"Principles taken upon trust, consequences lamely deduced from them, want of coherence in the parts, and of evidence in the whole, these are every where to be met with in the systems of the most eminent philosophers, and seem to have drawn disgrace upon philosophy itself." (David Hume, "A Treatise of Human Nature", 1739-40)
"A system is said to be coherent if every fact in the system is related every other fact in the system by relations that are not merely conjunctive. A deductive system affords a good example of a coherent system." (Lizzie S Stebbing, "A modern introduction to logic", 1930)
"Even these humble objects reveal that our reality is not a mere collocation of elemental facts, but consists of units in which no part exists by itself, where each part points beyond itself and implies a larger whole. Facts and significance cease to be two concepts belonging to different realms, since a fact is always a fact in an intrinsically coherent whole. We could solve no problem of organization by solving it for each point separately, one after the other; the solution had to come for the whole. Thus we see how the problem of significance is closely bound up with the problem of the relation between the whole and its parts. It has been said: The whole is more than the sum of its parts. It is more correct to say that the whole is something else than the sum of its parts, because summing is a meaningless procedure, whereas the whole-part relationship is meaningful." (Kurt Koffka, "Principles of Gestalt Psychology", 1935)
"[…] reality is a system, completely ordered and fully intelligible, with which thought in its advance is more and more identifying itself. We may look at the growth of knowledge […] as an attempt by our mind to return to union with things as they are in their ordered wholeness. […] and if we take this view, our notion of truth is marked out for us. Truth is the approximation of thought to reality […] Its measure is the distance thought has travelled […] toward that intelligible system […] The degree of truth of a particular proposition is to be judged in the first instance by its coherence with experience as a whole, ultimately by its coherence with that further whole, all comprehensive and fully articulated, in which thought can come to rest." (Brand Blanshard, "The Nature of Thought" Vol. II, 1939)
"We cannot define truth in science until we move from fact to law. And within the body of laws in turn, what impresses us as truth is the orderly coherence of the pieces. They fit together like the characters of a great novel, or like the words of a poem. Indeed, we should keep that last analogy by us always, for science is a language, and like a language it defines its parts by the way they make up a meaning. Every word in a sentence has some uncertainty of definition, and yet the sentence defines its own meaning and that of its words conclusively. It is the internal unity and coherence of science which gives it truth, and which makes it a better system of prediction than any less orderly language." (Jacob Bronowski, "The Common Sense of Science", 1953)
"General Systems Theory is a name which has come into use to describe a level of theoretical model-building which lies somewhere between the highly generalized constructions of pure mathematics and the specific theories of the specialized disciplines. Mathematics attempts to organize highly general relationships into a coherent system, a system however which does not have any necessary connections with the 'real' world around us. It studies all thinkable relationships abstracted from any concrete situation or body of empirical knowledge." (Kenneth E Boulding, "General Systems Theory - The Skeleton of Science", Management Science Vol. 2 (3), 1956)
"In our definition of system we noted that all systems have interrelationships between objects and between their attributes. If every part of the system is so related to every other part that any change in one aspect results in dynamic changes in all other parts of the total system, the system is said to behave as a whole or coherently. At the other extreme is a set of parts that are completely unrelated: that is, a change in each part depends only on that part alone. The variation in the set is the physical sum of the variations of the parts. Such behavior is called independent or physical summativity." (Arthur D Hall & Robert E Fagen, "Definition of System", General Systems Vol. 1, 1956)
"The essential vision of reality presents us not with fugitive appearances but with felt patterns of order which have coherence and meaning for the eye and for the mind. Symmetry, balance and rhythmic sequences express characteristics of natural phenomena: the connectedness of nature - the order, the logic, the living process. Here art and science meet on common ground." (Gyorgy Kepes, "The New Landscape: In Art and Science", 1956)
"Within the confines of my abstraction, for instance, it is clear that the problem of truth and validity cannot be solved completely, if what we mean by the truth of an image is its correspondence with some reality in the world outside it. The difficulty with any correspondence theory of truth is that images can only be compared with images. They can never be compared with any outside reality. The difficulty with the coherence theory of truth, on the other hand, is that the coherence or consistency of the image is simply not what we mean by its truth." (Kenneth E Boulding, "The Image: Knowledge in life and society", 1956)
"Self-organization can be defined as the spontaneous creation of a globally coherent pattern out of local interactions. Because of its distributed character, this organization tends to be robust, resisting perturbations. The dynamics of a self-organizing system is typically non-linear, because of circular or feedback relations between the components. Positive feedback leads to an explosive growth, which ends when all components have been absorbed into the new configuration, leaving the system in a stable, negative feedback state. Non-linear systems have in general several stable states, and this number tends to increase (bifurcate) as an increasing input of energy pushes the system farther from its thermodynamic equilibrium." (Francis Heylighen, "The Science Of Self-Organization And Adaptivity", 1970)
