🦋Science: On Creativity (Quotes)

"[…] science conceived as resting on mere sense-perception, with no other source of observation, is bankrupt, so far as concerns its claim to self-sufficiency. Science can find no individual enjoyment in nature: Science can find no aim in nature: Science can find no creativity in nature; it finds mere rules of succession. These negations are true of Natural Science. They are inherent in it methodology." (Alfred N Whitehead, "Modes of Thought", 1938)

"The act of discovery escapes logical analysis; there are no logical rules in terms of which a 'discovery machine' could be constructed that would take over the creative function of the genius. But it is not the logician’s task to account for scientific discoveries; all he can do is to analyze the relation between given facts and a theory presented to him with the claim that it explains these facts. In other words, logic is concerned with the context of justification." (Hans Reichenbach, "The Rise of Scientific Philosophy", 1951)

"The design process involves a series of operations. In map design, it is convenient to break this sequence into three stages. In the first stage, you draw heavily on imagination and creativity. You think of various graphic possibilities, consider alternative ways." (Arthur H Robinson, "Elements of Cartography", 1953)

"[…] the difference between creative thinking and unimaginative competent thinking lies in the injection of a some randomness. The randomness must be guided by intuition to be efficient." (John McCarthy et al, "A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence", 1955)

"At each level of complexity, entirely new properties appear. [And] at each stage, entirely new laws, concepts, and generalizations are necessary, requiring inspiration and creativity to just as great a degree as in the previous one." (Herb Anderson, 1972)

"Facts do not ‘speak for themselves’; they are read in the light of theory. Creative thought, in science as much as in the arts, is the motor of changing opinion. Science is a quintessentially human activity, not a mechanized, robot-like accumulation of objective information, leading by laws of logic to inescapable interpretation." (Stephen J Gould, "Ever Since Darwin", 1977)

"Science is not a heartless pursuit of objective information. It is a creative human activity, its geniuses acting more as artists than information processors. Changes in theory are not simply the derivative results of the new discoveries but the work of creative imagination influenced by contemporary social and political forces." (Stephen J Gould, "Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History", 1977)

"Science, since people must do it, is a socially embedded activity. It progresses by hunch, vision, and intuition. Much of its change through time does not record a closer approach to absolute truth, but the alteration of cultural contexts that influence it so strongly. Facts are not pure and unsullied bits of information; culture also influences what we see and how we see it. Theories, moreover, are not inexorable inductions from facts. The most creative theories are often imaginative visions imposed upon facts; the source of imagination is also strongly cultural." (Stephen J Gould, "The Mismeasure of Man", 1980)

"If intelligence is a capacity that is gradually acquired as a result of development and learning, then a machine that can learn from experience would have, at least in theory, the capacity to carry out intelligent behavior. [...] Humans have created machines that imitate us - that provide mirrors to see ourselves and measure our strength, our intellect, and even our creativity." (Diego Rasskin-Gutman, "Chess Metaphors: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Mind", 2009)

"Some methods, such as those governing the design of experiments or the statistical treatment of data, can be written down and studied. But many methods are learned only through personal experience and interactions with other scientists. Some are even harder to describe or teach. Many of the intangible influences on scientific discovery - curiosity, intuition, creativity - largely defy rational analysis, yet they are often the tools that scientists bring to their work." (Committee on the Conduct of Science, "On Being a Scientist", 1989)

"All of engineering involves some creativity to cover the parts not known, and almost all of science includes some practical engineering to translate the abstractions into practice." (Richard W Hamming, "The Art of Probability for Scientists and Engineers", 1991)

"Good engineering is not a matter of creativity or centering or grounding or inspiration or lateral thinking, as useful as those might be, but of decoding the clever, even witty, messages the solution space carves on the corpses of the ideas in which you believed with all your heart, and then building the road to the next message." (Fred Hapgood, "Up the infinite Corridor: MIT and the Technical Imagination", 1993)

"Indeed, knowledge that one will be judged on some criterion of ‘creativeness’ or ‘originality’ tends to narrow the scope of what one can produce (leading to products that are then judged as relatively conventional); in contrast, the absence of an evaluations seems to liberate creativity." (Howard Gardner, "Creating Minds", 1993)

"[…] creativity is the ability to see the obvious over the long term, and not to be restrained by short-term conventional wisdom." (Arthur J Birch, "To See the Obvious", 1995)

"The pursuit of science is more than the pursuit of understanding. It is driven by the creative urge, the urge to construct a vision, a map, a picture of the world that gives the world a little more beauty and coherence than it had before." (John A Wheeler, "Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam: A Life in Physics", 1998)

"Simple observation generally gets us nowhere. It is the creative imagination that increases our understanding by finding connections between apparently unrelated phenomena, and forming logical, consistent theories to explain them. And if a theory turns out to be wrong, as many do, all is not lost. The struggle to create an imaginative, correct picture of reality frequently tells us where to go next, even when science has temporarily followed the wrong path." (Richard Morris, "The Universe, the Eleventh Dimension, and Everything: What We Know and How We Know It", 1999)

"Science, and physics in particular, has developed out of the Newtonian paradigm of mechanics. In this world view, every phenomenon we observe can be reduced to a collection of atoms or particles, whose movement is governed by the deterministic laws of nature. Everything that exists now has already existed in some different arrangement in the past, and will continue to exist so in the future. In such a philosophy, there seems to be no place for novelty or creativity." (Francis Heylighen, "The science of self-organization and adaptivity", 2001)

"This spontaneous emergence of order at critical points of instability is one of the most important concepts of the new understanding of life. It is technically known as self-organization and is often referred to simply as ‘emergence’. It has been recognized as the dynamic origin of development, learning and evolution. In other words, creativity - the generation of new forms - is a key property of all living systems. And since emergence is an integral part of the dynamics of open systems, we reach the important conclusion that open systems develop and evolve. Life constantly reaches out into novelty." (Fritjof  Capra, "The Hidden Connections", 2002)

"Evolution moves towards greater complexity, greater elegance, greater knowledge, greater intelligence, greater beauty, greater creativity, and greater levels of subtle attributes such as love. […] Of course, even the accelerating growth of evolution never achieves an infinite level, but as it explodes exponentially it certainly moves rapidly in that direction." (Ray Kurzweil, "The Singularity is Near", 2005)

"An ecology provides the special formations needed by organizations. Ecologies are: loose, free, dynamic, adaptable, messy, and chaotic. Innovation does not arise through hierarchies. As a function of creativity, innovation requires trust, openness, and a spirit of experimentation - where random ideas and thoughts can collide for re-creation." (George Siemens, "Knowing Knowledge", 2006)

"Learning emerges from discovery, not directives; reflection, not rules; possibilities, not prescriptions; diversity, not dogma; creativity and curiosity, not conformity and certainty; and meaning, not mandates." (Stephanie P Marshall, "The Power to Transform: Leadership That Brings Learning and Schooling to Life", 2006)

"Systemic problems trace back in the end to worldviews. But worldviews themselves are in flux and flow. Our most creative opportunity of all may be to reshape those worldviews themselves. New ideas can change everything." (Anthony Weston, "How to Re-Imagine the World", 2007)

"In an information economy, entrepreneurs master the science of information in order to overcome the laws of the purely physical sciences. They can succeed because of the surprising power of the laws of information, which are conducive to human creativity. The central concept of information theory is a measure of freedom of choice. The principle of matter, on the other hand, is not liberty but limitation- it has weight and occupies space." (George Gilder, "Knowledge and Power: The Information Theory of Capitalism and How it is Revolutionizing our World", 2013)

"Imagination, as well as reason, is necessary to perfection in the philosophical mind. A rapidity of combination, a power of perceiving analogies, and of comparing them by facts, is the creative source of discovery." (Sir Humphry Davy)

🦋Science: On Definitions (Quotes)

"Rules for Demonstrations. I. Not to undertake to demonstrate any thing that is so evident of itself that nothing can be given that is clearer to prove it. II. To prove all propositions at all obscure, and to employ in their proof only very evident maxims or propositions already admitted or demonstrated. III. To always mentally substitute definitions in the place of things defined, in order not to be misled by the ambiguity of terms which have been restricted by definitions." (Blaise Pascal, "Pensées", 1670)

"Rules necessary for definitions. Not to leave any terms at all obscure or ambiguous without definition; Not to employ in definitions any but terms perfectly known or already explained. […] A few rules include all that is necessary for the perfection of the definitions, the axioms, and the demonstrations, and consequently of the entire method of the geometrical proofs of the art of persuading." (Blaise Pascal, "Pensées", 1670)

