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Hi Jerry,
You have touched on an issue that I'd like to explore, although I may disagree with aspects of your statements as I interpret them. My comments are interspersed, below: ----- Original Message ----- From: Jerry Zhu To: *** Sent: Wednesday, February 16, 2005 10:39 PM Subject: Re: [ROSEN] Causality vs. Entailment Jerry Zhu wrote:
I would like to add that entailment is about ontology while causality is about epistemology. These two are often not differentiated. Either ontology is ignored or treating ontology as epistemology. There are seemingly a lot of ways to interpret your meaning here. I will interpret it in a way that is consistent with what I know about my father's work, and perhaps you can tell me if that is the way you intended it? Entailment drives both ontology of systems and system epistemology, but causality has to do with what actually happens; the observables. So, entailment can be said to provide the "ontology" of system behavior. I don't recall ever hearing or reading my father's words to that effect, but it sounds right. He usually kept ontological issues separate from epistemological issues, but that may have been to avoid confusing people more than he already had to! The tricky part of this is that reproduction as it happens in all
species is part of causality (observable behaviors) and yet is
often seen as a form of ontology. On the other hand, how complex systems
self-organize in the first place is the ontology he referred to and
differentiated from epistemology. It was the ontology of the organization type,
itself, not specific cases as with individual systems or
species.
JZ: Autopoiesis theory differentiates organization from structure. The former determines the identity the latter the behavior. We all have the same identity that is human but we are structurally different. The organization determines the range of behaviors and the structure determines the actual behavior of particular individule. Can you be more specific in defining what "structure" is in your
view and how it differs from organization? Because in the Rosennean view,
structure refers to physical/material parts, as in "the physical/material
aspects of overall organization". Organization includes components which are not
material; relations, for example. So, the Rosennean view is that organization
determines both identity and behavior, in general. Material structure may
account only for differences between various species and differences between
various individuals within a species. So I need to know how you define your
terms.
JZ: Today's business changes are mostly
structural not orgnaizational. I don't believe that there is even awareness on this. A change in orgnaization or identity revolutionizes the performance in differently levels of magnitute. See the difference the speed between a turtle and a rabit. They are all made of the same six atoms. But the organization of the atoms determines the identity, therefore the performance level. I see what you are getting at, but the final analogy lost me. A
turtle and a rabbit are both living systems. They have the same organizational
type but a different material structure. What they are made out of, in terms of
atoms, doesn't really enter into it because that is "pre-organizational"
information which can be utterly changed by the organization, itself. So I
would reverse your entailments there, but I still can agree with your final
sentence. In fact, the way I'm interpreting it, performance is a behavior... I
would need a more concrete definition of "performance level". There
may be an inconsistency with what you said in the first paragraph.
In any case, the Rosennean notion is that organization
determinines both the GENERAL behavior and identity--which are
similar (they are both living systems with the behaviors and identity
typical of all living systems). The material structure (in part or in total, I
don't know) accounts for the specific differences (in behavior and
identity) between these two living systems.
Judith
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