Published In

Systems Science and Science: Proceedings of the 24th Annual North American Meetng of the Society for General Systems Research

Document Type

Presentation

Publication Date

1-7-1980

Subjects

System theory, Thermodynamics

Abstract

The purpose of this note is to address a possible source of confusion in the description, which appears often in the systems literature, of "closed" systems, which seems to derive from the early work of von Bertalanffy (1940, 1950, 1968). Specifically, it is commonly stated (e.g., Rapoport, 1968*; Katz and Kahn, 1974; Kast and Rosenzweig, 1976; Kramer and de Smit, 1977) that "open" systems exhibit the property of equifinality, wherein a particular final state of the system may be reached via different routes from different initial states, in contrast to "closed" systems, where different initial states always result in correspondingly different final states. Contrary to this view, this paper argues that equifinality occurs also in closed systems.

Keywords: closed systems, isolated systems, open systems, equifinality, Ludwig von Bertalanffy, thermodynamics

Rights

© The Author

This is the camera-ready paper that was submitted and accepted. The page numbers for the paper as it later appeared in the Proceedings were typed onto the bottom of these pages.

Persistent Identifier

https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/42817

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