"The errors of definitions multiply themselves according as the reckoning proceeds; and lead men into absurdities, which at last they see but cannot avoid, without reckoning anew from the beginning." (Thomas Hobbes, "The Moral and Political Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury", 1750)

"Definitions might be good if we did not employ words in making them." (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, "Emile, or, Treatise on Education", 1762)

"A definition is nothing else but an explication of the meaning of a word, by words whose meaning is already known. Hence it is evident that every word cannot be defined; for the definition must consist of words; and there could be no definition, if there were not words previously understood without definition." (Thomas Reid, "Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man", 1785)

"There is nothing more difficult than a good definition, for it is scarcely possible to express, in a few words, the abstracted view of an infinite variety of facts." (Humphry Davy, "Consolations in Travel, or the Last Days of a Philosopher", 1830)

"It is the essence of a scientific definition to be causative, not by introduction of imaginary somewhats, natural or supernatural, under the name of causes, but by announcing the law of action in the particular case, in subordination to the common law of which all the phenomena are modifications or results." (Samuel T Coleridge, "Hints Towards the Formation of a More Comprehensive Theory of Life, The Nature of Life", 1847)

"The dimmed outlines of phenomenal things all merge into one another unless we put on the focusing-glass of theory, and screw it up sometimes to one pitch of definition and sometimes to another, so as to see down into different depths through the great millstone of the world." (James C Maxwell, "Are There Real Analogies in Nature?", 1856)

"Questions of Definition are of the very highest importance in Philosophy, and they need to be watched accordingly." (George Campbell, "A Fourth State of Matter, Nature", 1880)

"We say it is ‘explanation’ but it is only in ‘description’ that we are in advance of the older stages of knowledge and science. We describe better we explain just as little as our predecessors." (Friedrich W Nietzsche, "The Joyful Wisdom", 1887)

"The more elevated a culture, the richer its language. The number of words and their combinations depends directly on a sum of conceptions and ideas; without the latter there can be no understandings, no definitions, and, as a result, no reason to enrich a language. (Anton Chekhov, [letter to A.S. Suvorin] 1892)

"A definition is the enclosing a wilderness of idea within a wall of words." (Samuel Butler, "The Note-Books of Samuel Butler", 1912)

"In every new and growing science there are many working hypotheses that never attain to any sort of reality. On the other hand, in the old and abstract sciences of mathematics, where it is hard to tell how much is mere definition or convention, the problem of reality is not so much doubtful as it is meaningless." (Gilbert N Lewis, "The Anatomy of Science", 1926)

"If we wish to express our ideas in terms of the concepts synthetic and analytic, we would have to point out that these concepts are applicable only to sentences that can be either true of false, and not to definitions. The mathematical axioms are therefore neither synthetic nor analytic, but definitions. [...] Hence the question of whether axioms are a priori becomes pointless since they are arbitrary." (Hans Reichenbach, "The Philosophy of Space and Time", 1928)

"A Weltanschauung [worldview] is an intellectual construction which solves all the problems of our existence uniformly on the basis of one overriding hypothesis, which, accordingly, leaves no question unanswered and in which everything that interests us finds its fixed place [...] the worldview of science already departs noticeably from our definition. It is true that it too assumes the uniformity of the explanation of the universe; but it does so only as a programme, the fulfillment of which is relegated to the future." Sigmund Freud, "New introductory lectures on psycho-analysis", 1932)

"Scientific Ideas can often be adequately exhibited for all the purposes of reasoning, by means of Definitions and Axioms; all attempts to reason by means of Definitions from common Notions, lead to empty forms or entire confusion." (William Whewell, "History of the Inductive Sciences from the Earliest to the Present Time", 1937)

"The view is often defended that sciences should be built up on clear and sharply defined basal concepts. In actual fact no science, not even the most exact, begins with such definitions. The true beginning of scientific activity consists rather in describing phenomena and then in proceeding to group, classify and correlate them." (Sigmund Freud, "Collected Papers", 1950)

"Being built on concepts, hypotheses, and experiments, laws are no more accurate or trustworthy than the wording of the definitions and the accuracy and extent of the supporting experiments." (Gerald Holton, "Introduction to Concepts and Theories in Physical Science", 1952)

"The word 'definition' has come to have a dangerously reassuring sound, owing no doubt to its frequent occurrence in logical and mathematical writings." (Willard van Orman Quine, "From a Logical Point of View", 1953)

"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)

"The exact verbal definition of qualitative concepts is more often the province of philosophy than of physical science." (Ronnie Bell, "The Proton in Chemistry", 1959)

"In order that a mathematical science of any importance may be founded upon conventional definitions, the entities created by them must have properties which bear some affinity to the properties of existing things." (John H C Whitehead, A Treatise on Universal Algebra, with Applications, 1960)

"The view is often defended that sciences should be built up on clear and sharply defined basal concepts. In actual fact no science, not even the most exact, begins with such definitions. The true beginning of scientific activity consists rather in describing phenomena and then in proceeding to group, classify and correlate them." (Sigmund Freud, "General Psychological Theory", 1963)

"This other world is the so-called physical world image; it is merely an intellectual structure. To a certain extent it is arbitrary. It is a kind of model or idealization created in order to avoid the inaccuracy inherent in every measurement and to facilitate exact definition." (Max Planck, "The Philosophy of Physics", 1963)

"If all the theories pertinent to systems engineering could be discussed within a common framework by means of a standard set of nomenclature and definitions, many separate courses might not be required." (A Wayne Wymore, "A Mathematical Theory of Systems Engineering", 1967)

"Definitions are the guardians of rationality, the first line of defense against the chaos of mental disintegration. (Ayn Rand, The Romantic Manifesto, 1969)

"Concepts form the basis for any science. These are ideas, usually somewhat vague (especially when first encountered), which often defy really adequate definition. The meaning of a new concept can seldom be grasped from reading a one-paragraph discussion. There must be time to become accustomed to the concept, to investigate it with prior knowledge, and to associate it with personal experience. Inability to work with details of a new subject can often be traced to inadequate understanding of its basic concepts." (William C Reynolds & Harry C Perkins, "Engineering Thermodynamics", 1977)

"Definitions, like questions and metaphors, are instruments for thinking. Their authority rests entirely on their usefulness, not their correctness. We use definitions in order to delineate problems we wish to investigate, or to further interests we wish to promote. In other words, we invent definitions and discard them as suits our purposes." (Neil Postman, "Language Education in a Knowledge Context", 1980)

"When terms [...] evolve and change definition with time; and when the social reality which terms are intended to organize and render intelligible is also seen to be in flux, capturing the truth in a net of words becomes a matter of intuition and style more than of any scientific method that can be replicated by others and made to achieve the same result every time someone asks the same question, or undertakes the same operations." (William H McNeill, "Discrepancies among the Social Sciences", 1981)

"Definitions are temporary verbalizations of concepts, and concepts - particularly difficult concepts - are usually revised repeatedly as our knowledge and understanding grows." (Ernst Mayr, "The Growth of Biological Thought", 1982)

"The assumptions and definitions of mathematics and science come from our intuition, which is based ultimately on experience. They then get shaped by further experience in using them and are occasionally revised. They are not fixed for all eternity." (Richard Hamming, "Methods of Mathematics Applied to Calculus, Probability, and Statistics", 1985)

"A full definition of an object must include the whole of human experience, both as a criterion of truth and a practical indicator of its connection with human wants." (Vladimir Lenin)

"Every physical concept must be given a definition such that one can in principle describe, in virtue of this definition, whether or not it applies in each particular case." (Albert Einstein)

"Fundamental definitions do not arise at the start but at the end of the exploration, because in order to define a thing you must know what it is and what it is good for." (Hans Freudenthal)

"We begin to reason from sensible objects, and definition is the end and epilogue of science. It is not the beginning of our knowing, but only of our teaching." (Tommaso Campanella)

❄️Systems Thinking: On Coherence (Quotes)

"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)

More quotes on Coherence at the-web-of-knowledge.blogspot.com.

