On Managing Science in the Systems Age: Two Schemas for the Study of Science as a Whole Systems Phenomenon

In the Machine Age science not only took the world apart, but it took itself apart, dividing itself into narrower and narrower disciplines. Each discipline represented a different way of looking at the same world. Shortly before World War II science began to put itself back together again so that it could study phenomena as a whole, from all points of view. As a result, a host of new interdisciplines emerged such as Operations Research, Cybernetics, Systems Engineering, Communications Sciences, and Environmental Sciences. Unlike earlier scientific disciplines which sought to separate themselves from each other and to subdivide; the new interdisciplines seek to enlarge themselves, to combine to take into account more and more aspects of reality. Systems Science is the limit of this process, an amalgamation of all the parts of science into an integrated whole. Thus, Systems Science is not a science, but is science taken as a whole and applied to the study of wholes.

[1]  K. Popper,et al.  The Logic of Scientific Discovery , 1960 .

[2]  H. Reichenbach.  Experience And Prediction , 1938 .

[3]  H. Reichenbach.  The rise of scientific philosophy , 1952 .

[4]  C. West Churchman,et al.  Concepts without Primitives , 1953, Philosophy of Science.

[5]  C. Churchman,et al.  Experience and Reflection , 1959 .

[6]  J. Crowther.  Francis Bacon: The First Statesman of Science , 1960 .

[7]  C. Churchman.  Prediction and optimal decision : philosophical issues of a science of values / C.W. Churchman , 1962 .

[8]  Lotfi A. Zadeh,et al.  General System Theory , 1962 .

[9]  A. H. Schainblatt,et al.  The Researcher and The Manager: A Dialectic of Implementation , 1965 .

[10]  Abraham H. Maslow,et al.  Psychology as science. , 1971 .

[11]  R. Rosenthal.  Experimenter effects in behavioral research , 1968 .

[12]  D. Bakan,et al.  On method : toward a reconstruction of psychological investigation , 1968 .

[13]  C. Churchman,et al.  Challenge to Reason , 1968 .

[14]  G. Dickens,et al.  1 – Methods of Inquiry , 1968 .

[15]  P. Caws,et al.  The structure of discovery. , 1969, Science.

[16]  T. Kuhn,et al.  Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge: Logic of Discovery or Psychology of Research? , 1970 .

[17]  Frederick Betz,et al.  On the Management of Inquiry , 1971 .

[18]  R. Ackoff.  Towards a System of Systems Concepts , 1971 .

[19]  I. Mitroff.  Solipsism: An Essay in Psychological Philosophy , 1971, Philosophy of Science.

[20]  E. Jantsch.  The design of inquiring systems,: by C. West Churchman New York, Basic Books, 1972. , 1972 .

[21]  Russell L. Ackoff,et al.  On purposeful systems , 1972 .

[22]  Russell L. Ackoff,et al.  A Note on Systems Science , 1972 .

[23]  Ian I. Mitroff,et al.  On the methodology of the holistic experiment: An approach to the conceptualization of large-scale social experiments , 1973 .

[24]  Ian I. Mitroff,et al.  A Program for Research on Management Information Systems , 1973 .

[25]  Ian I. Mitroff,et al.  Operations research from the viewpoint of general systems theory , 1973 .

[26]  I. Mitroff.  Emotion and Bias in Science. (Book Reviews: The Subjective Side of Science. A Philosophical Inquiry into the Psychology of the Apollo Moon Scientists) , 1974 .