"To adapt to a changing environment, the system needs a variety of stable states that is large enough to react to all perturbations but not so large as to make its evolution uncontrollably chaotic. The most adequate states are selected according to their fitness, either directly by the environment, or by subsystems that have adapted to the environment at an earlier stage. Formally, the basic mechanism underlying self-organization is the (often noise-driven) variation which explores different regions in the system’s state space until it enters an attractor. This precludes further variation outside the attractor, and thus restricts the freedom of the system’s components to behave independently. This is equivalent to the increase of coherence, or decrease of statistical entropy, that defines self-organization." (Francis Heylighen, "The Science Of Self-Organization And Adaptivity", 1970)
"Early scientific thinking was holistic, but speculative - the modern scientific temper reacted by being empirical, but atomistic. Neither is free from error, the former because it replaces factual inquiry with faith and insight, and the latter because it sacrifices coherence at the altar of facticity. We witness today another shift in ways of thinking: the shift toward rigorous but holistic theories. This means thinking in terms of facts and events in the context of wholes, forming integrated sets with their own properties and relationships."(Ervin László, "Introduction to Systems Philosophy", 1972)
"[…] science is not sacrosanct. The restrictions it imposes (and there are many such restrictions though it is not easy to spell them out) are not necessary in order to have general coherent and successful views about the world. There are myths, there are the dogmas of theology, there is metaphysics, and there are many other ways of constructing a worldview. It is clear that a fruitful exchange between science and such ‘nonscientific’ world-views will be in even greater need of anarchism than is science itself. Thus, anarchism is not only possible, it is necessary both for the internal progress of science and for the development of our culture as a whole." (Paul Feyerabend, "Against Method", 1975)
"Cybernetics is a homogenous and coherent scientific complex, a science resulting from the blending of at least two sciences - psychology and technology; it is a general and integrative science, a crossroads of sciences, involving both animal and car psychology. It is not just a discipline, circumscribed in a narrow and strictly defined field, but a complex of disciplines born of psychology and centered on it, branched out as branches of a tree in its stem. It is a stepwise synthesis, a suite of multiple, often reciprocal, modeling; syntheses and modeling in which, as a priority, and as a great importance, the modeling of psychology on the technique and then the modeling of the technique on psychology. Cybernetics is an intellectual symphony, a symphony of ideas and sciences." (Stefan Odobleja, "Psihologia consonantista ?i cibernetica" ["Consonatist and Cybernetic Psychology"], 1978)
"[…] a body of practices widely regarded by outsiders as well organized, logical, and coherent, in fact consists of a disordered array of observations with which scientists struggle to produce order." (Bruno Latour & S Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts, 1979)
"Nature is disordered, powerful and chaotic, and through fear of the chaos we impose system on it. We abhor complexity, and seek to simplify things whenever we can by whatever means we have at hand. We need to have an overall explanation of what the universe is and how it functions. In order to achieve this overall view we develop explanatory theories which will give structure to natural phenomena: we classify nature into a coherent system which appears to do what we say it does." (James Burke, "The Day the Universe Changed", 1985)
"Metaphor [is] a pervasive mode of understanding by which we project patterns from one domain of experience in order to structure another domain of a different kind. So conceived metaphor is not merely a linguistic mode of expression; rather, it is one of the chief cognitive structures by which we are able to have coherent, ordered experiences that we can reason about and make sense of. Through metaphor, we make use of patterns that obtain in our physical experience to organise our more abstract understanding." (Mark Johnson, "The Body in the Mind", 1987)
"There is no coherent knowledge, i.e. no uniform comprehensive account of the world and the events in it. There is no comprehensive truth that goes beyond an enumeration of details, but there are many pieces of information, obtained in different ways from different sources and collected for the benefit of the curious. The best way of presenting such knowledge is the list - and the oldest scientific works were indeed lists of facts, parts, coincidences, problems in several specialized domains." (Paul K Feyerabend, "Farewell to Reason", 1987)
"When loops are present, the network is no longer singly connected and local propagation schemes will invariably run into trouble. [...] If we ignore the existence of loops and permit the nodes to continue communicating with each other as if the network were singly connected, messages may circulate indefinitely around the loops and process may not converges to a stable equilibrium. […] Such oscillations do not normally occur in probabilistic networks […] which tend to bring all messages to some stable equilibrium as time goes on. However, this asymptotic equilibrium is not coherent, in the sense that it does not represent the posterior probabilities of all nodes of the network." (Judea Pearl, "Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems: Networks of Plausible Inference", 1988)