🏷️Knowledge Representation: On Imagination (Quotes)

"We invoke the imagination and the intervals that it furnishes, since the form itself is without motion or genesis, indivisible and free of all underlying matter, though the elements latent in the form are produced distinctly and individually on the screen of imagination. What projects the images is the understanding; the source of what is projected is the form in the understanding; and what they are projected in is this 'passive nous' that unfolds in revolution about the partlessness of genuine Nous." (Proclus Lycaeus, "A Commentary on the First Book of Euclid’s Elements", cca 5th century)

"But since we have, in our work on the soul, treated of imagination, and the faculty of imagination is identical with that of sense-perception, though the being of a faculty of imagination is different from that of a faculty of sense-perception; and since imagination is the movement set up by a sensory faculty when actually discharging its function, while a dream appears to be an image (for which occurs in sleep - whether simply or in some particular way - is what we call a dream): it manifestly follows that dreaming is an activity of the faculty of sense-perception, but belongs to this faculty qua imaginative." (Aristotle, "On Dreams", 4th century BC)

"For imagination is different from either perceiving or discursive thinking, though it is not found without sensation, or judgement without it. That this activity is not the same kind of thinking as judgement is obvious. For imagining lies within our own power whenever we wish (e.g. we can call up a picture, as in the practice of mnemonics by the use of mental images), but in forming opinions we are not free: we cannot escape the alternative of falsehood or truth." (Aristotle, "De Anima", cca. 350 BC)

"It is obvious then, that memory belongs to that part of the soul to which imagination belongs. […] Just as the picture painted on the panel is at once a picture and a portrait, and though one and the same, is both, yet the essence of the two is not the same, and it is possible to think of it both as a picture and as a portrait, so in the same way we must regard the mental picture within us both as an object of contemplation in itself and as a mental picture of something else […]. Insofar as we consider it in relation to something else, e.g. as a likeness, it is also an aid to memory." (Aristotle, "De Memoria et Reminiscentia" [On Memory and Recollection], 4th century BC)

"Since it seems that there is nothing outside and separate in existence from sensible spatial magnitudes, the objects of thought are in the sensible forms, viz. both the abstract objects and all the states and affections of sensible things. Hence no one can learn or understand anything in the absence of sense, and when the mind is actively aware of anything it is necessarily aware of it along with an image; for images are like sensuous contents except in that they contain no matter. Imagination is different from assertion and denial; for what is true or false involves a synthesis of thoughts. In what will the primary thoughts differ from images? Must we not say that neither these nor even our other thoughts are images, though they necessarily involve them?" (Aristotle, "De Anima", cca. 350 BC)

"Thinking is different from perceiving and is held to be in part imagination, in part judgement: we must therefore first mark off the sphere of imagination and then speak of judgement. If then imagination is that in virtue of which an image arises for us, excluding metaphorical uses of the term, is it a single faculty or disposition relative to images, in virtue of which we discriminate and are either in error or not? The faculties in virtue of which we do this are sense, opinion, knowledge, thought." (Aristotle, "De Anima", cca. 350 BC)

"Imagination (VIKALPA) is a thought based on a mental image describable by words but not based on an object directly observable." (Patanjali, "Yoga Sutra" cca. 500 BC - 400 AD)

"Sometimes a thing is perceived [via sense-perception] when it is observed; then it is imagined, when it is absent [in reality] through the representation of its form inside, Sense-perception grasps [the concept] insofar as it is buried in these accidents that cling to it because of the matter out of which it is made without abstracting it from [matter], and it grasps it only by means of a connection through position [ that exists] between its perception and its matter. It is for this reason that the form of [the thing] is not represented in the external sense when [sensation] ceases. As to the internal [faculty of] imagination, it imagines [the concept] together with these accidents, without being able to entirely abstract it from them. Still, [imagination] abstracts it from the afore-mentioned connection [through position] on which sense-perception depends, so that [imagination] represents the form [of the thing] despite the absence of the form's [outside] carrier." (Avicenna Latinus [Ibn Sina], "Pointer and Reminders", cca. 1030)

"Imagination is accordingly the first activity [movement] of the soul after it is subjected to external stimulation. Imagination  either formulates second judgment, or brings back first judgment by recollection." (John of Salisbury, "Metalogicon", 1159)

"[…] the painter cannot produce any form or figure […] if first this form or figure is not imagined and reduced into a mental image (idea) by the inward wits. And to paint, one needs acute senses and a good imagination with which one can get to know the things one sees in such a way that, once these things are not present anymore and transformed into mental images (fantasmi), they can be presented to the intellect. In the second stage, the intellect by means of its judgement puts these things together and, finally, in the third stage the intellect turns these mental images […] into a finished composition which it afterwards represents in painting by means of its ability to cause movement in the body." (Romano Alberti, "Della nobiltà della Pittura", 1585)

"From all this I am beginning to have a rather better understanding of what I am. But it still appears - and I cannot stop thinking this - that the corporeal things of which images are formed in my thought, and which the senses investigate, are known with much more distinctness than this puzzling 'I' which cannot be pictured in the imagination." (René Descartes, "Meditations" II, 1641)

"For after the object is removed, or the eye shut, we still retain an image of the thing seen, though more obscure than when we see it. And this is it the Latins call imagination, from the image made in seeing, and apply the same, though improperly, to all the other senses. But the Greeks call it fancy, which signifies appearance, and is as proper to one sense as to another. IMAGINATION, therefore, is nothing but decaying sense; and is found in men and many other living creatures, as well sleeping as waking." (Thomas Hobbes, "Leviathan: The Matter, Form and Power of a Commonwealth  Ecclesiastical and Civil", 1651)

"Measure, time and number are nothing but modes of thought or rather of imagination." (Baruch Spinoza, [Letter to Ludvicus Meyer] 1663)

"The ideas imprinted on the senses by the Author of Nature are called real things: and those excited in the imagination being less regular, vivid and constant, are more properly termed ideas, or images of things, which they copy and represent. But then our sensations, be they never so vivid and distinct, are nevertheless ideas, that is, they exist in the mind, or are perceived by it, as truly as the ideas of its own framing. The ideas of sense are allowed to have more reality in them, that is, to be more strong, orderly, and coherent than the creatures of the mind; but this is no argument that they exist without the mind. They are also less dependent on the spirit, or thinking substance which perceives them, in that they are excited by the will of another and more powerful spirit: yet still they are ideas, and certainly no idea, whether faint or strong, can exist otherwise than in a mind perceiving it." (George Berkeley, "Principles of Human Knowledge", 1710)

"[...] things which do not now exist in the mind itself, can only be perceived, remembered, or imagined, by means of ideas or images of them in the mind, which are the immediate objects of perception, remembrance, and imagination. This doctrine appears evidently to be borrowed from the old system; which taught, that external things make impressions upon the mind, like the impressions of a seal upon wax; that it is by means of those impressions that we perceive, remember) or imagine them; and that those impressions must resemble the things from which they are taken. When we form our notions of the operations of the mind by analogy, this way of conceiving them seems to be very natural, and offers itself to our thoughts: for as every thing which is felt must make some impression upon the body, we are apt to think, that every thing which is understood must make some impression upon the mind." (Thomas Reid, "An Inquiry into the Human Mind", 1734)

"Nay farther, even with relation to that succession, we cou'd only admit of those perceptions, which are immediately present to our consciousness, nor cou'd those lively images, with which the memory presents us, be ever receiv'd as true pictures of past perceptions. The memory, senses, and understanding are, therefore, all of them founded on the imagination, or the vivacity of our ideas."(David Hume, "A Treatise of Human Nature A Treatise of Human Nature", 1739)

"Beware of determining and declaring your Opinion suddenly on any Object; for Imagination often gets the Start of judgment, and makes People believe they see Things, which better Observations will convince them could not possibly be seen: Therefore assert nothing till after repeated Experiments and Examinations in all Lights and in all Positions." (Henry Baker, "The Microscope Made Easy", 1742)

"Things which do not now exist in the mind itself, can only be perceived, remembered, or imagined, by means of the ideas or images in the mind, which are the immediate objects of perception, remembrance, and imagination." (Thomas Reid, "An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles", 1764)

"Men always fool themselves when they give up experience for systems born of the imagination. Man is the work of nature, he exists in nature, he is subject to its laws, he can not break free, he can not leave even in thought; it is in vain that his spirit wants to soar beyond the bounds of the visible world, he is always forced to return." (Paul-Henri T d’ Holbach, "Système de la Nature", 1770)

"Psychologists have hitherto failed to realize that imagination is a necessary ingredient of perception itself." (Immanuel Kant, "Critique of Pure Reason", 1781)

"The schema is in itself always a product of imagination. Since, however, the synthesis of imagination aims at no special intuition, but only at unity in the determination of sensibility, the schema has to be distinguished from the image." (Immanuel Kant," Critique of Pure Reason", 1781)

"There are conceptions which may be called fancy pictures. They are commonly called creatures of fancy, or of imagination. They are not the copies of any original that exists, but are originals themselves […]. They were conceived by their creators, and may be conceived by others, but they never existed. We do not ascribe the qualities of true or false to them, because they are not accompanied with any belief, nor do they imply any affirmation or negation." (Thomas Reid,"Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man", 1785)

"The moment a person forms a theory, his imagination sees, in every object, only the traits which favor that theory." (Thomas Jefferson, [letter to Charles Thompson] 1787)

