolution to describe 
the growth of science. Invoking the anal-
ogy of organisms evolving toward higher 
levels of organized complexity, he sup-
ports the image, originally proposed by 
Samuel Sambursky, of science as ad-
vancing by "concentric approximations," 
that is to say, through viewing new, 
more abstract theory as possessing many 
of the components of the theory or theo-
ries that it has subordinated.29 It may 
not even be stretching the point to sug-
gest that the development of new para-
digms in science approximate the emer-
gence of new species in biology. The 
principle of ontogeny recapitulating 
phylogeny suggests that the life history 
of an individual organism from concep-
tion on takes it through roughly the 
same stages that evolution took that 
species of organism up to the time the 
individual organism came into existence. 
In much the same way, a new, compre-
hensive theory in science typically in-
corporates the lower order theoretical 
structure which had developed in sci-
ence up to that time, but represents an 
improvement on the latter in its orga-
nizational and correlative powers.30 

There are other ways in which the 
fundamental continuity of knowledge 
may be observed, in the humanities as 
well as the natural and social sciences. 
A familiar form of identifying continui-
ties in literature and other humanistic 
disciplines is through the analytical iso-
lation of those formative structures that 
J ung called archetypes, or primordial 
ideas which are rooted in the collective 
unconscious of the human race.3 1 Jung 

29 Nash , op. cit., pp. 286-88. 
80 I n a somewhat different but analogous context, 

Talcott Parsons has defined an "evolutionary universal" 
as " a complex of structures and associated processes 
the d evelopment of which so increases the long run 
adaptive capacity of living systems in a given class 
that only systems that develop the complex can attain 
certain higher levels of general adaptive capacity." 
See his " Evolutionary Universals in Society," American 
Sociological R eview, XXIX (June 1964), 340-41. 

81 These archetypes may be distinguished from Plato's 
ideas or the categories of Kant in that they are not 
completely a priori, having had their genesis in man' s 

conceived archetypes less in terms of 
inherited ideas about love or religion or, 
more negatively, about the perversion 
of love in lust or hatred, but rather as 
the inherited potential for such ideas, 
a potential which began to cumulate at 
that point in historical time when man 
became conscious of himself as some-
how different or set apart from the rest 
of nature.32 Briefly defined, archetypes 
are symbols which "carry the same or 
very similar meanings for a large por-
tion, if not all, of mankind."33 In the 
archetypal mode of literary evaluation, 
the focus is on the genesis and persist-
ence in literature of symbolism such as 
day and night, spring and autumn, birth 
and death, innocence and experience, 
and on such provocative figures as Faust, 
Odysseus, Satan, and Prometheus. There 
are dangers, of course, in the inappro-
priate use of archetypes in the explana-
tion of literature. One is reminded of 
Douglas Bush's witty comment on arche-
types: "Some ideas, such as frustration, 
became master keys for opening all 
doors. A crowd of authors and charac-
ters were seen trudging along the road 
back to the womb. Along a parallel road 
stumbled another crowd driven by the 
death wish."34 

Some archetypes, it may be supposed, 
can be explained by certain constraints 
of the natural order. Physically, all men 
are subject, at least in their natural state, 
to the laws of gravitation. As a conse-
quence, the obstacles to vertical move-
own primordial experiences. See Carl Gustav Jung, 
Collected Works (Vol. IX, The Archetypes and the 
Collective Unconscious [New York: Pantheon, 1959] ) , 
pp. 3-4, 16, 23. Jung has referred to archetypes as 
the " residua of racial experience." See Maud Bodkin, 
Studies of Type-Ima ges in Poetry, Religion, and 
Philosophy (London: Oxford University Press, 1951) , 

· p. 9. See also Jolande Jacobi ( ed. ), Psychological 
Reflections: An Anthology of the Writings of C. G. 
]ung (New York: Harper, 1953) , pp. 38-39. 

82 See Jacobi (ed.), op. cit., p. 36. Jung likens arche-
types to receptacles which are filled in by the cul-
tural experience of a lifetime. 

sa Philip E. Wheelwright, M etaphor and R eality 
(Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Pr. , 1962), pp. 111-12. 

84 As quoted in William C . DeVane, Higher Educa-
tion in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass. : 
Harvard Univ. Pr., 1965) , p. 111. 



Implications of General Systems Theory I 367 

ment of an upward sort are more for-
midable than those confronting one who 
seeks to go down. Therefore, the basic 
notions of dominance, achievement, 
loftiness, and excellence, all of which 
represent states one must struggle for, 
are associated with upward movement 
rather than with the ease of downward 
motion.35 Most archetypes, however, 
are elusive and their essence can be only 
indirectly explained through the use of 
imperfect metaphors. Nor does continu-
ity in archetypal meaning always pre-
vail, everywhere and in every period. 
Symbolically, the wheel as ~rchetype, 
may have either positive or negative 
signi£cance. In the East it has the posi-
tive connotation of the persistent cycle 
of birth, death, and rebirth. In the West, 
it has a more ominous symbolic meaning 
related to the role of fortune (for ex-
ample, the wheel in the game of rou-
lette) in determining one's success or 
failure. 36 Fustel de Coulanges devoted 
most of his life to studying the elements, 
particularly religious beliefs informed 
by archetypes, influencing the growth of 
Greek .and Roman institutions, particu-
larly the life of the city.37 Mircea Eliade 
has sought to identify the formative con-
cepts at work in a number of archaic so-
cieties, and found in the course of his 
investigations that time and the flow 
of history in such societies is regulated 
mainly by the operation of archetypes. 
These archetypes expressed the ontology 
of primitive societies like those of ancient 
Mesopotamia or aboriginal Australia-
societies which largely lacked the philo-
sophical language to express their no-
tions of being and reality. The ontology 
of such societies had to be inferred from 
their rites, symbols, and myths.ss It was 

8 5 Wheelwright, op. cit., pp. 111-12. 
86 Ibid., p. 126. 
87 See Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, The An-

cient City: A Study on the Religion, Laws, and In-
stitutions of Greece and Rome (Garden City, N.Y.: 
Doubleday, 1956), pp. 11-14, 142-73. 

88 Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return 
( ew York: Pantheon, 1954), p. 3. 

observed that the life of primitive man 
was fulfilled only to the extent that he 
performed certain paradigmatic gestures 
or spoke symbolically powerful words 
which originated with the celestial gods. 
The mountains that he climbed, the land 
that he cultivated, the rivers that he 
navigated, all of the acts of primitive 
man, found their meaning in the arche-
typal actions primordially performed by 
transcendent gods. The temples and 
cities of ancient men were also patterned 
after such extraterrestial prototypes. 
Babylon, for example, was surrounded 
by a vast circular territory bounded by 
a river (the Euphrates) in precise imi-
tation of the Babylonian vision of a 
celestial heaven. 39 In the sense that these 
godly actions took place at the beginning 
of time, the ancient man participated in 
the beginning of things through their 
re-enactment. 

Two of the most fundamental arche-
types which recur in philosophy and re-
ligion as well as literature are those of 
saving wisdom and spiritual rebirth.40 

Northrop Frye has proposed that these 
and other very powerful archetypes are 
embodied in the Greek classics, especially 
Homer, and in the Bible and have rever-
berated through literature to the present 
period. He sees the myths of creation 
and fall in Genesis and of the pastoral 
life as the strongest formative principles 
in religion and social, political, and phil-
osophical thought. 41 Put another way, 
literature from the end of the first cen-
tury A.D. to the present is mainly derived 
and mimetic, deriving its thematic con-
tent from the past and its substantive 
content from its own historical period 
in much the same way that a Jungian 
archetype maintains its form while wear-

89 See ibid., pp. 9-10. 
40 Bodkin, op. cit., pp. 35, 175. 
41 See Northrop Frye, "The Developing Imagination, .. 

in Learning in Language and Literature (Cambridge, 
Mass.: Graduate School of Education, Harvard Univ., 
1963 ), pp. 31-60. Also his "Introduction" in Northrop 
Frye (ed.), Design for Learning (Toronto: U niv. of 
Toronto Pr., 1962) , pp. 3-17. 



368 1 College & Research Libraries • September, 1966 

ing the experiential clothing of different 
eras. In this perspective, literature is the 
embellishment and elaboration of time-
less themes. The literateur, in the final 
analysis, has no really new stories to tell. 
This thematic continuity is described by 
Frye in the following way: "At a point 
in the narrative, recognition point, or as 
Aristotle calls it anagnorisis, the reader 
knows what is going to happen, but he 
wishes to continue participating in the 
completion of the design."42 

As units of discourse in literary criti-
cism, archetypes are conceptually im-
portant since they impart to literature 
its characteristic forms. 43 Even in music, 
one can sense that "inner unity of sym-
bolic forms" that Ernst Cassirer saw as 
providing a basic homogeneity to human 
culture.44 Leonard Meyer, bridging be-
tween music and psychology, has hy-
pothesized that meaning in music may 
be interpreted in terms of the amount 
of congruence which prevails between 
one's generalized expectations about 
what will come next in a score and what 
actually does. Skill in composition then 
rests with the composer's ability to 
manipulate this tension of expectation 
which is general for most of mankind. 
Music which satisfies man's every ex-
pectation is, in this theory, highly re-
dundant and boring to the musical gour-
met. It is from the uncertainty of music 
and its probabilistic character that man 
draws his pleasure.45 Great composers, 
like Beethoven and Mozart, achieve 
simultaneously a maximum of uncer-
tainty or surprise and a maximum of 

42 Frye makes many incisive comments on this prob-
lem in his "The Road to Excess" in Myth and Symbol: 
Critical Approaches and Applications (Lincoln: Univ. 
of Nebraska Pr., 1963 ), pp. 3-38. 

.a Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays 
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Pr., 1957), pp. 341-
42. 

44 See Cassirer, An Essay on Man: An Introduction to 
a Philosophy of Human Culture (New Haven, Conn.: 
Yale Univ. Pr., 1944), pp. 67-68, 70-71, 222. 

• 5 There are some parallels here with the measures 
of information transmission in information theory. 

fulfilled expectations.46 To the continui-
ties and discontinuities of the music, 
man brings his generalized aesthetic ten-
sion. From the foregoing it can be seen 
that both literature and music, though 
by and large in the stage of taxonomy 
or naive induction, are capable of sus-
taining conceptual frameworks which 
articulate the parts of the whole. Within 
this perspective, chronological classifica-
tion or grouping by form seem primitive 
indeed as organizing principles in litera-
ture and music. Frye has contended, as 
a matter of fact, that ultimately litera-
ture, like mathematics, has a self-con-
tained form and a system of postulates 
which require no empirical referents. He 
has even wondered, though partially dis-
carding the notion, whether the same 
formative structures which recur in the 
history of literature are operative in 
other fields which are dependent on 
verbal structures, like metaphysics, the-
ology, history, and law.47 At all events, 
in literature and music, indeed in the 
humanities generally, there are scholars 
devoted to Matthew Arnold's precept 
of "letting the mind play freely around 
a subject in which there has been much 
endeavor and little attempt at perspec-
tive."48 From the point of view of the 
writer, the foregoing demonstrates that 
there are elements of structural con-
tinuity in several fields of the humani-
ties and that where structure persists 
over time, even in the midst of seeming 
uniqueness, the prospect for systemic 
outlook is radically improved. 

Corresponding to the archetypal pat-
terns which structure the products of 
artistic activity are what Gerald Holton 
has called the "themata" of science. It 
is increasingly sensed in scientific quar-
ters that there are elements at work in 

•o Leonard B. Meyer, Emotion and Meaning in 
Music (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Pr., 1956), pp. 
1-42. 

• 7 Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, pp. 350-54. 
4 8 Quoted in ibid., p. 3. 