"A world view is a system of co-ordinates or a frame of reference in which everything presented to us by our diverse experiences can be placed. It is a symbolic system of representation that allows us to integrate everything we know about the world and ourselves into a global picture, one that illuminates reality as it is presented to us within a certain culture. […] A world view is a coherent collection of concepts and theorems that must allow us to construct a global image of the world, and in this way to understand as many elements of our experience as possible." (Diederick Aerts et al, "World views: From Fragmentation to Integration", 1994)
"There are a variety of swarm topologies, but the only organization that holds a genuine plurality of shapes is the grand mesh. In fact, a plurality of truly divergent components can only remain coherent in a network. No other arrangement-chain, pyramid, tree, circle, hub-can contain true diversity working as a whole. This is why the network is nearly synonymous with democracy or the market." (Kevin Kelly, "Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World", 1995)
"The role of science, like that of art, is to blend proximate imagery with more distant meaning, the parts we already understand with those given as new into larger patterns that are coherent enough to be acceptable as truth. Biologists know this relation by intuition during the course of fieldwork, as they struggle to make order out of the infinitely varying patterns of nature." (Edward O Wilson, "In Search of Nature", 1996)
"The central proposition in [realistic thinking] is that human actions and interactions are processes, not systems, and the coherent patterning of those processes becomes what it becomes because of their intrinsic capacity, the intrinsic capacity of interaction and relationship, to form coherence. That emergent form is radically unpredictable, but it emerges in a controlled or patterned way because of the characteristic of relationship itself, creation and destruction in conditions at the edge of chaos." (Ralph D Stacey et al, "Complexity and Management: Fad or Radical Challenge to Systems Thinking?", 2000)
"Falling between order and chaos, the moment of complexity is the point at which self-organizing systems emerge to create new patterns of coherence and structures of behaviour." (Mark C Taylor, "The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture", 2001)
"Metaphor is evidence of the human ability to visualize the universe as a coherent organism. Proof of our capacity, not just to see one thing in another but to change the very nature of things. When a metaphor is accepted as fact, it enters groupthink, taking on an existence in the real world. [...] Metaphor is the default form of thought, providing many angles from which to literally 'see' the world." (Marcel Danesi, "Poetic Logic: The Role of Metaphor in Thought, Language, and Culture", 2004)
"A scientific theory is a concise and coherent set of concepts, claims, and laws (frequently expressed mathematically) that can be used to precisely and accurately explain and predict natural phenomena." (Mordechai Ben-Ari, "Just a Theory: Exploring the Nature of Science", 2005)
"A worldview must be coherent, logical and adequate. Coherence means that the fundamental ideas constituting the worldview must be seen as proceeding from a single, unifying, overarching concept. A logical worldview means simply that the various ideas constituting it should not be contradictory. Adequate means that it is capable of explaining, logically and coherently, every element of contemporary experience." (M G Jackson, "Transformative Learning for a New Worldview: Learning to Think Differently", 2008)
"Each systems archetype embodies a particular theory about dynamic behavior that can serve as a starting point for selecting and formulating raw data into a coherent set of interrelationships. Once those relationships are made explicit and precise, the "theory" of the archetype can then further guide us in our data-gathering process to test the causal relationships through direct observation, data analysis, or group deliberation." (Daniel H Kim, "Systems Archetypes as Dynamic Theories", The Systems Thinker Vol. 24 (1), 2013)
"Even more important is the way complex systems seem to strike a balance between the need for order and the imperative for change. Complex systems tend to locate themselves at a place we call 'the edge of chaos'. We imagine the edge of chaos as a place where there is enough innovation to keep a living system vibrant, and enough stability to keep it from collapsing into anarchy. It is a zone of conflict and upheaval, where the old and new are constantly at war. Finding the balance point must be a delicate matter - if a living system drifts too close, it risks falling over into incoherence and dissolution; but if the system moves too far away from the edge, it becomes rigid, frozen, totalitarian. Both conditions lead to extinction. […] Only at the edge of chaos can complex systems flourish. This threshold line, that edge between anarchy and frozen rigidity, is not a like a fence line, it is a fractal line; it possesses nonlinearity. (Stephen H Buhner, "Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm: Beyond the Doors of Perception into the Dreaming of Earth", 2014)
"The work around the complex systems map supported a concentration on causal mechanisms. This enabled poor system responses to be diagnosed as the unanticipated effects of previous policies as well as identification of the drivers of the sector. Understanding the feedback mechanisms in play then allowed experimentation with possible future policies and the creation of a coherent and mutually supporting package of recommendations for change." (David C Lane et al, "Blending systems thinking approaches for organisational analysis: reviewing child protection", 2015)
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