"Conjectures in philosophy are termed hypotheses or theories; and the investigation of an hypothesis founded on some slight probability, which accounts for many appearances in nature, has too often been considered as the highest attainment of a philosopher. If the hypothesis (sic) hangs well together, is embellished with a lively imagination, and serves to account for common appearances - it is considered by many, as having all the qualities that should recommend it to our belief, and all that ought to be required in a philosophical system." (George Adams, "Lectures on Natural and Experimental Philosophy" Vol. 1, 1794)

"The imagination is an eye where images remain forever." (Joseph Joubert, [Letter to Revd. Dr. Trusler] 1799)

"The philosopher who is really useful to the cause of science, is he who, uniting to a fertile imagination, a rigid severity in investigation and observation, is at once tormented by the desire of ascertaining the cause of the phenomena, and by the fear of deceiving himself in that which he assigns." (Pierre-Simon Laplace, "System of the World" Vol. 2, 1809)

"When the eye or the imagination is struck with an uncommon work, the next transition of an active mind is to the means by which it was performed." (Samuel Johnson, 1810)

"The imagination […] that reconciling and mediatory power, which incorporating the reason in images of the sense and organizing (as it were) the flux of the senses by the permanence and self-circling energies of the reason, gives birth to a system of symbols, harmonious in themselves, and consubstantial with the truths of which they are the conductors." (Samuel T Coleridge, "The Statesman's Manual", 1816)

"It seems to be like taking the pieces of a dissected map out of its box. We first look at one part, and then at another, then join and dove-tail them; and when the successive acts of attention have been completed, there is a retrogressive effort of mind to behold it as a whole. The poet should paint to the imagination, not to the fancy; and I know no happier case to exemplify the distinction between these two faculties." (Samuel T Coleridge," Biographia Literaria", 1817)

"Whilst chemical pursuits exalt the understanding, they do not depress the imagination or weaken genuine feeling; whilst they give the mind habits of accuracy, by obliging it to attend to facts, they likewise extend its analogies; and, though conversant with the minute forms of things, they have for their ultimate end the great and magnificent objects of nature." (Sir Humphry Davy, "Consolations in Travel, or the Last Days of a Philosopher", 1830)

"No occupation is more worthy of an intelligent and enlightened mind, than the study of Nature and natural objects; and whether we labour to investigate the structure and function of the human system, whether we direct our attention to the classification and habits of the animal kingdom, or prosecute our researches in the more pleasing and varied field of vegetable life, we shall constantly find some new object to attract our attention, some fresh beauties to excite our imagination, and some previously undiscovered source of gratification and delight." (Sir Joseph Paxton, "A Practical Treatise on the Cultivation of the Dahlia", 1838)

"But a thousand unconnected observations have no more value, as a demonstrative proof, than a single one. If we do not succeed in discovering causes by our researches, we have no right to create them by the imagination; we must not allow mere fancy to proceed beyond the bounds of our knowledge."(Justus von Liebig, "The Lancet", 1844)

"By reducing imagination to the power of forming images, and by  insisting that no image can be formed except out of the elements furnished by experience, I do not mean to confound imagination with memory; indeed, the frequent occurrence of great strength of memory with comparative feebleness of imagination, would suffice to warn us against such a conclusion." (George H Lewes, "The Principles of Success in Literature", 1865)

"You cannot crown the edifice by this abstraction. The scientific imagination, which is here authoritative, demands as the origin and cause of a series of ether waves a particle of vibrating matter quite as definite, though it may be excessively minute, as that which gives origin to a musical sound. Such a particle we name an atom or a molecule. I think the imagination when focused so as to give definition without penumbral haze, is sure to realise this image at last." (John Tyndall, "The Scientific Use of the Imagination", 1870)

"Accurate and minute measurement seems to the nonscientific imagination a less lofty and dignified work than looking for something new. But nearly all the grandest discoveries of science have been but the rewards of accurate measurement and patient long contained labor in the minute sifting of numerical results." (William T Kelvin, "Report of the British Association For the Advancement of Science" Vol. 41, 1871)

"The imagination is one of the highest prerogatives of man. By this faculty he unites, independently of the will, former images and ideas, and thus creates brilliant and novel results […] The value of the products of our imagination depends of course on the number, accuracy, and clearness of our impressions; on our judgment and taste in selecting or rejecting the involuntary combinations, and to a certain extent on our power of voluntarily combining them." (Charles Darwin, "The Descent of Man", 1874)

"It would be an error to suppose that the great discoverer seizes at once upon the truth, or has any unerring method of divining it. In all probability the errors of the great mind exceed in number those of the less vigorous one. Fertility of imagination and abundance of guesses at truth are among the first requisites of discovery; but the erroneous guesses must be many times as numerous as those that prove well founded. The weakest analogies, the most whimsical notions, the most apparently absurd theories, may pass through the teeming brain, and no record remain of more than the hundredth part. […] The truest theories involve suppositions which are inconceivable, and no limit can really be placed to the freedom of hypotheses." (W Stanley Jevons, "The Principles of Science: A Treatise on Logic and Scientific Method", 1877)

"But I thoroughly believe myself, and hope to prove to you, that science is full of beautiful pictures, of real poetry, and of wonder-working fairies; and what is more […] though they themselves will always remain invisible, yet you will see their wonderful power at work everywhere around you. […] There is only one gift we must have before we can learn to know them - we must have imagination. I do not mean mere fancy, which creates unreal images and impossible monsters, but imagination, the power of making pictures or images in our mind, of that which is, though it is invisible to us." (Arabella Buckley, Fairyland, 1879)

"[…] deduction consists in constructing an icon or diagram the relations of whose parts shall present a complete analogy with those of the parts of the object of reasoning, of experimenting upon this image in the imagination, and of observing the result so as to discover unnoticed and hidden relations among the parts." (Charles S Peirce, 1885)

"[...] thought is the representative or cognitive apprehension of relations among notions; imagination is the affective or felt apprehension of relations among images." (James M Baldwin,"Handbook of Psychology: Senses and Intellect", 1890)

"All great scientists have, in a certain sense, been great artists; the man with no imagination may collect facts, but he cannot make great discoveries." (Karl Pearson, "The Grammar of Science", 1892)

"Ask your imagination if it will accept a vibrating multiple proportion - a numerical ratio in a state of oscillation? I do not think it will. You cannot crown the edifice with this abstraction. The scientific imagination, which is here authoritative, demands, as the origin and cause of a series of ether-waves, a particle of vibrating matter quite as definite, though it may be excessively minute, as that which gives origin to a musical sound. Such a particle we name an atom or a molecule. I think the intellect, when focused so as to give definition without penumbral haze, is sure to realize this image at the last." (John Tyndall, "Fragments of Science", 1892)

"The natural world has its laws, and no man must interfere with them in the way of presentment any more than in the way of use; but they themselves may suggest laws of other kinds, and man may, if he pleases, invent a little world of his own, with its own laws; for there is that in him which delights in calling up new forms - which is the nearest, perhaps, he can come to creation. When such forms are new embodiments of old truths, we call them products of the Imagination; when they are mere inventions, however lovely, I should call them the work of the Fancy: in either case, Law has been diligently at work." (George MacDonald, "The Fantastic Imagination", 1893)

"It is a common and necessary feature of human intelligence that we can neither conceive of things nor define them conceptually without adding attributes to them that simply do not exist. This applies not only to every thought and imagination of ordinary life, even the sciences do not proceed otherwise. Only philosophy seeks and finds the difference between things that exist and things that we perceive, and also sees the necessity of this difference. […] What we add are therefore not incorrect conceptions but the conditions for such conceptions in general. We cannot simply remove them and replace them with better ones; either we must add them, or we must abstain from all conceptions of this kind." (Heinrich Hertz, "Die Prinzipien der Mechanik in neuem Zusammenhange dargestellt", 1894)

"Many theorems are obvious upon looking at a moderately-sized figure; but the reasoning must be such as to convince the mind of their truth when, from excessive increase or diminution of the scale, the figures themselves have past the boundary even of imagination." (Augustus de Morgan, "On the Study and Difficulties of Mathematics", 1898)

"[…] we must have imagination. I do not mean mere fancy, which creates unreal images and impossible monsters, but imagination, the power of making pictures or images in our mind of that which is, though it is invisible to us."  (Arabella B Buckley, "The Fairy-Land of Science", 1899)

"This is the greatest degree of impoverishment; the [mental] image, deprived little by little of its own characteristics, is nothing more than a shadow. […] Being dependent on the state of the brain, the image undergoes change like all living substance, - it is subject to gains and losses, especially losses. But each of the foregoing three classes has its use for the inventor. They serve as material for different kinds of imagination - in their concrete form, for the mechanic and the artist; in their schematic form, for the scientist and for others." (Théodule-Armand Ribot, "Essay on the Creative Imagination", 1900)