Implications of General Systems Theory 1369 

the process of theory construction, as 
well as discovery and justification, which 
are not verbalized or made explicit but 
which, nevertheless, seem to possess an 
historic continuity.49 At least one promi-
nent scientist sees the primordial formu-
lations of science, which persist even to 
the present day, as deriving mainly from 
~e unanalyzed depths of human con-
sciousness and as receiving their initial 
embodiment in religion and philosophy. 50 
As a result, so the argument goes, a large 
part of the history of science can be in-
terpreted as a continuing dialectic be-
tween those who would emphasize sta-
bility and being (as atomism) and those 
who would emphasize becoming (reality 
as a continuum), positions which had 
already received reasonably refined for-
mulation in <;reek philosophy. 51 Rene 
Dubos has noted that 

. . . the theory of dynamic equilibrium, 
which was the last word in biochemical 
sophistication when first enunciated three 
decades ago, is now being questioned again 
by a new generation of biochemists. In a 
very recent series of lectures an eminent 
biochemist suggested that life might reside 
in the stability and continuity of nonliving 
macromolecules within the cells, rather than 
in the transformation of components which 
undergo rapid turnover. According to this 
biochemist, in other words, the course of 
life might be found in the Cartesian con-
cept of "being" rather than in the concept 
of "becoming" which had its origin in 
Heraclitus of Ephesus .... 52 

49 Koch in Wann ( ed.), op. cit., pp. 21-22. See also 
Polanyi, op. cit., pp. 15-17. 

50 Rene Dubos, The Dreams of Reason: Science and 
Utopias (New York: Columbia Univ. Pr., 1961 ), 
p. 123. 

51 In his The Edge of Objectivity (Princeton, N.J.: 
Princeton Univ. Pr., 1960), Charles Gillespie con-
tends that atomism (or atomicism) has been the most 
productive organizing structure in the history of sci-
ence. See Dubos, op. cit., pp. 120, 126, 128. 

62 Dubos, op. cit., p. 124. Harvey Brooks has ob-
served that the stability of dynamic equilibrium, seen 
macroscopically, may turn out, microscopically, to be 
a flux of opposing motions which simply cancel each 
other out. See his .. Scientific Concepts and Cultural 
Change," Daedalus, XCIV (Winter 1965), 73. 

Less Jungian in tone and in general 
less speculative with regard to the pos-
sible sources of persisting images in sci-
ence is Holton's discussion of themata. 53 
He begins by citing the recent discovery 
by Alexandre Koyre that Newton sup-
pressed and failed to publish in Book 
III of his Principia, a fifth rule of rea-
soning in philosophy which read, in 
part, as follows: "Whatever is not de-
rived from things themselves, whether 
by the external senses or by internal 
cogitation, is to be taken for hypoth-
eses .... And what neither can be 
demonstrated from the phenomena nor 
follows from them by argument based on 
induction, I hold as hypotheses."54 As 
operative in science, themata are propo-
sitions which are "entirely unverifiable 
and unfalsifiable, yet not quite arbi-
trary .... " What may be called the 
contingent plane of science-that is to 
say: ( 1) statements which are empirical-
ly based; and ( 2) statements deriving 
from logical or mathematical processes-
is thus seen as overly limiting. 55 Holton 
believes that any complete understand-
ing of theory construction in science 
must take into account a thematic di-
mension as supplement to the two-di-
mensional contingent plane. He sug-
gests, for example, that the thematic 
component of the concept of force is the 
masculine principle of potency. This 
principle of potency has been differently 
incarnated at various points in human 
history by scholars as diverse as Aris-

53 Holton would not go so far, for example, as Kant 
who saw the " categories" as prior to human experience 
and functioning as stereotyped intellectual equipment 
common to all men. See Deutsch in Bryson et al. 
( eds.) op. cit., p. 58. 

54 Gerald Holton, " Presuppositions in the Construc-
tion of Theories," in Harry Woolf ( ed. ), Science as a 
Cultural Force (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Pr., 1964) , 
p. 83. 

55 Force, for example, can be "observed" empirically 
in the deflection of solid bodies as detected by a 
measuring instrument. The logical or mathematical 
dimensions of force as it operates in the contingent 
plane of science are to be found in the mathematical 
laws of vector calculus, 



370 1 College & Research Libraries • September, 1966 

totle, Galileo, and Newton, among oth-
ers. The persistence of the potency 
themata can be seen in the early failure 
of seventeenth-century natural philoso-
phers to distinguish between the Aris-
totelean notion of force as that which 
produces motion or velocity and the 
Galilean concept of force as that which 
produces a change in velocity or accel-
eration, that is to say, a ball to which 
one imparts motion will continue to roll 
along a reasonably friction-free hori-
zontal plane even after one has ceased 
to impart motion to it. 56 Other themata 
are those of ( 1) conservation of energy; 
( 2) atomism; ( 3) the probabilistic char-
acter of behavior; and ( 4) the behavior 
of things as a consequence of their shape 
(for example, the earth rotates because 
of its near sphericity). A striking exam-
ple of themata in action is provided by 
the contemporary controversy between 
the evolutionary a11d steady state theo-
ries of cosmology and the more ancient 
Milesian and Parmenidesian cosmolo-
gies. The fission of primeval matter and 
its later fusion in Milesian cosmology 
has its echo in the expansion-contraction 
cycles of the more modern pulsating 
universe of the evolutionary theory. And 
the steady state hypothesis may, of 
course, be equated with the ideas of 
Parmenides. In general, themata are 
ascendant or obscure in various intel-
lectual epochs because of the seeming 
relevance of their power to structure 
reality. With the rise and fall of scientific 
fashions, they are utilized or put into 
storage but are never really disposed of 
or discarded with finality. 57 

It may perhaps be argued that the 
foregoing extended discussion of struc-
tural continua in the history of the sci-
ences and the humanities is overly su-
perficial and that any investigator seek-
ing to identify historical discontinuities 
would be, at least, equally rewarded. 
That may be so, and yet one cannot fail 

56 See Northrop, op. cit., pp. 22-34. 
57 Holton in Wool£ ( ed. ), Science as a Cultural 

Force, p. 101. 

to be somewhat impressed by certain 
functional parallelisms between themata 
and archetypes. Indeed, a reasonable ex-
tension of general systems theory, how-
ever quasi-scientific, might be to seek 
ismorphism between archetypes and 
themata as they are employed respective-
ly, to organize the reality of the human-
ist and the scientist. At all events, the 
continuities represented by such forma-
tive elements might well provide a use-
ful historical adjunct to the emerging 
recognition of general theories of sys-
tems. At this point in the course of the 
paper, it may be appropriate to con-
sider the attempts which have been made 
to view knowledge as a structural unity, 
particularly as such integrative struc-
tures have been supportive of general 
education in colleges and universities. 

Historically, efforts to view knowledge 
holistically begin with the philosophers 
of classical Greece and run all the way 
to the general systems theorists of the 
twentieth century. In the Sophist, Plato 
directly concerned himself with knowl-
edge in its unity and diversity. And the 
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries 
were especially characterized by efforts 
to see knowledge whole. Descartes' para-
digm for the unification of knowledge, 
as explained in his Discourse on Method, 
was a primitive reduction of all knowl-
edge to the relationships at that time, 
seen as inherent in geometry. Francis 
Bacon, in his N ovum Organum, sought 
to unify knowledge through limiting it 
to the output of those areas of inquiry 
which were amenable to the application 
of natural philosophy. Leibnitz and the 
French Encyclopedists deplored as arti-
ficial the arbitrary division of knowledge 
into subject matters, but differed in 
their plans for the encyclopedic organi-
zation of knowledge. The former, in his 
projected encyclopedia, would have 
made the logical (or synthetic-theoretic) 
ordering of knowledge primary and 
would have employed an index to pro-
vide classification by subject. Diderot 



Implications of General Systems Theory I 371 

and d' Alembert, the French Encyclope-
dists, made classification by subject pri-
mary and utilized a cross-reference ar-
rangement to demonstrate horizontal 
connections. Kant, in radical disagree-
ment with his predecessors, saw each 
subject matter as a self-contained logical 
system whose place in the total scheme 
of things was defined a priori by knowl-
edge as an organic whole. For Descartes 
and Leibnitz, knowledge was simply the 
sum of its constituents. For Kant, all 
knowledge was a system and the dis-
crete subject matters were logically self-
contained subsystems whose articulation 
within the organic whole was defined by 
the system itsel£. 58 In Kant's judgment, 
therefore, the division of knowledge was 
anything but arbitrary. Throughout the 
course of history the unification of 
knowledge has been seen as a desirable 
goal, at times simply for its own sake, 
at other times for the sake of its redeem-
ing social importance-that is to say, the 
periodic demand for knowledge codifi-
cation as essential to the coordination of 
human and physical phenomena in the 
practical sphere. The efforts to unify 
knowledge have been formally embodied 
in the formation of special groups (like 
the Society for General Systems Re-
search, and the Foundation for Integra-
tive Education); in the construction of 
encyclopedias (like the International En-
cyclopedia of Unified Science); and in 
the educational efforts of Comenius and 
the Pansophists or the formulators of 
the encyclopedic curricula in the eigh-
teenth century universities of what is 
now Germany. 59 

58 Caws has suggested that, vis-a-vis the discrete 
sciences, there is a methodological unity based on 
the sharing of a single logic. See op. cit., p. 336. 

59 See Robert McRae's excellent discussion of efforts 
to unify science during the seventeenth and eighteenth 
centuries in his The Problem of the Unity of the 
Sciences: Bacon to Kant (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto 
Pr., 1961 ) , especially v-x, 3-23. See also William 
O'Meara, "Observation, Interpretation, and Integra-

, tion," in F. Champion Ward (ed.), The Idea and 
Practice of General Education (Chicago: U niv. of 
Chicago Pr., 1950), pp. 235-37, where the strategies 
employed in attempts to integrate knowledge are 
classified as encyclopedic, theoretical, and practical. 

During the two decades preceding 
1950, physics (or better, physical state-
ments which had been purged of all 
metaphysical content) was seen as the 
prime discipline to which all other scien-
tific disciplines could be reduced.60 The 
same kind of disciplinary ethnocentrism 
which had earlier made theology and 
geometry the measure of all knowledge 
now made physics the keystone of the 
twentieth-century edifice of knowledge. 61 

Of late, however, the notion of emerg-
ence, which is the inverse of reduction, 
has been popular. Like reduction, 
emergence implies the idea of hierar-
chical order, but the focus is on the as-
cendant rather than the descendant na-
ture of vertical order. Caws has pro-
vided this description of the proces~ of 
emergence: 

We say that one science is emergent with 
respect to another if there is some event 
described and explained by the former, 
whose parts are described and explained by 
the latter, such that no combination of the 
explanations of the parts as described by 
the latter can be made to yield an accepta-
ble explanation of the whole as described 
by the former. Psychology would, accord-
ing to this criterion, be emergent with re-
spect to physiology if no set of explanations 
of brain structures could be made to yield 
an acceptable explanation of, for example, 

6 0 Described by Rudolf Camap as quantitative de-
scription of space-time-place. See Joergen Joergensen, 
The D evelopment of Logical Empiricism (International 
Encyclopedia of Unified Science, Vol. II, No. 9 [Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press , 1951] ), pp. 81-82. 
The logical empiricists, in general, tried to avoid the 
ambiguity and metaphysical pregnance of natural ob-
servational language. P. W. Bridgman, for example, 
developed the notion of operations in which he did 
not deny the possible existence of that which could 
not be subjected to the operations of measurement, 
but did deny the scientific validity of concepts which 
did not possess a corresponding set of operations- op-
erations which, contrary to widespread understand-
ing, could be either physical or mental. An example 
of the latter would be mathematics in which one de-
sires to determine whether a series of magnitudes is 
continuous. See Caws, op. cit., pp. 319, 321-22 and 
Joergenson op. cit., p. 56. 

