Critical Systems Thinking and the Management of Complexity

Part I Systems Thinking in the Disciplines

Mark this well, you proud men of action: You are nothing but the unwitting agents of the men of thought who often, in quiet self‐effacement, mark out most exactly all your doings in advance

(Heine 1834)

Part I traces the emergence of systems thinking in philosophy, the physical sciences, the life sciences, and the social sciences. The reason for concentrating on these broad fields of knowledge is that it demonstrates the necessity of systems thinking for making intellectual progress in a wider context than that of individual disciplines. A downside is that individual disciplines impacted by systems thinking, such as geography and political science, are ignored if not central to that purpose. Chapter 1 is a review of the long engagement that has taken place between philosophy and systems thinking. Chapter 2 looks at the physical sciences, the refinement of the “scientific method,” and at how that method (based on “reductionism”) enabled spectacular progress to be made in science and technology in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. It notes, however, that newer discoveries in general relativity, quantum mechanics, and chaos theory are leading to a rethink of the traditional scientific method and requiring the physical sciences to embrace systems ideas. In contrast to the physical sciences, the life sciences, specifically biology and ecology, seemed to require a commitment to systemic thinking from their early ...