"This means that it is not a dead thing; it is not at all like a photographic plate with which one may reproduce copies indefinitely. Being dependent on the state of the brain, the image undergoes change like all living substance, - it is subject to gains and losses, especially losses. But each of the foregoing three classes has its use for the inventor. They serve as material for different kinds of imagination - in their concrete form, for the mechanic and the artist; in their schematic form, for the scientist and for others." (Théodule-Armand Ribot, "Essay on the Creative Imagination" , 1900)

"We form in the imagination some sort of diagrammatic, that is, iconic, representation of the facts, as skeletonized as possible. The impression of the present writer is that with ordinary persons this is always a visual image, or mixed visual and muscular; but this is an opinion not founded on any systematic examination." (Charles S Peirce, "Notes on Ampliative Reasoning", 1901)

"Nature talks in symbols; he who lacks imagination cannot understand her." (Abraham Miller, "Unmoral Maxims", 1906)

"No system would have ever been framed if people had been simply interested in knowing what is true, whatever it may be. What produces systems is the interest in maintaining against all comers that some favourite or inherited idea of ours is sufficient and right. A system may contain an account of many things which, in detail, are true enough; but as a system, covering infinite possibilities that neither our experience nor our logic can prejudge, it must be a work of imagination and a piece of human soliloquy: It may be expressive of human experience, it may be poetical; but how should anyone who really coveted truth suppose that it was true?" (George Santayana, "The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy", 1911)

"Only in men’s imagination does every truth find an effective and undeniable existence." (Joseph Conrad, "Some Reminiscences", 1912)

"The sciences bring into play the imagination, the building of images in which the reality, of the past is blended with the ideals for the future, and from the picture there springs the prescience of genius." (William J Mayo, "Contributions of Pure Science to Progressive Medicine", The Journal of the American Medical Association Vol. 84 (20), 1925)

"We do not know why the imagination has accepted that image before the reason can reject it; or why such correspondences seem really to correspond to something in the soul." (Gilbert K Chesterton, "The Everlasting Man", 1925)

"In this way things, external objects, are assimilated to more or less ordered motor schemas, and in this continuous assimilation of objects the child's own activity is the starting point of play. Not only this, but when to pure movement are added language and imagination, the assimilation is strengthened, and wherever the mind feels no actual need for accommodating itself to reality, its natural tendency will be to distort the objects that surround it in accordance with its desires or its fantasy, in short to use them for its satisfaction. Such is the intellectual egocentrism that characterizes the earliest form of child thought." (Jean Piaget, "The Moral Judgment of the Child", 1932)

"The scientist explores the world of phenomena by successive approximations. He knows that his data are not precise and that his theories must always be tested. It is quite natural that he tends to develop healthy skepticism, suspended judgment, and disciplined imagination." (Edwin P Hubble, 1938)

"Yet a review of receipt physics has shown that all attempts at mechanical models or pictures have failed and must fail. For a mechanical model or picture must represent things as happening in space and time, while it has recently become clear that the ultimate processes of nature neither occur in, nor admit of representation in, space and time. Thus an understanding of the ultimate processes of nature is for ever beyond our reach: we shall never be able - even in imagination - to open the case of our watch and see how the wheels go round. The true object of scientific study can never be the realities of nature, but only our own observations on nature." (James H Jeans, "Physics and Philosophy", 1942)

"[…] observation is not enough, and it seems to me that in science, as in the arts, there is very little worth having that does not require the exercise of intuition as well as of intelligence, the use of imagination as well as of information." (Kathleen Lonsdale, "Facts About Crystals", American Scientist Vol. 39 (4), 1951)

"There is always an analogy between nature and the imagination, and possibly poetry is merely the strange rhetoric of that parallel." (Wallace Stevens, "The Necessary Angel", 1951)

"All great discoveries in experimental physics have been due to the intuition of men who made free use of models, which were for them not products of the imagination, but representatives of real things." (Max Born, "Physical Reality", Philosophical Quarterly Vol. (11), 1953)

"One great lesson that we can learn from its systematic absence in the work of the grand theorists is that every self-conscious thinker must at all times be aware of - and hence be able to control - the levels of abstraction on which he is working. The capacity to shuttle between levels of abstraction, with ease and with clarity, is a signal mark of the imaginative and systematic thinker." (C Wright Mills, "The Sociological Imagination", 1959)

"In imagination there exists the perfect mystery story. Such a story presents all the essential clews, and compels us to form our own theory of the case. If we follow the plot carefully we arrive at the complete solution for ourselves just before the author’s disclosure at the end of the book. The solution itself, contrary to those of inferior mysteries, does not disappoint us; moreover, it appears at the very moment we expect it." (Leopold Infeld, "The Evolution of Physics", 1961)

"That perfected machines may one day succeed us is, I remember, an extremely commonplace notion on Earth. It prevails not only among poets and romantics but in all classes of society. Perhaps it is because it is so widespread, born spontaneously in popular imagination, that it irritates scientific minds. Perhaps it is also for this very reason that it contains a germ of truth. Only a germ: Machines will always be machines; the most perfected robot, always a robot." (Pierre Boulle, "Planet of the Apes", 1963)

"Science begins with the world we have to live in, accepting its data and trying to explain its laws. From there, it moves toward the imagination: it becomes a mental construct, a model of a possible way of interpreting experience." (Northrop Frye, "The Educated Imagination", 1964)

"An expert problem solver must be endowed with two incompatible qualities, a restless imagination and a patient pertinacity." (Howard W Eves, "In Mathematical Circles", 1969)

"Equilibrium is a figment of the human imagination." (Kenneth Boulding, Toward a General Social Science, 1974)

"Imagination is the outreaching of mind […] the bombardment of the conscious mind with ideas, impulses, images and every sort of psychic phenomena welling up from the preconscious. It is the capacity to ‘dream dreams and see visions’" (Rollo May, "The Courage to Create", 1975)

"Imagination - backed up by practical tests to determine which imaginative leaps are securely founded - is the key to a more accurate world picture." (John R Gribbin, "White holes: Cosmic gushers in the universe", 1977)

"Science is not a heartless pursuit of objective information. It is a creative human activity, its geniuses acting more as artists than information processors. Changes in theory are not simply the derivative results of the new discoveries but the work of creative imagination influenced by contemporary social and political forces. " (Stephen J Gould, "Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History", 1977)

"Imagination is our means of interpreting the world, and it also is our means of forming images in the mind. The images themselves are not separate from our interpretations of the world; they are our way of thinking of the objects in the world. We see the forms in our mind’s eye and we see these very forms in the world. We could not do one of these things if we could not do the other" (Mary Warnock, "Imagination", 1978)

"Metaphor is for most people a device of the poetic imagination and the rhetorical flourish - a matter of extraordinary rather than ordinary language. Moreover, metaphor is typieully viewed as characteristic of language alone, a matter of words rather than thought or action. For this reason, most people think they can get along perfectly well without metaphor. We have found, on the contrary, that metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature." (George Lakoff & Mark Johnson, "Metaphors we Live by", 1980)

"Science, since people must do it, is a socially embedded activity. It progresses by hunch, vision, and intuition. Much of its change through time does not record a closer approach to absolute truth, but the alteration of cultural contexts that influence it so strongly. Facts are not pure and unsullied bits of information; culture also influences what we see and how we see it. Theories, moreover, are not inexorable inductions from facts. The most creative theories are often imaginative visions imposed upon facts; the source of imagination is also strongly cultural." (Stephen J Gould, "The Mismeasure of Man", 1980)

"At present, no complete account can be given - one may as well ask for an inventory of the entire products of the human imagination - and indeed such an account would be premature, since mental models are supposed to be in people's heads, and their exact constitution is an empirical question. Nevertheless, there are three immediate constraints on possible models. […] 1. The principle of computability: Mental models, and the machinery for constructing and interpreting them, are computable. […] 2. The principle of finitism: A mental model must be finite in size and cannot directly represent an infinite domain. […] 3. The principle of constructivism: A mental model is constructed from tokens arranged in a particular structure to represent a state of affairs." (Philip Johnson-Laird, "Mental Models" 1983)

"The vision of the Universe that is so vivid in our minds is framed by a few iron posts of true observation - themselves resting on theory for their meaning - but most of all the walls and towers in the vision are of papier-mâché, plastered in between those posts by an immense labor of imagination and theory." (John A Wheeler & Wojciech H Zurek, "Quantum Theory and Measurement", 1983)