61 Such reduction can be viewed in the image of a 
chain- from sociology to psychology to biology to chem-
istry to physics. See O'Meara in Ward ( ed.), op. cit., 
p. 233. Caws has suggested that the sciences which 
formed the links in this chain of reduction had, at 
least in part, to have reached the nomological (or 
generalized empirical theory) stage of inquiry. See 
Caws , op. cit., p. 283. 



372 1 College & Research Libraries • September, 1966 

some exhibition of problem solving be-
havior . . . the defender of emergence 
would claim that there is something about 
the whole event as described in the emer-
gent science to which the concepts of the 
science from which it is emergent are not 
even relevant. The whole, he would say, 
is greater than the sum of its parts. . . . 62 

The historic search for integrating 
principles in American higher education 
is interesting to review, especially in 
light of the efforts at knowledge unifica-
tion just discussed. During a substantial 
part of the nineteenth century, and even 
before that in what William Cowley calls 
the classical American literary college, a 
course in moral philosophy, typically 
taught to seniors by the president of the 
college, was regarded as the integrative 
capstone of the curriculum. Such courses 
were ordinarily a curious melange of re-
ligious orthodoxy and personal opinion. 
At Williams College, for example, Presi-
dent Mark Hopkins, who could without 
exaggeration be called the worst sort of 
dilettante, described his course in moral 
philosophy as covering ··man in his unity 
and God in his sovereignty."63 In Cath-
olic institutions of higher learning, theol-
ogy, by virtue of the nobility of its ob-
ject (God) and the reliability of its 
sources (Divine Revelation as interpret-
ed within the teaching authority of the 
Church ), was viewed as the queenly dis-
cipline to which all others were ulti-
mately linked.64 In the 1930's and 1940's 
Robert Maynard Hutchins championed 
the primacy of metaphysics, not simply 
as the study of first principles, but of 

62 Caws, op. cit., pp. 308 and 309. 
63 Quoted in Rudolph, op. cit., pp. 140-41. There 

is considerable evidence that Hopkins, though ap-
parently popular with students and alumni, was an 
anti-intellectual who eschewed Kant and had not even 
read Darwin or Huxley. He was not, in a phrase, 
the kind of professor that a really able student would 
like to have seated opposite him on a log. See Bruce 
Dearing, "The Myths about the College Teacher," 
Saturday Review, XLVII (January 1964 ), 65. 

114 See Vincent E. Smith, The School Examined: An 
Essay on the Curriculum (Milwaukee: Bruce, 1960), 
pp. 70-94. Christoper Dawson, the noted historian, 
has more recently suggested the study of Christian 
civilization as an integrating principle in higher edu-
cation. 

all that such principles imply for be-
havior in human and nonhuman reality.65 
Yet in the late 1940's and early 1950's, 
the innovating college at the University 
of Chicago was by no means oriented to 
the Great Books or even the metaphysics 
of classical antiquity. To be sure, philos-
ophy and history did serve as the disci-
plines of integration in the curriculum, 
but the selections from original works, 
syllabi of ccGreat Snippets" as they were 
called, the content of which was ordered 
by philosophical and historical princi-
ples, were quite modern in origin and 
the medieval period was, on the whole, 
rather underrepresented. The objective 
of this curriculum was to develop in 
students the capacity to think critically 
and judge wisely. 66 There are many in-
deed who view the ecOid College" at Chi-
cago, with its symbol of erudition and 
intellectual high play-Aristotle Schwartz 
-as a remarkably successful experiment 
in higher education. Those who imple-
mented the college curriculum were con-
cerned that the students grasped ideas 
and methods and that they learned a 
little nl!: about the different ways in 
which knowledge might be structured. 
They were not interested in stuffing stu-
dents with subject matter and low-order 
empirical content. 67 It is curious that in 
the latest reorganization of the college, 
adopted within the last few months, 
there is the suggestion that the older 
emphasis on acquainting students with 
the structure of knowledge, despite the 
intervening i;ncrease in low-order em-
pirical knowledge, is no longer viable. 

65 Robert Maynard Hutchins, The Higher Learning 
in America (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Pr., 1936), 
pp. 107-108. 

86 F. Champion Ward, "Principles and Particulars 
in Liberal Education," in Cohen ( ed.), op. cit., pp. 
122-23, 127-28. 

67 Richard McKeon has given an account of the 
shift away from an emphasis on discipline and 
method, which prevailed in the medieval period, to a 
concern, in the Renaissance, with the facts and data 
of individual subject matters. One of the fundamental 
objectives of the pre-1953 college curriculum at the 
University of Chicago was to sensitize the student to 
how bits and pieces of knowledge might be articu-
lated in knowledge viewed as a seamless, but com-
plex, whole. See McKeon in Cohen ( ed.), op. cit., 
p. 168. 



Implications of General Systems Theory I 373 

Apparently the older ideal will survive 
only in the so-called "collegiate division" 
(or Division of Integrated Studies), one 
of the five divisions in which a student 
may now concentrate.6s 

Prior to 1942, the integration course 
in the college of Chicago was called 
.. Methods, Values, and Concepts." After 
that year, it was known as Observation, 
Interpretation, and Integration and 
aimed at giving the student an "oppor-
tunity to acquire the knowledge and ca-
pacity necessary to work out for himself 
an intelligent theory on the interrelation-
ships of the fields of knowledge."69 A 
similar course, called .. Organization, 
Methods, and Principles of Knowledge," 
still exists at Shimer College, a small 
experimental institution located at Mount 
Carroll, Illinois, which adopted the Chi-
cago College Plan of general education 
in the early 1950's and has promoted its 
evolution. 70 In the main, however, the 
various concepts of general education 
which were formulated earlier in the 
century are encountering rough sled-
ding. Substantive innovations like the 
sequence of courses in contemporary civ-
ilization adopted by Columbia College 
in 1919, the broad humanities courses 
developed at Reed College in 1921, and 
the earlier attempt at Chicago to formu-
late a course on the Nature of the World 
and Man ( 1924) 71 have, it appears, few 
imaginative parallels in the present pe-
riod. It is true, of course, that in portions 
of the country-for example, New Eng-
land with its Goddard and Marlboro-
there are colleges which continue to em-

68 The others are Physical Science, Biological Science, 
Social Science, and the Humanities. See Wayne C. 
Booth, " The New College," The University of Chicago 
Magazine, LVIII (November 1965), 8-10. It is freely 
admitted that a major rationale of the reorganization 
was to link the college more closely to the interests 
and commitments of the graduate divisions and to 
check the flow of faculty away from a commitment 
to undergraduate teaching and towards an interest in 
the discipline-oriented research and graduate teaching 
of the subject departments. 

69 O'Meara in Ward ( ed.), op. cit., p. 234. 
1o See the Shimer College Catalogue, 1964-1965 

(Mount Carroll, Illinois: Shimer College, December 
1963), pp. 3, 39. 

7 1 See Rudolph, op. cit., pp. 69, 76. 

phasize those principles upon which in-
stitutions . like Bennington and Sarah 
Lawrence were founded earlier in the 
century, namely, Freudian psychology 
and the educational philosophy of Dew-
ey. It is also true that there are new 
colleges being based on technological 
·innovations, or on what this writer 
would call secondary innovations when 
contrasted with a primary innovation 
like the restructuring of knowledge-
even though, for example, the construc-
tion of programed educational materials 
does result in the rethinking of how sub-
ject material can be most adequately 
presented. There is also the call for col-
leges with a concern for their impact on 
the values of students and with the pos-
ing of relevant sets of value alternatives 
for student choice. 72 There are even 
colleges, like Shimer and Monteith Col-
lege of Wayne State University, which 
are devoted to constant review of the 
way in which knowledge is organized for 
transmission to students. By and large, 
however, there is relatively little effort in 
the universe of higher education at or-
ganizing knowledge within frameworks 
which are fundamentally new, and it 
almost seems as if those engaged in high-
er learning are waiting for a final theory 
of learning based on neurophysiology or 
an epistemologically perfect conceptua-
lization of "reality." Perhaps this assess-
ment of things as they now stand is over-
drawn and unfair, however, since there 
are many factors constraining the de-
velopment and implementation of 
schemes of general education. 73 

72 Such a concern has been reflected recently in the 
presidential remarks of both Nathan Pusey of Harvard 
and John Sloan Dickey of Dartmouth. 

7 3 Chicago of course has substantially modified its 
pre-1953 program of prescribed studies in general 
education and now permits students to elect major 
concentrations. Columbia College has also, in recent 
years, cut back on its two-year sequence of integrated 
social science studies called "Contemporary Civiliza-
tion." Both actions, while obviously motivated by a 
multiplicity of factors, suggest that the prescription of 
general content for all may be less viable as a 
strategy than to modify the presentation of general 
content so as to fit the cognitive structure of the 
individual learner. 



374 1 College & Research Libraries • September:~l966 

Not the least of the constraints ef-
fecting general education at any level of 
higher education are the subject organi-
zation and narrow emphases of graduate 
study. Scholars who develop a general 
orientation do so, one suspects, almost 
in spite of what they have been exposed 
to, with minor exceptions, during their 
upper division undergraduate and grad-
uate preparation. In addition, there is 
the widespread assumption that general 
education is being squeezed out by the 
percolation of specialized interests from 
the graduate schools standing above and 
the appropriation of its very content by 
the high schools positioned below. As 
the recent dialogue between David Tru-
man and Jacques Barzun revealed, how-
ever, there is by no means general agree-
ment on the nature of this squeeze-in-
deed, on whether or not any squeeze ac-
tually exists. 74 If Freud, Dostoevsky, and 
Marx were traditionally read in the good 
colleges during a student's lower division 
years, it is not now precisely clear what 
having "had" these authors in high 
school really means. It may, of course, 
mean that the high school student has 
genuinely grappled with the ideas con-
tained in those words. It may also mean, 
on the contrary, that the acquaintance 
which he developed with these authors 
was superficial and that he has no sense 
of the importance of their writings in 
the larger context of knowledge. With 
respect to the articulated structure of 
education and the ways in which higher 

74 David Riesman, reviewing a report on Princeton 
men made by Roy Heath in the mid-1950's, noted 
that those students who prepared senior honors theses 
severely limited the scope of their topics "in that 
mysterious way in which a college senior will say of 
himself, 'I'm a biophysicist with an interest in the 
morphology of the cell,' or 'I'm in eighteenth-century 
literature! " See Roy Heath, The Reasonable Adven-
turer: A Study of the Development of Thirty-six Un-
dergraduates at Princeton (Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pitts-
burgh Pr., 1964), xiii. Robert Wolff has even more 
recently observed that upper division undergraduates 
are, in many of the strong autonomous and university-
based liberal arts colleges, taking courses which are 
in reality baby graduate courses and writing senior 
honors theses which are in effect baby dissertations. 
See his "The Race to College," Atlantic, CCXVI 
(November 1965), 147. 

levels influence lower levels, Robert 
Wolff comments: 

Once more, the education of the present, 
for which the student gave up so much in 
high school, is sacrificed to the demands 
of the future .... Each present was sacri-
ficed to the future, until the presents were 
all pasts, and the future an empty present. 
It is a familiar enough story in our society. 
We call it prudence, or deferral of gratifi-
cation, depending on our tastes in moral 
discourse. 75 

Commitment to general education, or 
the view that knowledge should be 
looked at as a coherent and integrated 
whole, appears to provide limited pay-
offs-at least on the surface-for faculty 
members as well as students. After all, 
most institutions of higher education are 
discipline oriented, and rewards accrue 
to both students and faculty on the basis 
of their intradisciplinary performance. 
The marginality of general education, 
particularly with respect to the ongoing 
educational activities of the large uni-
versities, lies in its very definition as an 
approach which is nonspecialized, in-
deed those who espouse it often have 
a genuine aversion to academic speciali-
zation and its ultimate usefulness. 76 It 
cannot be denied, of course, that gen-
eral education attracts the best and worst 
kinds of men, those who are capable of 
transcending specialization and those 
who, failing to make the grade in a par-
ticular discipline, try it as an alterna-
tive.77 It is interesting to observe, never-
theless, that general education, in partial 
eclipse at the undergraduate level, is 
beginning to make inroads at the gradu-
ate level. At Chicago, for example, a 
number of those faculty members who 
were active in the "Old College" as pro-
fessors or students now serve on one or 

7 5 Wolff, op. cit., pp. 147-48. 
76 Joseph R. Gusfield, "General Education as a 

Career: A Sociological Analysis," Journal of General 
Education, X (January 1957), 38. 

