"Mathematicians themselves set up standards of generality and elegance in their exposition which are a bar to understand." (Kenneth E Boulding, "Economic Analysis", 1941)
"In calling society an ecological system we are not merely using an analogy; society is an example of the general concept of an 'ecosystem' that is, an ecological system of which biological systems - forests, fields, swamps - are other examples." (Kenneth E Boulding, A Reconstruction of Economics, 1950)
"Anyone who believes that exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist." (Kenneth E Boulding, "General Systens Theory - The skeleton of science", Management Science Vol.2 (3), 1956)
"Because of the extended time image and the extended relationship images, man is capable of ‘rational behavior,’ that is to say, his response is not to an immediate stimulus but to an image of the future filtered through an elaborate value system. His image contains not only what is, but what might be." (Kenneth E Boulding, "The Image: Knowledge in life and society", 1956)
"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)
"Because of the extended time image and the extended relationship images, man is capable of ‘rational behavior,’ that is to say, his response is not to an immediate stimulus but to an image of the future filtered through an elaborate value system. His image contains not only what is, but what might be." (Kenneth E Boulding, "The Image: Knowledge in life and society", 1956)
"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)
"General Systems Theory is the skeleton of science in the sense that it aims to provide a framework or structure of systems on which to hang the flesh and blood of particular disciplines and particular subject matters in an orderly and coherent corpus of knowledge." (Kenneth E Boulding, "General Systems Theory - The Skeleton of Science", Management Science Vol. 2 (3), 1956)
"Knowledge is not something which exists and grows in the abstract. It is a function of human organisms and of social organization. Knowledge, that is to say, is always what somebody knows: the most perfect transcript of knowledge in writing is not knowledge if nobody knows it. Knowledge however grows by the receipt of meaningful information - that is, by the intake of messages by a knower which are capable of reorganising his knowledge." (Kenneth E Boulding, "General Systems Theory - The Skeleton of Science", Management Science Vol. 2 (3), 1956)
"I have suggested that one of the basic theorems of the theory of the image is that it is the image which in fact determines what might be called the current behavior of any organism […] The image acts as a field. The behavior consists in gravitating toward the most highly valued part of the field." (Kenneth E Boulding, "The Image: Knowledge in life and society", 1956)
"Nevertheless as we move towards the human and societal level a curious thing happens: the fact that we have, as it were, an inside track, and that we ourselves are the systems which we are studying, enables us to utilize systems which we do not really understand." (Kenneth E Boulding, "General Systems Theory - The Skeleton of Science", Management Science Vol. 2 (3), 1956)
"Out of our image we predict the messages which will return to us as a result of our acts. If this prediction is fulfilled the image is confirmed, if it is not fulfilled the image must be changed. This is the essence of the logical-positivist view that definitions must be operational and hypotheses must be testable as an open system of a very different and much more complex character than that of the biological organism." (Kenneth E Boulding, "The Image: Knowledge in life and society", 1956)
"The correct analogy to the image of the organization in the organism is what might be called the genetic image. As far as the genetics of organisms is concerned, it is the image of the cell that is important, not the image of the organization as a whole. Because of this fact, an organization, although it is an open system, is an open system of a very different and much more complex character than that of the biological organism." (Kenneth E Boulding, "The Image: Knowledge in life and society", 1956)
"The problem of the transformation of images is of great importance in the theory of economic development. […] The problem here is that of the initiation and imitation of superior processes. Both these phenomena require transformation of the image; a new process always starts as a new image, as a new idea. The process itself is merely a form of transcription of the new image." (Kenneth E Boulding, "The Image: Knowledge in life and society", 1956)
"The idea of knowledge as an improbable structure is still a good place to start. Knowledge, however, has a dimension which goes beyond that of mere information or improbability. This is a dimension of significance which is very hard to reduce to quantitative form. Two knowledge structures might be equally improbable but one might be much more significant than the other." (Kenneth E Boulding, "Beyond Economics: Essays on Society", 1968)
"No science of any kind can be divorced from ethical considerations [...] Science is a human learning process which arises in certain subcultures in human society and not in others, and a subculture as we seen is a group of people defined by acceptance of certain common values, that is, an ethic which permits extensive communication between them." (Kenneth E Boulding, "Economics As A Moral Science", 1969)