"[...] without imagination, heightened awareness, moral sense, and some reference to the general culture, the engineering experience becomes less meaningful, less fulfilling than it should be." (Samuel C Florman, "The Civilized Engineer", 1985)

"Catastrophes are often stimulated by the failure to feel the emergence of a domain, and so what cannot be felt in the imagination is experienced as embodied sensation in the catastrophe. (William I Thompson, "Gaia, a Way of Knowing: Political Implications of the New Biology", 1987)

"If it should turn out that the whole of physical reality can be described by a finite set of equations, I would be disappointed. I would feel that the Creator had been uncharacteristically lacking in imagination." (Freeman Dyson, "Infinite in All Directions", 1988)

"The dreams of people are in the machines, a planet network of active imaginations hooked into their made-up, make-believe worlds. Artificial reality is taking over; it has its own children." (Storm Constantine, "Immaculate" (1991)

"Simple observation generally gets us nowhere. It is the creative imagination that increases our understanding by finding connections between apparently unrelated phenomena, and forming logical, consistent theories to explain them. And if a theory turns out to be wrong, as many do, all is not lost. The struggle to create an imaginative, correct picture of reality frequently tells us where to go next, even when science has temporarily followed the wrong path." (Richard Morris, "The Universe, the Eleventh Dimension, and Everything: What We Know and How We Know It", 1999)

"To say that a thing is imaginary is not to dispose of it in the realm of mind, for the imagination, or the image making faculty, is a very important part of our mental functioning. An image formed by the imagination is a reality from the point of view of psychology; it is quite true that it has no physical existence, but are we going to limit reality to that which is material? We shall be far out of our reckoning if we do, for mental images are potent things, and although they do not actually exist on the physical plane, they influence it far more than most people suspect." (Dion Fortune," Spiritualism and Occultism", 2000)

"Imagination has the creative task of making symbols, joining things together in such a way that they throw new light on each other and on everything around them. The imagination is a discovering faculty, a faculty for seeing relationships, for seeing meanings that are special and even quite new." (Thomas Merton, "Angelic Mistakes: The Art of Thomas Merton", 2006)

"Language use is a curious behavior, but once the transition to language is made, literature is a likely consequence, since it is linked to the dynamic of the linguistic symbol through the functioning of the imagination." (Russell Berman, "Fiction Sets You Free: Literature, Liberty and Western Culture", 2007)

"If worldviews or metanarratives can be compared to lenses, which of them brings things into the sharpest focus? This is not an irrational retreat from reason. Rather, it is about grasping a deeper order of things which is more easily accessed by the imagination than by reason." (Alister McGrath, "If I Had Lunch with C. S. Lewis: Exploring the Ideas of C. S. Lewis on the Meaning of Life", 2014)

"The mental model is the arena where imagination takes place. It enables us to experiment with different scenarios by making local alterations to the model. […] To speak of causality, we must have a mental model of the real world. […] Our shared mental models bind us together into communities." (Judea Pearl & Dana Mackenzie, "The Book of Why: The new science of cause and effect", 2018)

❄️Systems Thinking: On Paradigm (Quotes)

"All crises begin with the blurring of a paradigm and the consequent loosening of the rules for normal research […] Or finally, the case that will most concern us here, a crisis may end with the emergence of a new candidate for paradigm and with the ensuing battle over its acceptance." (Thomas S Kuhn, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions", 1962)

"Discovery commences with the awareness of anomaly, i.e., with the recognition that nature has somehow violated the paradigm-induced expectations that govern normal science. It then continues with a more or less extended exploration of the area of anomaly. And it closes only when the paradigm theory has been adjusted so that the anomalous has become the expected. […] Until he has learned to see nature in a different way - the new fact is not quite a scientific fact at all." (Thomas S Kuhn, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions", 1962)

"Probably, the single most prevalent claim advanced by the proponents of a new paradigm is that they can solve the problems that led the old one to a crisis." (Thomas S Kuhn, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions", 1962)

"The transition from a paradigm to a new one from which a new tradition of normal science can emerge is far from a cumulative process, one achieved by an articulation or extension of the old paradigm. Rather it is a reconstruction of the field from new fundamentals, a reconstruction that changes some of the field’s most elementary theoretical generalizations as well as many of its paradigm methods and applications." (Thomas S Kuhn, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions", 1962)

"[…] paradigms, the core of the culture of science, are transmitted and sustained just as is culture generally: scientists accept them and become committed to them as a result of training and socialization, and the commitment is maintained by a developed system of social control." (Barry Barnes, "Thomas Kuhn", 1985)

"For our purposes, a simple way to understand paradigms is to see them as maps. We all know that ‘the map is not the territory’. A map is simply an explanation of certain aspects of the territory. That’s exactly what a paradigm is. It is a theory, an explanation, or model of something else." (Stephen R Covey, "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People", 1989)

"The word paradigm comes from the Greek. It was originally a scientific term, and is more commonly used today to mean a model, theory, perception, assumption, or frame of reference. In the more general sense, it's the way we 'see' the world - not in terms of our visual sense of sight, but in terms of perceiving, understanding, and interpreting." (Stephen Covey, "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People", 1989)

“Each of us carries within us a worldview, a set of assumptions about how the world works - what some call a paradigm - that forms the very questions we allow ourselves to ask, and determines our view of future possibilities.” (Frances M Lappé, “Rediscovering America's Values”, 1991)

"Paradigms are powerful because they create the lens through which we see the world." (Stephen Covey, "Daily Reflections for Highly Effective People", 1994)

"The realm of the particularity of each experienced item differs from the formal realm of concepts. [...] The power of paradigmatic thought is to bring order to experience by seeing individual things as belonging to a category." (Donald E Polkinghorne, “Narrative configuration in qualitative analysis", International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education Vol. 8 (1), 1995)

"The shift of paradigms requires an expansion not only of our perceptions and ways of thinking, but also of our values. […] scientific facts emerge out of an entire constellation of human perceptions, values, and actions-in one word, out of a paradigm-from which they cannot be separated. […] Today the paradigm shift in science, at its deepest level, implies a shift from physics to the life sciences." (Fritjof Capra, "The Web of Life", 1996)

"All scientific theories, even those in the physical sciences, are developed in a particular cultural context. Although the context may help to explain the persistence of a theory in the face of apparently falsifying evidence, the fact that a theory arises from a particular context is not sufficient to condemn it. Theories and paradigms must be accepted, modified or rejected on the basis of evidence." (Richard P Bentall,  "Madness Explained: Psychosis and Human Nature", 2003)

"Paradigms are the most general-rather like a philosophical or ideological framework. Theories are more specific, based on the paradigm and designed to describe what happens in one of the many realms of events encompassed by the paradigm. Models are even more specific providing the mechanisms by which events occur in a particular part of the theory's realm. Of all three, models are most affected by empirical data - models come and go, theories only give way when evidence is overwhelmingly against them and paradigms stay put until a radically better idea comes along." (Lee R Beach, "The Psychology of Decision Making: People in Organizations", 2005)

"A paradigm is a shared mindset that represents a fundamental way of thinking about, perceiving, and understanding the world." (Richard L Daft, "The Leadership Experience" 4th Ed., 2008)

“The crucial concept that brings all of this together is one that is perhaps as rich and suggestive as that of a paradigm: the concept of a model." (Otávio Bueno, [in" Springer Handbook of Model-Based Science", Ed. by Lorenzo Magnani & Tommaso Bertolotti, 2017])

❄️Systems Thinking: On Systems Thinking (Quotes)

"Tektology must clarify the modes of organization that are perceived to exist in nature and human activity; then it must generalize and systematize these modes; further it must explain them, that is, propose abstract schemes of their tendencies and laws; finally, based on these schemes, determine the direction of organizational methods and their role in the universal process. This general plan is similar to the plan of any natural science; but the objective of tektology is basically different. Tektology deals with organizational experiences not of this or that specialized field, but of all these fields together. In other words, tektology embraces the subject matter of all the other sciences and of all the human experience giving rise to these sciences, but only from the aspect of method, that is, it is interested only in the modes of organization of this subject matter." (Alexander Bogdanov, "Tektologia: Vseobshchaya Organizatsionnaya Nauka" ["Tektology: The Universal Organizational Science"], 1922)

"Creative evolution synthesises from the parts a new entity not only different from them, but quite transcending them. That is the essence of a whole. It is always transcendent to its parts, and its character cannot be inferred from the characters of its parts." (Jan Smuts, "Holism and Evolution", 1926)

"[Holism is] the tendency in nature to form wholes that are greater than the sum of the parts through creative evolution […]" (Jan Smuts, "Holism and Evolution", 1926)