77 See Joseph Gusfield and David Riesman, " Faculty 
Culture and Academic Careers: Some Sources of In-
novation in Higher Education,'' Sociology of Education, 
XXXVII (Summer 1964), 305. 



Implications of General Systems Theory I 375 

more of the three interdisciplinary com-
mittees which award doctorates, one 
might .almost say, in general education-
the Committee on Social Thought ( orig-
inally founded in the early 1940's with 
Hutchins' active assistance, as the Com-
mittee on Interrelation), the Committee 
on the Analysis of Ideas and the Study 
of Methods, and the Committee on the 
History of Culture. The program of the 
Committee on the Analysis of Ideas and 
the Study of Methods resembles, in 
its objectives, the .. Old College" course 
on Observation, Interpretation, and In-
tegration; indeed, Richard McKeon, who 
taught that course, is the chairman of the 
committee. The graduate program in 
the History of Ideas at Brandeis Uni-
versity parallels the Chicago efforts in 
its attempt «to examine the interrelations 
of ideas in the various disciplines, the 
interconnections between theoretical .and 
practical activities, and the reciprocal in-
fluence of ideas and historical events."78 

The existence of these programs at the 
graduate level and the anticipated de-
velopment of similar activities in other 
universities would seem to augur well 
for undergraduate programs of general 
education which need a steady supply of 
generalists. 

Two problems which are likely to bear 
upon efforts to reorganize knowledge 
are: ( 1 ) investigations into the nature 
of the relationship between the observer 
and what is observed in the natural and 
social sciences; and ( 2) investigations 
into the correlation of concepts, as men-
tal constructs, with their neurophysio-
logical bases. With regard to the former, 
it can be suggested that the mechanism 
which science has developed to cope 
with uncertainty in the subatomic realin 
-that is to say, the forecasting of aver-
ages in ensembles-will play an increas-
ing role in the social sciences whose ob-
jects of inquiry-individuals, individuals 

78 See the Bulletin of the Graduate School of Arts 
and Sciences, Brandeis University, 1965/196 ; (Walt-
ham, Mass.: Brandeis Univ., 1965), pp. 108-18. 

in groups, and groups themselves-are 
also subject to behavioral deflection by 
the very act of observation. 79 It is as if 
the grossest observations of the social 
scientist affect those macro systems 
which he investigates in the same way 
that the finite quanta of energy which 
physicists employ when studying the 
microcosmos affect the behavior of ele-
mentary particles. The observations of 
both the social scientists and the physi-
cist are, in deterministic perspective, 
what Henry Margenau calls .. epistemo-
logically destructive."80 In his judgment, 
the statistical devices which explain sub-
atomic behavior in probabilistic terms 
can also be applied to the kind of free 
behavior observed with respect to so-
cial groups. 81 The problem of predicting 
individual human action, even on a 
probabilistic basis, poses far more diffi-
culty than the statistical explanations of 
social group behavior. While the suicide 
rate for a sizable population can be pre-
dicted within the limits of probability, 
a variety of factors carry adequate pre-
dictions of individual human action well 
beyond the capacity of existing statistical 
tools. 82 Nevertheless, science and social 

79 Margenau, op. cit., pp. 54-55. The analogue in 
the social sciences of Heisenberg's principle of un-
certainty (or indeterminacy) in physics is the "Haw-
thorne Effect." In the late 1930's, investigators at the 
Hawthorne Plant of the Western Electric Company 
noted substantial variations in output during those 
periods when they were observing the production 
workers. Like the physicist dealing with elementary 
particles, the social scientist often encounters situations 
in which he can neither exactly know the present 
state of a system nor the precise nature of the cor-
relation or causal relationship between the existing 
state of affairs and some future state of a system. 
The criteria for demonstrating determinism are to be 
found in Caws, op. cit., pp. 300-301. 

8o Margenau, op. cit., pp. 62-63. Karl Popper sees 
the solution (or better, resolution) of such fundamental 
epistemological problems in Alfred Tarski's theory of 
objective truth as synonymous with simple compliance 
with the facts. See his discussion of Tarski's thesis in 
Coniectures and R efutations: The Growth of Scientific 
Knowledge (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 
1963), pp. 223-26. 

81 Margenau , op. cit., pp. 93-97. 
82 Caws, op. cit., p. 303. One reason why man's 

knowledge of the nature of nonhuman organic and 
inorganic entities may always exceed that which he 
has of himself is due to his anti-life or anti-nature 
posture. Such a posture has its origin in the very 
process of hominization and sets man epistemologically 
at a distance from nonhuman nahue, thus providing, 



376 1 College & Research Libraries • September, 1966 

science appear to share a statistical meth-
odology which permits them to fathom, 
in like fashion, the complexity of social 
and subatomic life. 

Another problem which has implica-
tions for the organization of knowledge 
is the relationship between conventional 
or nonexperimental epistemology and 
the newer empirical epistemology which 
is based on a variety of disciplines in-
cluding neurophysiology and information 
theory. Needless to say, physiological 
theories of knowing have a much briefer 
history than their speculative counter-
parts. 83 The following remarks by some 
Oxford dons, attributable, it is my under-
standing, to Ralph Gerard, exemplify the 
difficulty of precisely correlating con-
cepts with the structures and processes 
in the central nervous system on which 
they are based. The dons are reputed 
to have seen a group of women walking 
just ahead and obviously plying the 
trade. 

Said one, "I see ahead of us a jam of tarts." 
The second picked it up, "I should describe 

them as a volume of Trollop's." 
The third rose to the occasion, "To me they 

are a flourish of strumpets." 
The fourth was still abreast of the punning 

and said, "No, I think we have an anthol-
ogy of prose." 

The field of experimental epistemology 

it is suspected, a kind of built-in objectivity vis-a-vis 
such phenomena. Such objectivity is probably denied 
the infant and young child who perceives a basic 
continuity between man and nonhuman life prior to 
that time when the limits of his ego and nonego be-
come more sharply d elimited. See Harold D. Lasswell, 
"The Major Trends in World Politics," in Harold D. 
Lasswell and Harlan Cleveland ( eds. ) , The Ethic of 
Power: The Interplay of R eligion, Philosophy, and 
Politics (New York: Harper, 1962) , p. 349. 

83 Warren S. McCulloch, " A Historical Introduction 
to the Postulational Foundations of Experimental Epis-
temology," in F. S. C. Northrop and Helen H. Liv-
ingston ( eds.), Cross-Cultural Understanding: Epis-
temology in Anthropology (New York: Harper, 1964), 
p. 183. Boulding has suggested that there may be a 
" Heisenberg principle" at work which will prevent in-
vestigators from knowing in any deterministic kind of 
way the nature of the physiological structures corre-
sponding to man's knowledge structures. See Boulding, 
op. cit., pp. 16-17. Whether this is so remains to be 
seen as Koch in Wann (ed.), op. cit., pp. 4-5, has 
suggested. 

received great impetus when Warren 
McCulloch first enunciated his postulate 
regarding the circular configuration of 
sets of neurons in the human nervous 
system. It is important to realize that for 
McCulloch the notion of neuron circuits 
was abstract and postulated and that 
within the bounds of his theory vacuum 
tubes or transistors might have served 
just as well as neurons. In this theory, 
circularly arranged neurons are set off 
through the firing of one neuron along 
the circuit which is in some way linked 
to a stimulus coming in over the sensory 
organs. After the initial firing, these 
neural rings continue to reverberate in 
much the same way that a circle of 
dominoes might continue to reverberate 
if the domino which originally set off 
the circuit by falling were stood up, 
along with the other fallen dominoes, 
before the reverberation had completed 
its circuit and reached again its starting 
point. In a neural circuit the recovery, 
or metabolic process in the individual 
neuron, must take less time than a com-
plete reverberation of the circuit or the 
circuit will cease to reverberate. There 
are many such neural circuits present 
in the human nervous system, each ca-
pable, it is hypothesized, of trapping uni-
versals (like shape regardless of size) 
from environmental stimuli. It seems pos-
sible, moreover, that neural circuits of 
trapped impulses corresponding to en-
vironmental stimuli may be permuted 
and associated in the cortex and thus 
employed to define other, more fully 
abstract notions which will reverberate 
around their own neural circuits. Thus 
it is possible to postulate a cortical heir-
archy containing neural circuits corre-
sponding to philosophical concepts as 
well as inductive facts. 84 The source of 
concepts which are postulated by the 
imagination or intellect, that is to say-

84 F. S. C. Northrop, The Complexity of L egal-
Ethical Experience: Studies in the Method of Norma-
tive Subjects (Boston: Little, Brown, 1959), pp. 109-
10. 



Implications of General Systems Theory 1377 

not given in immediate sense experience, 
is a puzzle of far greater complexity. It 
is my understanding that experimental 
epistemologists know considerably less 
about the neurophysiological foundations 
of imagined or intellected concepts than 
about those of concepts which have, at 
some point in time, been abstracted from 
reality by a process of induction. With 
regard to the latter, it is believed that 
the regenerative activity in a neural 
circuit permits a trapped stimulus to 
reverberate initially for about half an 
hour. At the end of that time, if the re-
verberation has not been interrupted, 
the neurons along the circuit seem to 
contain an increased amount of ribonu-
cleic acid and protein synthesis has got-
ten under way. This activity results in 
local changes in the electrical character-
istics of the neurons themselves and 
leads, in some way, to the anatomical 
embodiment of the impulse trapped in 
the reverberating circuit. 85 Child psy-
chologists see . this ability to trap univer-
sals as developing in humans between 
the ages of three and eleven. From the 
third year on, for instance, children de-
velop the capacity of "conservation," that 
is to say, they are able to conserve the 
notion of circularity despite changes in 
the area or color or background of the 
circles presented to them. Sometimes 
after developing the capacity to con-
serve, children begin to classify objects 
according to their configuration and to 
develop the power of seriation-that is 
to say, the ability to order objects hier-
archically in terms of the increasing or 
decreasing value of some attribute. The 
principles of classification and hierar-
chical ordering (or grouping and seria-
tion) are, in the judgment of Jean Pia get 
and his colleagues in genetic psychology 

85 See McCulloch in Northrop and Livingston ( eds.), 
op. cit., pp. 191-92. Reverberation may also result in 
lowered resistance along a given circuit which can be 
easily reactivated by fresh perceptual stimulus (that is 
to say, recognition after long memory) or even by 
internal stimulus in the absence of perception (that is 
to say, in response to representation). 

at the University of Geneva, the basi for 
concept formation in adult life.86 

The experimental epistemology which 
has developed up to now makes no claim 
to full physiological realism. 87 But the 
theoretical model developed by McCul-

. loch does suggest that man does not 
bring a tabula rasa or Lockean blank 
tablet to the data provided him by his 
senses. And the notion of circular rather 
than linear ordering of neurons pro-
vides excellent support for this sugges-
tion. In terms of concept formation and 
retention, there is a world of difference 
between closed loops and linear trains. 
The McCulloch theory also accords with 
Dean Wooldridge's hypothesis of atten-
tion-focusing mechanisms which not only 
select out those circuits which will be 
permitted to reverberate for the full half 
hour but also those which will be em-
bodied in the brain over the long term. 88 
At all events, it seems that man brings 
to his experience on an a priori structure 
rooted in the nervous system, through 

88 Michael Wallach has described the child's ability 
to conserve as "the understanding that no change has 
occurred regarding one or more aspects of an object 
or a relationship, despite change in other perceivable 
features." See his "Research on Children's Thinking," 
in Harold W. Stevenson ( ed. ) , Child Psychology ( The 
Sixty-second Yearbook of the National Society for the 
Study of Education [Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Pr., 
1963] ), p. 246, also pp. 255, 259, 262, 264. 

