The logic for social systems
Michael Heather, Nick Rossiter · Northumbria Research Link (Northumbria University) · 2008
Social systems are more complex than phys-ical systems but systems theory and cyber-netics are not extensible by adding local re-finements as an incremental science. By gen-eral systems theory we would expect living systems to exhibit the same fundamentals as physical systems that can be expressed in logical terms, that is the language of mathe-matics, science and philosophy built on logic. As the complexity of systems increases so the theory has to dig deeper into these logical foundations to guarantee a rigorous applica-tion of its principles. This applies to the sys-tems of human life to be found in biology and medicine, economics and social systems, that is if they are to have the power of the exact sciences. Human life resides in a myriad of connections at various levels. Possible inter-actions between levels lead to a more pro-found type of logic because the closed world assumption no longer holds at any level. It is necessary therefore to go back to first prin-ciples even to the work of Gödel (1906-1978) on incompleteness and undecidability for a natural logic. Social systems do not popu-late a Boolean world but a topos where the internal logic is Heyting. 1