"The human condition can almost be summed up in the observation that, whereas all experiences are of the past, all decisions are about the future. It is the great task of human knowledge to bridge this gap and to find those patterns in the past which can be projected into the future as realistic images." (Kenneth E Boulding, [foreword] 1972)
"Equilibrium is a figment of the human imagination." (Kenneth E Boulding, "Toward a General Social Science", 1974)
"The social system tends to be dominated by images [...] especially of the future, which act cybernetically, constantly guided by perceived divergences between the real and the ideal." (Kenneth E Boulding, "Toward a General Social Science", 1974)
"Any attempt to reduce the complex properties of biological organisms or of nervous systems or of human brains to simple physical and chemical systems is foolish." (Kenneth E Boulding, "Ecodynamics: A New Theory Of Societal Evolution", 1978)
"Prediction of the future is possible only in systems that have stable parameters like celestial mechanics. The only reason why prediction is so successful in celestial mechanics is that the evolution of the solar system has ground to a halt in what is essentially a dynamic equilibrium with stable parameters. Evolutionary systems, however, by their very nature have unstable parameters. They are disequilibrium systems and in such systems our power of prediction, though not zero, is very limited because of the unpredictability of the parameters themselves. If, of course, it were possible to predict the change in the parameters, then there would be other parameters which were unchanged, but the search for ultimately stable parameters in evolutionary systems is futile, for they probably do not exist… Social systems have Heisenberg principles all over the place, for we cannot predict the future without changing it." (Kenneth E Boulding, Evolutionary Economics, 1981)
"Knowledge is not something which exists and grows in the abstract. It is a function of human organisms and of social organization. Knowledge, that is to say, is always what somebody knows: the most perfect transcript of knowledge in writing is not knowledge if nobody knows it. Knowledge however grows by the receipt of meaningful information - that is, by the intake of messages by a knower which are capable of reorganising his knowledge." (Kenneth E Boulding, "General Systems Theory - The Skeleton of Science", Management Science Vol. 2 (3), 1956)
"I have suggested that one of the basic theorems of the theory of the image is that it is the image which in fact determines what might be called the current behavior of any organism […] The image acts as a field. The behavior consists in gravitating toward the most highly valued part of the field." (Kenneth E Boulding, "The Image: Knowledge in life and society", 1956)
"Nevertheless as we move towards the human and societal level a curious thing happens: the fact that we have, as it were, an inside track, and that we ourselves are the systems which we are studying, enables us to utilize systems which we do not really understand." (Kenneth E Boulding, "General Systems Theory - The Skeleton of Science", Management Science Vol. 2 (3), 1956)
"One advantage of exhibiting a hierarchy of systems in this way is that it gives us some idea of the present gaps in both theoretical and empirical knowledge. Adequate theoretical models extend up to about the fourth level, and not much beyond. Empirical knowledge is deficient at practically all levels." (Kenneth E Boulding, "General Systems Theory: The Skeleton of Science", 1956)
"Out of our image we predict the messages which will return to us as a result of our acts. If this prediction is fulfilled the image is confirmed, if it is not fulfilled the image must be changed. This is the essence of the logical-positivist view that definitions must be operational and hypotheses must be testable as an open system of a very different and much more complex character than that of the biological organism." (Kenneth E Boulding, "The Image: Knowledge in life and society", 1956)
"The correct analogy to the image of the organization in the organism is what might be called the genetic image. As far as the genetics of organisms is concerned, it is the image of the cell that is important, not the image of the organization as a whole. Because of this fact, an organization, although it is an open system, is an open system of a very different and much more complex character than that of the biological organism." (Kenneth E Boulding, "The Image: Knowledge in life and society", 1956)
"The problem of the transformation of images is of great importance in the theory of economic development. […] The problem here is that of the initiation and imitation of superior processes. Both these phenomena require transformation of the image; a new process always starts as a new image, as a new idea. The process itself is merely a form of transcription of the new image." (Kenneth E Boulding, "The Image: Knowledge in life and society", 1956)