87 Neurophysiological models of brain functioning 
can still be constructed, for, as McCulloch has put it, 
with the birth of cybernetics "teleology had its proper 
mechanistic base in engineering and biology." See 
McCulloch, in Northrop, op. cit., pp 185-86. 

88 Dean Wooldridge has hypothesized a three-stage 
concept of memory: ( 1 ) The Sensory Input Stage (in 
which the datum of the senses is sorted for special 
attention and reinforcement by a focusing mechanism ) ; 
( 2) The Medium Term Memory Stage (corresponding 
to McCulloch's notion of reverberating circuits of 
neurons); and ( 3) The Permanent Memory Stage (in 
which a reverberating neural circuit is incorporated 
into the memory system, it is suggested, via some 
kind of change in the efficiency of the synapses which 
connect the neurons in the circuit involved in the final 
storage of a memory trace. W. Ritchie Russell has 
proposed that the low resistance neural circuits where 
a memory has already been established are constantly 
reinforced by the action of circuits which have been 
randomly generated through the occasional firing of 
neurons in the absence of some external stimulus. This 
means that the memory traces which have been stored 
in the storage mechanism of the brain grow progres-
sively stronger over time through the action of these 
randomly generated circuits. See Dean Wooldridge, 
The Machinery of the Brain (New York: McGraw-
Hill, 1964). 



378 1 College & Research Libraries • September, 1966 

which incoming data is interpreted in 
much the same way that a program in-
structs a computer to perform certain 
operations on input data. This suggests 
furth er that the brain has a mechanical 
causality which is teleological in nature, 
that i to say, that the brain manipulates 
incoming information in terms of a hier-
archical complex of goals and subgoals. 
Donald MacKay has speculated that the 
term in which a given individual per-
ceive some aspect of the empirical 
world will depend, in the final analysis, 
on th e extent to which such a perception 
is supportive, nonsupportive, or capable 
of modifying the individual's hierarchy 
of goals. In the «internal matching" of 
stimulus .and goal complex, the stimu-
lus which generates no response in the 
goal apparatus will simply :riot be per-
ceived or conceived in any meaningful 
way. These goal complexes, originally 
developed in response to what MacKay 
calls .. patterns of demand" which the 
world presents to the organism, serve as 
organizing systems. Complex structures 
are thus perceived in terms of the in-
ternal organizers which previous goal 
seeking has developed in the individual. 
It is possible, MacKay suggests, for in-
dividuals to have «epistemological blind 
spots" in which no complex of organizers 
defined by the individual's goal com-
plex corresponds to incoming sensory in-
formation. In other words, conceptual in-
novation at certain levels is out of the 
question for some individuals who-in 
order to react meaningfully to certain 
concepts-would need to demolish and 
recon truct their go.al complexes, a task 
of great formidability. 89 Herbert Simon 
and Allen Newell have sought to under-
stand the operation of the organizers 
specified by goal complexes independent-
ly of the biology of the brain, by inferring 
from the behavioral response to a known 
input the kind of information processing 
that took place in the brain. In this way, 

89 See Donald M. MacKay, "Communication and 
Meaning-A Functional Approach," in Northrop and 
Livingston (eds.), op. cit., pp. 168-70. 

a computer program can be developed 
which will permit a simulation of the 
problem-solving processes in a sopho-
more's mind. 90 

Related to ongoing research in the 
area of human cognition is the recent 
work of the experimental psychologist, 
J. C. R. Licklider, on the design of an 
advanced system which would intervene 
between a given corpus of recorded in-
formation and the cognitive structure or 
map which an individual seeking knowl-
edge brings with him to the interaction 
with a body of knowledge. The thesis 
seems to be that it is easier to organize 
information for transmission to indi-
viduals with unique cognitive structures 
than to ·attempt to reorient cognitive 
structures to a statically organized body 
of information. Such a system, called by 
Licklider a procognitive system, would 
permit a process of negotiation between 
the cognitive structure of the informa-
tion seeker, as target, and a body of in-
formation with a given initial organiza-
tion. In all likelihood, such a system 
would consist of some linkage between 
a computer with a very large random 
access storage capacity91 and a teaching 
machine and, of course, the sources of 
knowledge generation. 92 Unlike conven-
tional library and information systems, 
the units of discourse in this design 
would be conceptual and factual knowl-
edge, not the physical artifacts or docu-
ments within whose bounds knowledge 
is constrained and arbitrarily organized 
only in terms of the cognitive system of 
the author and those who are on the 

90 Herbert A. Simon and Allen ewell, "Information 
Processing in Computer and Man," American Scientist, 
LIT ( 1964), 281-82. 

91 Serial access computer memories have storage 
capacities which are roughly one thousand times great-
er than random access memories. In terins of access 
speed, however, random access memories are about 
ten thousand times faster than serial access memories. 

02 The console of the procognitive system would, 
therefore, have buttons labeled respectively "Where 
am I?" and "What should I do next?" These buttons 
would enable the knowledge seeker to negotiate a 
rapprochement with the body of recorded knowledge 
through the conceptual good offices of the interme-
diate procognitive system itself. See J. C. R. Licklider, 
Libraries of the Future (Cambridge: MIT Press, 
1965), p. 127. 

r 

. 



Implications of General Systems Theory 1 319 

same wavelength with him.93 Defining 
solid information as that which excludes 
popularizations, ephemera, and unquali-
fied contributions, Licklider has predict-
ed that the increasing size of high speed 
random access computer memories by 
1985 will permit, · despite prodigious 
growth in the body of recorded knowl-
edge, a procognitive system user to inter-
act simultaneously with the solid litera-
ture of a subfield of science and tech-
nology, with a scientific or technical dis-
cipline by 1988 or 1989, and with all of 
science and technology by 1996.94 This 
assumes, of course, that an adequate 
mechanism for knowledge organization 
can be developed with sufficient versa-
tility by those dates. It is interesting to 
note, however, that a subcommittee of 
the Federal Council for Science and 

93 Compare, for example, the imaginative specula-
tions of Licklider, ibid. , pp. 21-69, with the less sophis-
ticated extrapolations of John Kemeny in his " A Li-
brary for 2000 A.D. ," in Martin Greenberger ( ed.), 
Management and the Computer of the Future (New 
York: MIT Press and Wiley, 1962) , pp. 134-177, 
where the library is seen as continuing to contain 
mainly physical artifacts (like books and periodicals) ; 
where the library is conventionally classified; and 
where information access is assured, by and large, 
through refinements in presently existing technology. 
It certainly can be speculated that scientists operating 
on the leading edges of theoretical research prefer 
informal or nonbibliographical channels of commu-
nication for r easons other than the time lag between 
the germination of an idea for an article in the mind 
of a scholar and the formal entry into the public 
domain of science via the published article ultimately 
embodying the idea. The feedback incorporated in 
interpersonal interaction ( whether orally or through 
correspondence) cannot be duplicated in the inter-
action between a scholar and the formal publications 
of a colleague. Scholars are likely, for example, to be 
more speculative, to risk more, and to be less circum-
spect with regard to the dimensions of their thought 
in an informal situation. That is why there is a need 
to formalize the informal means of communication 
without, at the same time, eliminating the informal 
which makes these channels so viable. Russel Ackoff 
has in mind, as I understand it, a project which would 
formalize certain aspects of the intellectual interaction 
in the "invisible colleges" identified by Derek DeS. 
Price in his Little Science, Big Science (New York: 
Columbia Univ. Pr., 1963). See also the discussions 
of informal communication in William D. Garvey and 
Belver C. Griffith, ' 'Informal Channels of Communi-
cation in the Behavioral Sciences : Their Relevance in 
the Structuring of Formal or Bibliographic Commu-
nication," in Bergen ( ed.), op. cit. and Richard H. 
Orr and Associates, "Communication Problems in 
Biomedical Research: Report of a Study," Proceedings 
of the Federation of American Societies for Experi-
mental Biology, XXIII (September-October 1964) , 
1117-32. 

9 4 See Lickli4er, op. cit., pp. 13-20. 

Technology, known as the Committee on 
Scientific and Technical Information, is 
planning a national information system 
which embodies two distinct but related 
subsystems. There is to be a library sub-
system (consisting of a complex of li-
braries) which is document-oriented, 
and an information subsystem (directed 
to the evaluation, storage, and retrieval 
of information per se). The library sys-
tem would satisfy the requirements of 
those who seek humanistic and some 
forms of social science knowledge and 
who are interested in nonscientific ideas. 
The information system would provide 
natural scientists and most social scien-
tists with conceptual .and factual infor-
mation.95 Another development of in-
terest in the organization of knowledge 
(as recorded knowledge) is the SYNTOL 
( Syntagmatic Organization Language), 
a general system developed by Jean 
Gardin in France between 1960 and 
1962 and currently applied to a set of 
brief abstracts in the field of cultural 
anthropology. In this system, there is 
a paradigmatic organization in which 
relations are established a priori be-
tween index terms which have been de-
veloped out of a general surveillance of 
the fields involved, but which are not de-
rived from any specific document. The 
strategy employed in developing the 
paradigmatic dimension of the system is 
not unlike that used in constructing an 
a priori classification scheme. The syn-
tagmatic dimension of the system, unlike 
the paradigmatic, is a posteriori-that is 
to say, based on relations between terms 
which have actually been found in the 
documents of the fields involved.96 The 

9 5 William T . Knox, " The Changing Role of Li-
braries," ALA Bulletin, LIX (September 1965 ), 720, 
724. 

us As I understand it, the syntagmatic dimension of 
SYNTOL bears at least some resemblance to the con-
cept of associative indexing suggested by L a uren 
Doyle in his "Semantic Road Maps for Litera ture 
Searchers," Journal of the Association for Computing 
Machinery, VIII ( 1961 ), 553-78. It also seems r elated 
to the concept of faceted classification favored b y the 
Classification Research Group in England and by the 
Indian classificationist Ranganathan. 



3801 College & Research Libraries • September, 1966 

SYNTOL is, therefore, both precoordi-
nate and postcoordinate in character. My 
understanding of this system is limited 
and imperfect, but it is supposed to be 
capable of concept coordination. 97 In 
discussing the system, Victor Yngve has 
foreseen the possibility of revising, re-
organizing, and updating the paradig-
matic component on the basis of the on-
going development of the syntagmatic 
component, linked as it is with the on-
going development of knowledge as in-
corporated in actual documents. Draw-
ing an analogy between the paradigmatic 
dimension and innate knowledge and the 
syntagmatic dimension and acquired 
knowledge, he suggests that "one can 
imagine a learning method by which 
syntagma that are collected-acquired 
from new documents, in this case docu-
ment representations or surrogates-
would be abstractly incorporated in the 
paradigmatic, innate structure, subject 
to certain conditions of acceptability. In 
this way the <culture' of the computer 
would continually be extended, reorgan-
ized, updated, under the impact of the 
recent scientific data found in the newly 
processed literature."98 This conversion 
of syntagmas into paradigms finds its 
analogue, it appears, in the modification 
of empirically based concepts on the 
basis of new experimental evidence, or 
the modification of very general con-
cepts on the basis of new found correla-
tions among its components-the empir-
ically based theories. Obviously, systems 
like the procognitive and the SYNTOL 
are ready-made for the involvement of 
general systems theory. General system 
principles could serve as organizers in 
the procognitive system and as speci-
fiers of knowledge relationships in the 

97 For a basic elaboratio.n see Susan Artandi, 
"SY ITOL-A New System for the Organization of 
Information," Library Resources and Technical Ser-
vices, IX ( Fall 1965), 473-75, 477. For a more ex-
tensive treatment, see J. C. Gardin, SYNTOL (New 
Brunswick, N.J.: Graduate School of Library Service, 
Rutgers-The State University, 1965). 

os Gardin, op. cit., pp. 95-96. 

paradigmatic component of the SYN-
TOL. These possibilities will be dis-
cussed more fully later in the paper. 