"An ecological approach to public administration builds, then, quite literally from the ground up; from the elements of a place - soils, climate, location, for example - to the people who live there - their numbers and ages and knowledge, and the ways of physical and social technology by which from the place and in relationships with one another, they get their living. It is within this setting that their instruments and practices of public housekeeping should be studied so that they may better understand what they are doing, and appraise reasonably how they are doing it. Such an approach is of particular interest to us as students seeking to co-operate in our studies; for it invites - indeed is dependent upon - careful observation by many people in different environments of the roots of government functions, civic attitudes, and operating problems." (John Merriman Gaus, "Reflections on public administration", 1947)

"A systems approach begins when first you see the world through the eyes of another." (C West Churchman, "The Systems Approach", 1968)

"The parallelism of general conceptions or even special laws in different fields therefore is a consequence of the fact that these are concerned with 'systems' and that certain general principles apply to systems irrespective of their nature. Hence principles such as those of wholeness and sum, mechanization, hierarchic order, approached to steady states, equifinality, etc., may appear in quite different disciplines. The isomorphism found in different realms is based of the existence of general system principles, of a more or less well-developed ‘general system theory’." (Ludwig von Bertalanffy, "General System Theory", 1968)

"We may state as characteristic of modern science that this scheme of isolable units acting in one-way causality has proven to be insufficient. Hence the appearance, in all fields of science, of notions like wholeness, holistic, organismic, gestalt, etc., which all signify that, in the last resort, we must think in terms of systems of elements in mutual interaction […]." (Ludwig von Bertalanffy, "General System Theory", 1968)

"In the selection of papers for this volume, two problems have arisen, namely what constitutes systems thinking and what systems thinking is relevant to the thinking required for organizational management. The first problem is obviously critical. Unless there were a meaningful answer there would be no sense in producing a volume of readings in systems thinking in any subject. A great many writers have manifestly believed that there is a way of considering phenomena which is sufficiently different from the well-established modes of scientific analysis to deserve the particular title of systems thinking." (Frederick E Emery (ed.),"Systems thinking: selected readings", 1969)

"There are different levels of organization in the occurrence of events. You cannot explain the events of one level in terms of the events of another. For example, you cannot explain life in terms of mechanical concepts, nor society in terms of individual psychology. Analysis can only take you down the scale of organization. It cannot reveal the workings of things on a higher level. To some extent the holistic philosophers are right." (Anatol Rapoport, "General Systems" Vol. 14, 1969) 

"The systems approach to problems focuses on systems taken as a whole, not on their parts taken separately. Such an approach is concerned with total - system performance even when a change in only one or a few of its parts is contemplated because there are some properties of systems that can only be treated adequately from a holistic point of view. These properties derive from the relationship between parts of systems: how the parts interact and fit together." (Russell L Ackoff, "Towards a System of Systems Concepts", 1971)

"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) 

“The notion of ‘system’ has gained central importance in contemporary science, society and life. In many fields of endeavor, the necessity of a ‘systems approach’ or ‘systems thinking’ is emphasized, new professions called ‘systems engineering’, ‘systems analysis’ and the like have come into being, and there can be little doubt that this this concept marks a genuine, necessary, and consequential development in science and world-view.” (Ervin László, “Introduction to Systems Philosophy: Toward a New Paradigm of Contemporary Thought”, 1972)

"A company is a multidimensional system capable of growth, expansion, and self-regulation. It is, therefore, not a thing but a set of interacting forces. Any theory of organization must be capable of reflecting a company's many facets, its dynamism, and its basic orderliness. When company organization is reviewed, or when reorganizing a company, it must be looked upon as a whole, as a total system." (Albert Low, "Zen and Creative Management", 1976)

"There is a strong current in contemporary culture advocating ‘holistic’ views as some sort of cure-all […] Reductionism implies attention to a lower level while holistic implies attention to higher level. These are intertwined in any satisfactory description: and each entails some loss relative to our cognitive preferences, as well as some gain [...] there is no whole system without an interconnection of its parts and there is no whole system without an environment." (Francisco Varela, "On being autonomous: The lessons of natural history for systems theory", 1977)

"Holism traditionally says that a collection of beings may have a collective property that cannot be inferred from the properties of its members." (C West Churchman, "The Systems Approach and Its Enemies" , 1979) 

"Systems thinking is a special form of holistic thinking - dealing with wholes rather than parts. One way of thinking about this is in terms of a hierarchy of levels of biological organization and of the different 'emergent' properties that are evident in say, the whole plant (e.g. wilting) that are not evident at the level of the cell (loss of turgor). It is also possible to bring different perspectives to bear on these different levels of organization. Holistic thinking starts by looking at the nature and behaviour of the whole system that those participating have agreed to be worthy of study. This involves: (i) taking multiple partial views of 'reality' […] (ii) placing conceptual boundaries around the whole, or system of interest and (iii) devising ways of representing systems of interest." (C J Pearson and R L Ison, "Agronomy of Grassland Systems", 1987)

"Systems thinking is a framework of thought that helps us to deal with complex things in a holistic way. The formalization of (giving an explicit, definite, and conventional form to) this thinking is what we have termed systems theory." (Robert L Flood & Ewart R Carson, "Dealing with Complexity: An introduction to the theory and application of systems", 1988)

"Systems thinking is a discipline for seeing the 'structures' that underlie complex situations, and for discerning high from low leverage change. That is, by seeing wholes we learn how to foster health. To do so, systems thinking offers a language that begins by restructuring how we think." (Peter Senge, "The Fifth Discipline", 1990)

"Systems thinking is a discipline for seeing wholes. It is a framework for seeing interrelationships rather than things, for seeing patterns of change rather than static 'snapshots'. It is a set of general principles- distilled over the course of the twentieth century, spanning fields as diverse as the physical and social sciences, engineering, and management. [...] During the last thirty years, these tools have been applied to understand a wide range of corporate, urban, regional, economic, political, ecological, and even psychological systems. And systems thinking is a sensibility for the subtle interconnectedness that gives living systems their unique character." (Peter Senge, "The Fifth Discipline", 1990)

"Systems thinking is a framework for seeing interrelationships rather than things, for seeing patterns rather than static snapshots. It is a set of general principles spanning fields as diverse as physical and social sciences, engineering and management." (Peter Senge, "The Fifth Discipline", 1990) 

"Systems philosophy brings forth a reorganization of ways of thinking. It creates a new worldview, a new paradigm of perception and explanation, which is manifested in integration, holistic thinking, purpose-seeking, mutual causality, and process-focused inquiry.” (Béla H. Bánáthy, "Systems Design of Education”, 1991)

"The new paradigm may be called a holistic world view, seeing the world as an integrated whole rather than a dissociated collection of parts. It may also be called an ecological view, if the term 'ecological' is used in a much broader and deeper sense than usual. Deep ecological awareness recognizes the fundamental interdependence of all phenomena and the fact that, as individuals and societies we are all embedded in (and ultimately dependent on) the cyclical process of nature." (Fritjof Capra & Gunter A Pauli, "Steering business toward sustainability", 1995)

"In the new systems thinking, the metaphor of knowledge as a building is being replaced by that of the network. As we perceive reality as a network of relationships, our descriptions, too, form an interconnected network of concepts and models in which there are no foundations. For most scientists such a view of knowledge as a network with no firm foundations is extremely unsettling, and today it is by no means generally accepted. But as the network approach expands throughout the scientific community, the idea of knowledge as a network will undoubtedly find increasing acceptance." (Fritjof Capra," The Web of Life: a new scientific understanding of living systems", 1996)

"It [system dynamics] focuses on building system dynamics models with teams in order to enhance team learning, to foster consensus and to create commitment with a resulting decision […] System dynamics can be helpful to elicit and integrate mental models into a more holistic view of the problem and to explore the dynamics of this holistic view […] It must be understood that the ultimate goal of the intervention is not to build a system dynamics model. The system dynamics model is a means to achieve other ends […] putting people in a position to learn about a messy problem [...] create a shared social reality […] a shared understanding of the problem and potential solutions [...] to foster consensus within the team [..]" (Jac A M Vennix, "Group Model Building: Facilitating Team Learning Using System Dynamics", 1996)

"Understanding ecological interdependence means understanding relationships. It requires the shifts of perception that are characteristic of systems thinking - from the parts to the whole, from objects to relationships, from contents to patterns. […] Nourishing the community means nourishing those relationships." (Fritjof Capra, "The Web of Life: A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems", 1996)

"One of the strongest benefits of the systems thinking perspective is that it can help you learn to ask the right questions. This is an important first step toward understanding a problem. […] Much of the value of systems thinking comes from the different framework that it gives us for looking at problems in new ways." (Virginia Anderson & Lauren Johnson, "Systems Thinking Basics: From Concepts to Causal Loops", 1997)