"Two possible approaches to the organization of general systems theory suggest themselves, which are to be thought of as complementary rather than competitive, or at least as two roads each of which is worth exploring. The first approach is to look over the empirical universe and to pick out certain general phenomena which are found in many different disciplines, and to seek to build up general theoretical models relevant to these phenomena. The second approach is to arrange the empirical fields in a hierarchy of complexity of organization of their basic "individual" or unit of behavior, and to try to develop a level of abstraction appropriate to each." (Kenneth E Boulding, "General Systems Theory: The Skeleton of 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)
"It is clear that the building of models is not a purely mechanical process but requires skill of a high order – not merely mathematical skill but a sensitivity to the relative importance of different factors and a critical, almost an artistic, faculty in the selection of behaviour equations which are reasonable, tentative hypotheses in explaining the behaviour of actual economies." (Kenneth E Boulding, "The Skills of the Economist", 1958)
"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)
"It is clear that the building of models is not a purely mechanical process but requires skill of a high order – not merely mathematical skill but a sensitivity to the relative importance of different factors and a critical, almost an artistic, faculty in the selection of behaviour equations which are reasonable, tentative hypotheses in explaining the behaviour of actual economies." (Kenneth E Boulding, "The Skills of the Economist", 1958)
"It is important to realize that the exercise of any skill depends on the ability to create an abstract system of some kind out of the totality of the world around us." (Kenneth E Boulding, "The Skills of the Economist", 1958)
"The ability to work with systems of general equilibrium is perhaps one of the most important skills of the economist - a skill which he shares with many other scientists, but in which he has perhaps a certain comparative advantage." (Kenneth E Boulding, The Skills of the Economist, 1958)
"It is absurd to suppose we can think of nature as a system apart from knowledge, for it is knowledge that is increasingly determining the course of nature." (Kenneth E Boulding, "Beyond Economics: Essays on Society", 1968)
"It [knowledge] is clearly related to information, which we can now measure; and an economist especially is tempted to regard knowledge as a kind of capital structure, corresponding to information as an income flow. Knowledge, that is to say, is some kind of improbable structure or stock made up essentially of patterns — that is, improbable arrangements, and the more improbable the arrangements, we might suppose, the more knowledge there is." (Kenneth E Boulding, "Beyond Economics: Essays on Society", 1968)
"The idea of knowledge as an improbable structure is still a good place to start. Knowledge, however, has a dimension which goes beyond that of mere information or improbability. This is a dimension of significance which is very hard to reduce to quantitative form. Two knowledge structures might be equally improbable but one might be much more significant than the other." (Kenneth E Boulding, "Beyond Economics: Essays on Society", 1968)
"No science of any kind can be divorced from ethical considerations [...] Science is a human learning process which arises in certain subcultures in human society and not in others, and a subculture as we seen is a group of people defined by acceptance of certain common values, that is, an ethic which permits extensive communication between them." (Kenneth E Boulding, "Economics As A Moral Science", 1969)
"The human condition can almost be summed up in the observation that, whereas all experiences are of the past, all decisions are about the future. It is the great task of human knowledge to bridge this gap and to find those patterns in the past which can be projected into the future as realistic images." (Kenneth E Boulding, [foreword] 1972)
"Equilibrium is a figment of the human imagination." (Kenneth E Boulding, "Toward a General Social Science", 1974)
"The social system tends to be dominated by images [...] especially of the future, which act cybernetically, constantly guided by perceived divergences between the real and the ideal." (Kenneth E Boulding, "Toward a General Social Science", 1974)
"Any attempt to reduce the complex properties of biological organisms or of nervous systems or of human brains to simple physical and chemical systems is foolish." (Kenneth E Boulding, "Ecodynamics: A New Theory Of Societal Evolution", 1978)
"Prediction of the future is possible only in systems that have stable parameters like celestial mechanics. The only reason why prediction is so successful in celestial mechanics is that the evolution of the solar system has ground to a halt in what is essentially a dynamic equilibrium with stable parameters. Evolutionary systems, however, by their very nature have unstable parameters. They are disequilibrium systems and in such systems our power of prediction, though not zero, is very limited because of the unpredictability of the parameters themselves. If, of course, it were possible to predict the change in the parameters, then there would be other parameters which were unchanged, but the search for ultimately stable parameters in evolutionary systems is futile, for they probably do not exist… Social systems have Heisenberg principles all over the place, for we cannot predict the future without changing it." (Kenneth E Boulding, Evolutionary Economics, 1981)
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