Prior to discussing the implications of 
general systems theory for librarianship 
and higher education in any great de-
tail, it might be well to devote some 
space to a general consideration of mod-
els, theories ,and concepts. A brief treat-
ment should suffice here. There are, of 
course, many different kinds of reason-
ing: the mathematical or logical (with 
its internal aesthetic and independence 
of empirical reference); the scientific 
(which also may be deductive, but 
which makes empirical referents impera-
tive); and the philosophical (which may 
also be deductive, but which is con-
cerned with ultimate meanings and is 
frequently prescriptive or normative in 
character) .99 Robert Morton, the advo-
cate of "middle range" theory in sociolo-
gy, has identified the functions of broad 
theory or paradigms as: ( 1) notational 
(including economy in the logical in-
corporation of lower-level theories); ( 2) 
logical (in the sense that they prohibit 
the incorporation of logically irresponsi-
ble hypotheses); (3) cumulative (in their 
support of knowledge cumulation); ( 4) 
heuristic (in their guidance of the defini-
tion, investigation, and solution of prob-
lems); and ( 5) organizational (in their 
ability to codify knowledge) .100 An ex-
cellent definition of theory is that re-
cently formulated by Karl Deutsch and 
Leroy Rieselbach. They write: 

To the Greeks, theoria meant the passion-
ate contemplation of reality; to the modem 
scientist, theory means an abstract, sym-
bolic image or model of relevant asp~cts 
of reality-a .model which may or may not 
be capable of being imagined in visual 
terms, but which in any case permits the 

99 See Belth, op. cit., pp. 8-ll. 
100 Robert K. Merton, Social Theory and Social 

Structure (rev. and enl. ed.; Glencoe, Illinois: Free 
Press, 1957), pp. 5-6, 14-15. See also Belth's delinea-
tion of the functions of theory, in Belth, op. cit., pp. 
29-30. 



Implications of General Systems Theory I 381 

orderly retention and recall of relevant 
memories from the past, and the forming 
of relevant and, as far as possible, depend-
able expectations for the future. Every 
theory is then in principle an engine for 
the selection of information as wen as for 
its storage and retrieval, and for the making 
of predictions. If it is an open theory, rath-
er than a closed one, it will also be an in-
strument to start or extend the search for 
new information, and for the dissociation 
and recombination of old and new informa-
tion into patterns by means of which the 
original theory itself may be extended, 
transformed, or replaced by a new one. 
And, of course, if it is a scientific theory, 
it will be susceptible to testing by operation-
al evidence, that is, by evidence obtained by 
standardized and impersonally reproduci-
ble procedures. 

The foregoing, it seems, 101 summarizes 
in extremely cogent terms the manifold 
functions of theory. 

Theory is often, as Deutsch and Ries-
elbach indicate, cast into the form of a 
model.102 Abraham Kaplan has described 
models of all kinds as the "embodiment 
of a structural analogy" in which the 
elements and their relations in the model 
are such that something may be learned 
about the system to which the model is 
seen to correspond.103 Verbal models, 
which seek to explain the unfamiliar 
metaphorically in terms of the familiar, 
pervade even day-to-day human inter-
course. Such attempts at horizontal ex-

101 Karl W. Deutsch and Leroy N. Rieselbach, "Re-
cent Trends in Political Theory and Political Philoso-
phy," Annals of the American Academy of Political 
and Social Scienc e, CCCLX (July 1965) , 140. See 
also Karl W. Deutsch The Nerves of Government: 
Models of Political Communication and Control (New 
York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1963), pp. 6-8. 

1 02 Abraham Kaplan has argued that not all theories 
are models since " the theory states that the subject 
matter has a certain structure, but the theory does 
not therefore necessarily exhibit the structure itself." 
See his The Conduct of Inquiry: Methodology for Be-
havioral Science (San Francisco: Chandler, 1964), 
pp. 264-65. See also Belth, op. cit., pp. 30-31, 179-80. 

1 02 In very broad terms, system X is a model of 
system Y if by using X one can learn more about the 
structure and function of Y without directing any 
special attention to direct or indirect causal relation-
ships between the two systems. Kaplan, op. cit., pp. 
263, 266-67. See also Belth, op. cit., p. 88. 

planation are, however relatively ineffec-
tual at those dimensions where familiar 
analogues no longer exist, for example, 
at 10-13 centimeters or a billion light 
years. It is at these extremities of size 
and distance that mathematical models 
carry man out of his anthropomorphic 
dilemma.104 Good models often permit 
the identi:S.cation of those components 
of empirical reality which it is most im-
portant for man to measure. Of the sev-
eral functions performed by theories and 
models, the most important from a gen-
eral systems point of view are probably 
the organizational, the explanatory and 
the heuristic-predictive. It is in these 
functions particularly that theories and 
models serve as intellectual machine 
tools.105 The interaction of the organiza-
tional and heuristic functions of models 
and theories have been described in 
feedback terms-the organizing power is 
heuristically suggestive and it expands 
as the effects of problem solving pay off 
in new insights regarding the knowledge 
which is organized by the model or 
theory.106 

Having devoted some space to the 
treatment of models and theories, it may 
be worthwhile at this point to consider 

104 Warren Weaver, "Scientific Explanation," Science, 
CXLIII (March 1964), 1297-1300. Also Belth, op. cit., 
p. 89. Herbert Simon has argued additionally that 
mathematical models, by virtue of their ease of man-
ipulation, provide their employers with certain psycho-
logical advantages. See his "Models: Their Uses and 
Limitations," in Leonard White ( ed.) The State of 
the Social Sciences. (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Pr., 
1956) , pp. 71-72. 

1os Karl Deutsch uses the image of the safecracker's 
kit, filled with the tools of his trade, to suggest the 
importance of the intellectual's possessing an array 
of theories and models for the organization of reality, 
or intellectual safecracking. See his "Higher Educa-
tion ... " in Bryson et al., op. cit., p. 133. In physiol-
ogy, the concepts of organ and organ function served 
as heuristic devices, in that prior to the employment 
of these concepts there was little really certain knowl-
edge about the structure and function of organs in a 
complex organism. See Joseph J. Schwab, " The Con-
cept of the Structure of a Discipline," Educational 
Record, XLIII (July 1962), 198. See also Nash, op. 
cit., p. 369. 

106 For an excellent treatment of this phenomenon, 
see Nash, op. cit., pp. 87-88, 248-49, 269. Gyorgy 
Polya's notion of the science of heuristics is discussed 
in Polanyi, op . cit., pp. 127-128. 



382 1 College & Research Libraries • September, 1966 

general systems theory in its relationship 
to what has gone before. Many readers 
are undoubtedly familiar with the gen-
eral outline of the development of the 
systems or holistic approach from the 
excellent discussion contained in Ludwig 
von Bertalanffy' s book, The Problems of 
Life: An Evaluation of Modern Biological 
and Scientific Thought; 107 with the ac-
tivities of the Committee on the Behav-
ioral Sciences at the University of Chi-
cago through 1954; with the subsequent 
work done at the Mental Health Re-
search Institute at the University of 
Michigan; and with the systems research 
conducted at a number of institutions, 
often under the title of operations re-
search. The idea of general systems 
theory, as formulated by von Bertalanffy, 
goes back at least to the 1930's. It is the 
holism of the systems approach which 
no doubt appeals to its many adherents. 
Rene Dubos has vividly contrasted this 
approach to reductionism in the follow-
ing passage: 

The reductionist and holistic approaches 
to human problems are well symbolized, it 
seems to me, in two beautiful portraits of 
scientists, one by Franz Hals, the other 
by Rembrandt. The portrait by Franz Hals 
is a painting of Rene Descartes, in the 
M usee du Louvre. It conveys the clarity 
and vigor of orthodox science, confident in 
the power of its analytical method. The in-
tellectual assurance of the experimenter 
arises from the fact that he has learned to 
deal with simplified systems, representing 
selected aspects of the world rather than 
total reality. The portrait by Rembrandt is 
an etching in the Philadelphia Museum of 
Art, depicting a physician who has just seen 
a sick person. His attitude, at the same time 
perplexed and reflective symbolizes the be-
wilderment and awe experienced by any 
thoughtful scientist coming face to face 
with the problems of the body and the 
mind of the throbbing men in direct con-
tact with life as it occurs in nature. Rem-
brandt's doctor seems hesitant, yet eager 

107 New York: Harper, 1960. 

to grasp the real meaning of total experi-
ence.108 

The systems approach has been found 
useful in so many different domains of 
inquiry that David Easton recently char-
acterized it as "one of the thunderous 
concepts of the century."109 As a unit 
of discourse, the modern notion of sys-
tem implies more than did the classical 
concept of system. It implies that the 
whole is greater than the sum of its 
parts. General systems theory of course 
is based on the belief that system ele-
ments and behavior is controlled by 
processes which, if not tightly analogous 
-that is to say, homologous-are at least 
in some way isomorphic. 

One of the major difficulties with the 
systems approach, it would appear, how-
ever, is the real danger it poses for com-
mitting what has been called the "fallacy 
of misplaced concreteness," that is to 
say, the confusion of invisible, theoretical 
entities with concrete, observable ones.110 

This raises an important question: Are 
systems, viewed as sets of physical or 
conceptual entities whose attributes have 
some kind of relationship to one another, 
really present in nature or is the notion 
of system simply an artificial construct 
which is imposed on nature to aid human 
understanding? The answers to this 
question vary depending on whom one 
consults. In the judgment of A. D. Hall, 
system seems to imply an artificial con-
struct since one somewhat arbitrarily 
determines-on the basis of one's inter-
ests and the problem at hand-which ele-
ments are to be included in a system, 
which elements are to be excluded from 
it, and, finally, which intrasystem and 
system-environment relationships are go-
ing to be observed. The set of physical 
or conceptual entities which comprises 

1os Rene Dubos, "Logic and Choice in Science," 
Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 
CVI (October 1963), 374. 

1 09 David Easton, A Framework of Political Analysis 
(Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1965 ) , pp. 
24-25. 

u o Caws, op. cit., p. 285. 