"Systems thinking is most effective when it’s used to look at a problem in a new way, not to advocate a predetermined solution. Strong advocacy will create resistance - both to your ideas, and to systems thinking itself. Present systems thinking in the spirit of inquiry, not inquisition." (Virginia Anderson & Lauren Johnson, "Systems Thinking Basics: From Concepts to Causal Loops", 1997)

"[Systems thinking is] A new way to view and mentally frame what we see in the world; a worldview and way of thinking whereby we see the entity or unit first as a whole, with its fit and relationship to its environment as primary concerns." (Stephen G Haines, "The Managers Pocket Guide to Systems Thinking & Learning", 1998)

"The beauty of this [systems thinking] mindset is that its mental models are based on natural laws, principles of interrelationship, and interdependence found in all living systems. They give us a new view of ourselves and our many systems, from the tiniest cell to the entire earth; and as our organizations are included in that great range, they help us define organizational problems as systems problems, so we can respond in more productive ways. The systems thinking mindset is a new orientation to life. In many ways it also operates as a worldview - an overall perspective on, and understanding of, the world." (Stephen G Haines, "The Managers Pocket Guide to Systems Thinking & Learning", 1998)

"The Systems Thinking Approach is an absolute necessity to make sense of and succeed in today’s complex world." (Stephen G Haines, 1998)

 "[...] information feedback about the real world not only alters our decisions within the context of existing frames and decision rules but also feeds back to alter our mental models. As our mental models change we change the structure of our systems, creating different decision rules and new strategies. The same information, processed and interpreted by a different decision rule, now yields a different decision. Altering the structure of our systems then alters their patterns of behavior. The development of systems thinking is a double-loop learning process in which we replace a reductionist, narrow, short-run, static view of the world with a holistic, broad, long-term, dynamic view and then redesign our policies and institutions accordingly." (John D Sterman, "Business dynamics: Systems thinking and modeling for a complex world", 2000)

"Systems thinking practices the exact opposite of this analytic approach. Systems thinking studies the organization as a whole in its interaction with its environment. Then, it works backwards to understand how each part of that whole works in relation to, and support of, the entire system’s objectives. Only then can the core strategies be formulated. (Stephen G Haines, "The Systems Thinking Approach to Strategic Planning and Management", 2000)

"Systems, and organizations as systems, can only be understood holistically. Try to understand the system and its environment first. Organizations are open systems and, as such, are viable only in interaction with and adaptation to the changing environment." (Stephen G Haines, "The Systems Thinking Approach to Strategic Planning and Management", 2000)

"As a meta-discipline, systems science will transfer its content from discipline to discipline and address problems beyond conventional reductionist boundaries. Generalists, qualified to manage today’s problem better than the specialist, could be fostered. With these intentions, systems thinking and systems science should not replace but add, complement and integrate those aspects that seem not to be adequately treated by traditional science." (Lars Skyttner, "General Systems Theory: Ideas and Applications", 2001)

"Systems thinking expands the focus of the observer, whereas analytical thinking reduces it. In other words, analysis looks into things, synthesis looks out of them. This attitude of systems thinking is often called expansionism, an alternative to classic reductionism. Whereas analytical thinking concentrates on static and structural properties, systems thinking concentrates on the function and behaviour of whole systems. Analysis gives description and knowledge; systems thinking gives explanation and understanding." (Lars Skyttner, "General Systems Theory: Ideas and Applications", 2001)

"Systems thinking means the ability to see the synergy of the whole rather than just the separate elements of a system and to learn to reinforce or change whole system patterns. Many people have been trained to solve problems by breaking a complex system, such as an organization, into discrete parts and working to make each part perform as well as possible. However, the success of each piece does not add up to the success of the whole. to the success of the whole. In fact, sometimes changing one part to make it better actually makes the whole system function less effectively." (Richard L Daft, "The Leadership Experience", 2002)

"Deep change in mental models, or double-loop learning, arises when evidence not only alters our decisions within the context of existing frames, but also feeds back to alter our mental models. As our mental models change, we change the structure of our systems, creating different decision rules and new strategies. The same information, interpreted by a different model, now yields a different decision. Systems thinking is an iterative learning process in which we replace a reductionist, narrow, short-run, static view of the world with a holistic, broad, long-term, dynamic view, reinventing our policies and institutions accordingly." (John D Sterman, "Learning in and about complex systems", Systems Thinking Vol. 3 2003)

"There exists an alternative to reductionism for studying systems. This alternative is known as holism. Holism considers systems to be more than the sum of their parts. It is of course interested in the parts and particularly the networks of relationships between the parts, but primarily in terms of how they give rise to and sustain in existence the new entity that is the whole whether it be a river system, an automobile, a philosophical system or a quality system." (Michael C Jackson, "Systems Thinking: Creative Holism for Manager", 2003) 

"System Thinking is a common concept for understanding how causal relationships and feedbacks work in an everyday problem. Understanding a cause and an effect enables us to analyse, sort out and explain how changes come about both temporarily and spatially in common problems. This is referred to as mental modelling, i.e. to explicitly map the understanding of the problem and making it transparent and visible for others through Causal Loop Diagrams (CLD)." (Hördur V. Haraldsson, "Introduction to System Thinking and Causal Loop Diagrams", 2004)

"Systems thinking is only an epistemology, a particular way of describing the world. It does not tell us what the world is. Hence, strictly speaking, we should never say of something in the world: ‘It is a system’, only: ‘It may be described as a system.’" (John Mingers, Realising" Systems Thinking: Knowledge and Action in Management Science", 2006)

"At a time when the world is more messy, more crowded, more interconnected, more interdependent, and more rapidly changing than ever before, the more ways of seeing, the better. The systems-thinking lens allows us to reclaim our intuition about whole systems and hone our abilities to understand parts, see interconnections, ask 'what-if' questions about possible future behaviors, and be creative and courageous about system redesign. (Donella H Meadows, "Thinking in Systems: A Primer", 2008)

"In ecology, we are often interested in exploring the behavior of whole systems of species or ecosystem composed of individual components which interact through biological processes. We are interested not simply in the dynamics of each species or component in isolation, but the dynamics of each species or component in the context of all the others and how those coupled dynamics account for properties of the system as a whole, such as its persistence. This is what people seem to mean when they say that ecology is ‘holistic’, an otherwise rather vague term." (John Pastor, "Mathematical Ecology of Populations and Ecosystems", 2008)

"Systems thinking is a mental discipline and framework for seeing patterns and interrelationships. It is important to see organizational systems as a whole because of their complexity. Complexity can overwhelm managers, undermining confidence. When leaders can see the structures that underlie complex situations, they can facilitate improvement. But doing that requires a focus on the big picture." (Richard L Daft, "The Leadership Experience", 2008) 

"Systems thinking means the ability to see the synergy of the whole rather than just the separate elements of a system and to learn to reinforce or change whole system patterns. Many people have been trained to solve problems by breaking a complex system, such as an organization, into discrete parts and working to make each part perform as well as possible. However, the success of each piece does not add up to the success of the whole. to the success of the whole. In fact, sometimes changing one part to make it better actually makes the whole system function less effectively." (Richard L Daft, "The Leadership Experience" , 2008)

"Understanding interdependency requires a way of thinking different from analysis. It requires systems thinking. And analytical thinking and systems thinking are quite distinct. [...] Systems thinking is the art of simplifying complexity. It is about seeing through chaos, managing interdependency, and understanding choice. We see the world as increasingly more complex and chaotic because we use inadequate concepts to explain it. When we understand something, we no longer see it as chaotic or complex." (Jamshid Gharajedaghi, "Systems Thinking: Managing Chaos and Complexity A Platform for Designing Business Architecture", 2011)

"Systems thinking is a discipline or process that considers how individual elements interact with one another as part of a whole entity. As an approach to solving problems, systems thinking uses relationships among individual elements and the dynamics of these relationships to explain the behavior of systems such as an ecosystem, social system, or organization." (Karen L Higgins, "Economic Growth and Sustainability: Systems Thinking for a Complex World", 2015)

"Holism [is] the art - in contrast with reductionism - of seeing a complex system as a whole. Holism knows the limits to its understanding; it acknowledges that the system has its wildness, its privacy, its own reasons, its defenses against invasive explanation." (David Fleming, "Lean Logic", 2016)

"Systems thinking focuses on optimizing for the whole, looking at the overall flow of work, identifying what the largest bottleneck is today, and eliminating it." (Matthew Skelton & Manuel Pais, "Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow", 2019)