Implications of General Systems Theory 1 383 

a system, therefore, is left largely to the 
observer.111 On the other hand, Michael 
Polanyi has written: "The most daring 
feats of originality are still subject to 
this law: they must be performed on the 
assumption that they originate nothing, 
but merely reveal what is there."112 The 
British anthropoligist, A. R. Radcliffe-
Brown, arguing from what he describes 
as the Aristotelean-Ephesian concept of 
natural law, regards systems as immi-
nent in nature, that is to say, there from 
the beginning of time. He reaches this 
conclusion after considering and reject-
ing the Newtonian (law as imposed on 
reality by God); positivist (law as a 
statement of something that has been 
observed); and pragmatic (law as a gen-
eralization that works in the world) con-
cepts of law. 113 Within this perspective, 
therefore, systems can be isolated from 
one another, and the observer should 
be able to distinguish, for example, be-
tween a political system and an eco-
nomic system. The individual disciplines, 
moreover, can be identified by the classes 
of systems with which they deal. For 
Radcliffe- Brown, conceptual systems 
conformed with the systems of natu-
ral reality.114 David Easton, on the 
contrary, objects to the notion of nat-
ural systems and presents strong ar-
guments to buttress his view that sys-
tem is a construct imposed upon na-
ture as a matter of theoretical con-
venience. Looking at systems from the 
viewpoint of a behavioral scientist, Eas-
ton admits that in the physical and bio-
logical sciences systems may seem quite 
natural in that they are generally co-
herent and possess what seem to be 
clearly defined boundaries. Social sys-
tems, however, seem much less naturally 

111 See A. D. Hall, A Methodology for Systems En-
gineering (Princeton, N.J.: Van Nostrand, 1962), 
pp. 60-61. 

112 Polanyi, op. cit., p. 130. 
113 A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, A Natural Science of So-

ciety (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press of Glencoe and Fal-
con's Wing Press, 1957), pp. 13-14 and 19-20. 

lH Ibid., pp. 23-24. See also Easton, op. cit., p. 28. 

coherent and bounded. Even biological 
systems, claims Easton, have boundaries 
which are something less than com-
pletely defined. Cytologists, it seems, 
have difficulty during certain parts of 
analysis in differentiating the epidermal 
cells from the air which surrounds them. 
In his view of systems, the political sys-
tem, as construct, is defined by institu-
tions which "are more or less directly 
related to the authoritative allocation of 
values for a society."115 Institutions 
which cannot be included within the 
domain of this definition constitute the 
parameters or environmental givens of 
the political system. Systems as con-
structs are, therefore, neither true nor 
false, but are simply more or less useful 
or contributive to our understanding of 
the phenomena under investigation. 
There are, of course, undertones of prag-
matism in a view which orients to reality 
on the basis of utility, but it avoids con-
troversy over what is really a system, a 
difficulty which would be inevitable in 
the natural systems point of view. 116 It 
seems possible to relate both views of 
system-the natural and the artificially 
constructed-to Whitehead's metaphysics 
of organism in which all entities, human 
and nonhuman, are social and possess 
the quality of sympathy for one an-
other.117 The difficulty set out above is 
probably why James Miller, in his recent 
report on behavior in living systems, 
was careful to distinguish conceptual, 
abstracted, and concrete systems. Differ-
entiating abstracted systems from con-
ceptual systems by suggesting that the 
former are more likely to have empiri-
cally determined components, Miller ar-
gues that the unification of the sciences 
would proceed more rapidly if all of the 
sciences were oriented to either con-

115 Easton, op. cit., pp. 65-66. 
11o Ibid., pp. 27-30, 33-34, 44-45, 64-66. 
ur See Alfred North Whitehead, "Process and Reali-

ty: An Essay in Cosmology," in F. S. C. Northrop and 
Mason W. Gross (eds.), Alfred North Whitehead: An 
Anthology (New York: Macmillan, 1953 ), pp. 567-84. 



384 I College & Research Libraries • September, 1966 

crete or abstracted systems.118 Concrete 
systems, it is important to note, can most 
generally be ordered hierarchically ac-
cording to their complexity, an observa-
tion not at all startling when one recalls 
that the world evolved toward com-
plexity from simplicity.119 

In order to reorganize knowledge for 
transmission in the educational process, 
and to develop library systems which are 
supportive of that reorganization, some 
decisions must be made about what 
knowledge is important and what is 
not.120 It is the writer's view that eco-
nomic structure is all-important and that, 
to quote Boulding, "if a single theoretical 
principle can be shown to apply over a 
wide area of the empirical world, this is 
economy in the learning process."121 The 
economy provided higher education by 
such metatheories is important to con-

118 James G. Miller, "Living Systems: Basic Con-
cepts," Behavioral Science, X (October 1965), 202, 
204, 207. Easton has been inclined to make a simi-
lar differentiation between behaving systems and sym-
bolic systems, op. cit., p. 26. Parsons has distinguished 
theoretical (what Miller might be inclined to call 
abstracted) systems from empirical systems. He writes: 
"Methodologically, one must distinguish a theoretical 
system, which is a complex of assumptions, concepts, 
and propositions having both logical integration and 
empirical reference, from an empirical system which 
is a set of phenomena in the observable world that 
can be discovered and analyzed with a theoretical 
system." Talcott Parsons, "Social Systems and Sub-
systems," in David L. Sills ( ed.), International En-
cyclopedia of the Social Sciences (New York: Free 
Press of Glencoe; in press). The citation is to p. I 
of the mimeographed version of the article. 

= Simon reasons that our ability to hierarchically 
order empirical systems is based on the fact of the 
dynamics of intrasystem interaction. See his "The 
Architecture of Complexity," Proceedings of the Amer-
ican Philosophical Society, CVI (December 1962), 
477, 481-82. See also Kenneth Boulding, "General 
Systems Theory-The Skeleton of Science," General 
Systems, I ( 1956 ), 13-16, and Charles Morris, Sig-
nification and Significance: A Study of the Relations 
of Signs and Values (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1964), 
pp. 20-21. 

120 This is a principle, suggests Richard McKeon, of 
which "the philosophers of Greece, the summists of 
the thirteenth century, the universal men of the Renais-
sance, and the polymaths of the eighteenth century" 
were well aware. Se McKeon in Cohen, op. cit., p. 17 4. 

121 Boulding, The Image: Knowledge in Life and So-
ciety, pp. 162-63. Alvin Weinberg has expressed his 
concern that university science, and the elementary 
secondary school science curricula which university 
scientists are helping to shape, overemphasizes the 
specialized search activities of pure science at the ex-
pense of the important and legitimate scientific function 
of codification. See his "But Is the Teacher also a 
Citizen?" Science, CXLIX (August 1965), 603-604. 

template in view of the complaints about 
the length of the typical undergraduate, 
graduate, and professional programs and 
what, in my judgment, are the pseudo-
complaints of faculty ~embers about 
.. having too much material to cover" and 
the "explosion of knowledge."122 The 
organization of knowledge is the key to 
the problem and it rests, by and large, 
on the "set of related definitions, assump-
tions, and propositions which deal with 
reality as an integrated hierarchy of mat-
ter and energy."123 For a general systems 
theory to develop fully, great care must 
be exercised in identifying isomorphic 
system principles. And analogies must be 
carefully drawn between theoretical sys-
tems which have empirical linkages.124 
It is one of the great beauties of general 
systems theory that it is free to identify 
isomorphism in the principles which are 
operative in social, as well as physical 
and biological systems.125 The random-
ness, uncertainty, and organized com-

122 It is my intuitive notion that the phrase "ex-
plosion of knowledge" is in some respects a myth. To 
be sure, there is a gradual expansion of basic or 
fundamental theoretical knowledge, but there is by no 
means an explosion of deductively fecund conceptual 
systems. What there seems to be is a publication ex-
plosion reflecting the exponential increase in knowledge 
which is crudely empirical or of low theoretical order. 

123 Miller, "Living Systems ..• ," op. cit., p. 193. 
124 Kenneth Boulding has reminded us that analogies 

are only as good as the empirical linkages to the theo-
retical systems from which they are drawn. See his 
"General Systems as a Point of View," in Mihajlo 
Mesarovic (ed.), Views on General Systems Theory 
(New York: Wiley, 1964), p. 32. 

125 Early attempts at identifying general theories, 
based on the isomorphism of lower order generalization, 
led, for example, to the observation that the expo-
nential law of mathematics applied to a range of 
behaviors from radioactive decay to the death rate 
of bacteria under certain conditions to the rate of 
decrease in human and animal populations where the 
mortality rate exceeds the birth rate to (it might be 
added) the growth rate of the literature of science. 
Now James Miller has developed some one hundred 
and sixty-five different hypotheses which are cross-
level in the sense that they apply to the behavior of 
living systems at different levels of complexity. It is 
interesting to note that in the process of developing 
these hypotheses, Miller also identified discontinuities 
like longevity, size, and diffusion. He has employed 
matter, energy, and information as his fundamental 
analytical concepts. See his "Living Systems: Basic 
Concepts," op. cit., pp. 193, 216; his "Living Systems: 
Cross-Level Hypotheses," Behavioral Science, X ( Oc-
tober 1965), 380-411; and, finally, his "Living Sys-
tems: Structure and Process," Behavioral Science, X 
(October 1965), 337-79. 

; 



Implications of General Systems Theory I 385 

plexity present in all three kinds of sys-
tems render them open to the applica-
tion of mathematical methods which 
were unnecessary in classical, mechanis-
tic science.126 In the process of identify-
ing metaprinciples, general systems the-
ory can be said to be combatting entropy 
at a very high level. The operations of 
imagination, correlation, and systematic 
thought which go into the identification 
of such general theories of systems re-
sult, it has been suggested, in the crea-
tion of new information or negative en-
tropy. Therefore, the "form" in the word 
information is precisely what it suggests, 
that is to say, formative and structural.127 

What are the prospects for general 
systems theory as a curricular integrat-
ing principle in undergraduate, and per-
haps even graduate level, general edu-
cation? Boulding already teaches a 
course entitled "General Systems" to 
honor seniors at the University of Mich-
igan. In this course, general systems is 
presented as a point of view rather than 
a set of techniques. The course objectives 
seem to follow a perspective on general 
systems theory shared by Boulding with 
von Bertalanffy. The course prospectus 
reads as follows: 

The object of this course is to examine the 
general structure of theoretical systems in 
many different branches of learning, with 
a view to establishing relationships among 
the theories which pertain to various em-

126 Like finality, equifinality, hierarchical order, and 
the like. Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Problems of Life: 
An E v aluation of Modern Biological and Scientific 
Thought (New York: Harper, 1952), pp. 189-90, 199, 
202. Also his, " General Systems Theory- A Critical 
Review," General Systems, VI ( 1962), 2. 

127 See Miller, "Living Systems: Basic Concepts," 
op. cit., p. 194; H enry Quastler, The Emergence of 
Biological Organization (New Haven, Conn.: Yale 
Univ. Pr. , 1964), pp. 3-4; and Leon Brillouin, Scien-
tific Unc ertainty, and Information (New York: Aca-
demic Press, 1964), pp. 17-18, 21. For a discussion 
of the analogy between the linguistic theory of Noam 
Chomsky and the tiered way in which one can view 
the structure of science, see Israel Scheffier, The 
Anatomy of Inquiry : Philosophical Studies in the 
Theory of Science (New York: Knopf, 1963), p . 7. 
Of particular interest is the analogy between gram-
matical units of cross-linguistic relevance · (for ex-
ample, nouns) and the structural terms of science (for 
example, theory) which have cross-disciplinary ap-
plication. 

pirical subject matters. By so doing it is 
hoped that the student will come to appre-
ciate certain basic unities which underly 
the universe of knowledge.128 

In discussing the relationship between 
systems theory and systems research as 
two elements in a systems science, Rus-
sell Acko:ff projects a different point of 
view. As early as the 1950's, he expressed 
his concern about the excessive general-
ization, operational insignificance, and 
almost metaphysical point of view which 
he thought pervaded the systems move-
ment.129 Acko:ff suggests that where sys-
tems theory seeks to identify theories 
with cross-disciplinary generality, sys-
tems research views knowledge as a 
product of the application of scientific 
method applied not to phenomena de-
fined by disciplines but to nature viewed 
holistically, typically in terms of some 
problem. He would argue that nature 
does not share the disciplinary organiza-
tion of universities and that for systems 
theory to accept such arbitrary divisions 
is a constraint on its proclaimed holism. 
For Acko:ff the direction of abstraction 
vis-a-vis system principles is from the 
complex to the simple, not the reverse. 
He is unsettled about the apparent re-
moval of systems theory from the em-
pirical world-a two-stage removal if 
one considers general systems theories 
as inductively formulated on the bases 
of a common principle observed to be 
operative in a limited set of concrete 
systems. Therefore, Acko:ff argues, more 
limited theories must be: ( 1 ) deduced 
from the general theories for applica-
tion to newly identified systems; and ( 2) 

12s Prospectus for General Systems (College Honors 
498), taught by Kenneth Boulding at the University 
of Michigan. One scholar has observed that the sym-
biosis between a professor and undergraduates who 
lack a full initiation into the ethos of the discipline 
which he represents can result in a critical examina-
tion of the formal foundations of the field, which 
the symbiotic relationship between a professor and his 
graduate students or professional colleagues might 
never elicit. See Richard Wolfgang, " Pure Research, 
Cultism, and the Undergraduate,'' Science, CL (De-
cember 1965), 1564. 

129 Russell L. Ackoff, "Games, Decisions, and Or-
ganizations,'' General Systems, IV ( 1959), 145. 



386 1 College & Research Libraries • September, 1966 

either validated or invalidated empiri-
cally. In sum, however, Ackoff sees good 
work ongoing in systems theory as well 
as systems research and seems to suggest 
that a viable systems science may well 
require activity in both domains. 130 

It is apparent that both systems theory 
and systems research can contribute to 
a systems-oriented undergraduate pro-
gram of general education. It is of con-
cern in some quarters, however, that 
general systems theory, especially when 
it is viewed as a set of postulates or 
inductively determined theories from 
which more limited disciplinary theories 
can be derived and checked against 
reality, is open to the logical fallacy of 
affirming the consequent. In the logic 
of science it can be maintained that a 
system principle derived from a more 
general theory of systems is falsified-and 
with it the general theory of systems-if 
it does not agree with empirical reality; 
and it is confirmed, without really con-
firming the general systems principle, if 
it agrees with the empirical world. The 
logic of (a) falsification and (b) confirma-
tion is as follows: (a) If Y, then X; X is 
not the case, therefore, Y is not the case 
and (b) If Y, then X; X is the case, 
therefore, Y is the case. However, in the 
process of confirmation, if X is the case, 
Y may not necessarily be uniquely the 
case. Therefore, one observes formal 
validity where there is falsification and 
formal invalidity where there is con-
firmation. This is so because the confir-
mation of X (a logically derived dis-
ciplinary theory which has been deduced 
from a general theory of systems ) does 
not guarantee that Y (the general the-
ory of systems) is uniquely the case. It 
is entirely possible, for example, that a 
different general theory of systems, Z, 
could also logically give rise to the dis-

1 30 Russell L. Ackoff, "General Systems Theory and 
Systems Research : Contrasting Conceptions of Sys-
tems Science" in Mesarovic ( ed.) op. cit., pp. 51-60. 
This is obviously, as Anatol Rapoport has pointed out, 
a task for the philosophy of science. See his "Re-
flections on General Systems Theory," in Mesarovic 
( ed.) op. cit., p. 171. 

ciplinary theory X. In brief, if Y then X; 
X is the case; but also Z then X; X is the 
case.131 

The theories and concepts which .are 
employed in systems activity are an in-
teresting lot to observe and compare.132 

Alfred Kuhn's attempt to unify the 
knowledge centered in sociology, politi-
cal science, and economics resulted in 
the development of concepts like de-
C1SIOns, communications, transactions, 
organizations, and their combinations.133 

Ackoff speaks of theories of allocation, 
queuing, sequencing, routing, replace-
ment, competition, .and search and dis-
cusses gaming and sequencing in his 
book, Scientific Method: Optimizing Ap-
plied Research Decisions. 134 The role of 
mathematics is clear from the frequent 
mention of Bayesian statistics and Monte 
Carlo method. Of inventory theory, Ack-
off writes: 

Within the industrial context, inventory 
theory can be applied to such diverse phe-
nomena as the acquisition and use of op-
erating capital, the hiring and training of 
personnel, and the determination of how 
much and how frequently to acquire pro-
ductive capacity. It is also applicable to 
any type of input-output system to which 
benefits and losses. can accrue. For example, 
the metabolic processes of a living organism 
can be studied as an inventory process, the 
operation of a heating system, a computing 
center, a documentation center, and the 
natural water system of a geographical re-
gion. The inputs, outputs ,and systems in-
volved can be of relevance to any and 
every scientific discipline. The disciplinary 

131 The foregoing is based on a discussion of por-
tions of F. S. C. Northrop's The Logic of the Sci-
ences and the Humanities , in William P. Ebling, 
"Toward an Epistemological Integration of Science: 
A Review of Models Developed in Operations Research, 
Communications Research, Systems Research, and Cy-
bernetics" (Communications Research Studies in 
"Epistematics" [Syracuse, N.Y.: Information Science 
and Communication Management Program, School of 
Journalism, Newhouse Communications Center, Syracuse 
Univ., 1965] ), pp. 20-22 (Mimeographed). 

132 0. R. Young, "A Survey of General Systems 
Theory," General Systems, IX ( 1964), 61. See also 
Deutsch, "Higher Education . . . ," op. cit., p. 66. 

133 See his The Study of Society: A Unified Approach 
(Homewood, Ill.: Dorsey, 1963). 

184 Ackoff, op. cit., pp. 46-47, 134-35. 



Implications of General Systems Theory 1 387 

characteristics of the relevant variables have 
no relevance to the theory.135 

To continue, von Betalanffy has spo-
ken of the exponential law and Gaussian 
distribution. And 0. R. Young, in his 
overview of general systems theory, de-
velops a taxonomy of concepts employed 
in systems theory which includes equi-
finality, state-determined system, goal-
changing feedback, overload, and ultra-
stable system.136 In Miller's general sys-
tems behavior theory are to be found 
concepts like passive adaptation, im-
probability, irregular simplicity, and ex-
tremum adaptation.137 It is not clear at 
all times which of these many concepts 
reflect general system principles and 
which reflect methodologies or tech-
niques which have very wide applica-
tion. Most, however, seem to share a 
mathematical formulation, and some 
preparation in mathematics would seem 
to be rather central to a curriculum 
based on general systems theory. 

A number of concerns would have to 
be reflected in a collegiate curriculum 
based on general systems theory. A cen-
tral problem would be the historic role 
of archetypes and themata in the orga-
nization of humanistic and scientific 
knowledge respectively, and of the pos-
sible association of archetypes and the-
mata in some general theory of symbolic 
structure which would comprehend the 
humanities as well as the social and 
natural sciences. Such a theory might 
profit from the close study of ancient 
religious systems out of which, Parsons 
and others have suggested, differentiated 
secular knowledge sprung. Then too, 
some sense of the cyclic rise and fall 
of archetypes and themata could sensi-
tize students to what are likely to be the 
dominant organizing images during their 
lifetimes. The paired opposites which 

135 Ackoff, "General Systems Theory and Systems 
Research: Contrasting Conceptions of Systems Science," 
in Mesarovic, op. cit., p. 57. 

136 See Young, op . cit., pp. 61-62. 
1 37 Miller, " Living Systems: Basic Concepts," op. cit., 

pp. 201 , 229. 

are reflected in archetypes and themata 
may even suggest a kind of systematic 
complementarity which would lend cre-
dence to Floyd Matson's belief that in 
the physical principle of complementar-
ity lies "the immense evocative analogy" 
so pregnant with implication for the so-
cial sciences and humanities.138 Such a 
curriculum would have to consider the 
role of contemporary religion and its 
relationship to the theoretical structures 
of other academic disciplines in the Par-
sonian sense that it "comprises the ma-
trix from which cultural institutions in 
general have differentiated, and remains 
the 'master' system in a cybernetic 
sense."139 Such a curriculum, as a foun-
dation for the study of general systems 
principles, should acquaint students with 
the historical evidence concerning the 
analogical suggestiveness of models like 
mechanism, organism, and evolution 
which diffused outward from their loci 
of origin to have great impact in other 
areas of academic endeavor. Such a cur-

. riculum might seek to investigate the 
relationships between themata and 
archetypes and general system principles 
themselves. Using Ackoff's distinction, 
such a curriculum could direct the stu-
dent's attention to general systems the-
ory in the classroom and to the strategies 
of systems research during frequent, con-
trolled forays into the world apart from 
the classroom. It would seem important 
that the student have some sense of the 
operational importance (that is to say, 
the theory in action) of those general 
systems principles that he encounters in 
the more formal and abstract part of his 
education. Such a curriculum might, fol-
lowing the lead of Northrop and Mar-
genau, explore the extent to which viable 
normative and ethical principles can be 
derived through the application of sci-

138 See Floyd Matson, The Broken Image: Man, 
Science, and Society (New York: Braziller, 1964) , 
pp. 243-59, and von Bertalanffy, An Evaluation of 
Modern Biological and Scientific Thought, op. cit., pp. 
176-77. 

139 Parsons, in Sills ( ed.) op. cit., p. 26. 



388 1 College & Research Libraries • September, 1966 

entific method. It should also be con-
cerned with the extent to which the 
normative prescriptions of the world's 
major religions converge along some 
very general and abstract principles. In 
general, such a curriculum should not 
involve merely the search for general 
system theories. It should also be con-
cerned with what Whitehead called the 
unstated, and often unexamined, as-
sumptions which affect the way men 
view the world. Finally it would seem 
that in such a curriculum, general sys-
tems theory should be used less as a 
means to unify knowledge than as a 
mechanism for restructuring knowledge. 
Of course, the systems point of view 
would imply breadth of interest and a 
basic toleration of many different ap-
proaches to the development of a sys-
tems science. 

It is fun to speculate on the kind of 
library system needed to support such a 
curriculum. In the first place, it would 
probably have to be both information-
oriented and document-oriented. It 
would have to be an open system flexible 
enough to accommodate the shifts in 
relationship between metatheory and 
the empirically-based system principles 
which rise out of individual empirical 
realms. It would have to have both in-
ductive and deductive capacities-that 
is to say, when presented with a princi-
ple observed to be operative in a specific 
system, it could provide both the gen-
eral systems theory comprehending the 
specific system principle and concrete 
information regarding the empirical phe-
nomena whose behavior the specific sys-
tem principle comprehends. When in-

terrogated with a general theory of sys-
tems, it would provide information on 
the different systems _to which the princi-
ple had been found to apply and some-
thing about the smaller phenomenal en-
tities which it organizes.140 The design 
and construction of such a library sys-
tem would, of course, require the collab-
oration of not only general systems theo-
rists and librarians, but philosophers 
( especially epistemologists or philoso-
phers of science), mathematicians, com-
puter scientists, classificationists, and op-
erations researchers as well.141 And the 
efficiency and adequacy of such a system 
would, in all likelihood, be closely re-
lated to how well it remained current 
with the results of ongoing research in 
the systems sciences and how well its 
organizing mechanism supported the 
economy in knowledge transmission 
stressed in the curriculum itsel£.142 • • 

140 This raises the question of the relevance of gen-
eral systems theory to the development of procognitive 
systems and to the refinement of the paradigmatic 
dimension of SYNTOL. 

141 Douglas J. Foskett of the English Classification 
Research Group strongly urges that systems of classi-
fication be developed which take into account ad-
vances in scientific thought and the philosophy of 
science. He has even suggested general systems theory 
as an area of some possible utility in classification 
research. See his Classification and Indexing in the 
Social Sciences (Washington: Butterworths, 1963 ), 
pp. 130-31. • 

142 The English Classification Research Group has 
for some time considered the theory of integrative 
levels (or, put a bit differently, hierarchical systems) 
as a foundation on which to construct general classi-
fication schemes. The theory of integrative levels is 
based on the empirical observation that entities evolve 
from simplicity toward complexity and on the notion, 
advanced in the the theory of emergence discussed by 
Caws, that each successively complex whole is some-
how greater than the sum of its parts. See ibid., pp. 
132, 134-35, 141, 143; and Douglas J. Foskett, "The 
Classification Research Group, 1952-1962," in his 
Science, Humanism, and Librar·ies (New York: Haf-
ner, 1964) , p. 200.