Cybernetics
Basic Notions – System
A man with a screwdriver is a system. So is the assembly line he stands on, and the factory around that. The world is systems nested inside systems — which means the moment you name one, you've already drawn a line that was yours to draw.
Stafford Beer defines a system as “anything that consists of parts connected together.” George Klir puts it similarly: “the term ‘system’ stands, in general, for a set of some things and a relation among things.” So the test is simple — for something to be a system, there has to be some relation among some parts. A man working with a screwdriver is, by that test, a system in himself. But he is also part of an assembly line, which is part of a manufacturing operation, which is part of something larger still. The world is made of countless systems, each nested inside others, each a member of many at once.
Which leads to a point that is easy to miss and matters enormously: defining any particular system is an arbitrary act. Someone has to choose — to select a set of things out of all the things in the world, a set of relations out of all the possible relations, and draw an imaginary border around them, wide or narrow as they please, to mark out what they’re going to study. The system doesn’t announce its own edges. The observer draws them.
For our purposes, in a dispute, you might define the system as the parties and the matter between them. Or you might widen the border to take in their immediate families and relationships, or widen it again to include the broader community. Where you draw the line decides what you’ll be able to see.
References
[1] Beer, S. (1959). Cybernetics and Management (p. 9). London: English Universities Press.
[2] Klir, G. J. (2001). Facets of Systems Science (p. 4). Springer.
[3] In George Klir’s words: Thinghood.
[4] In George Klir’s words: Systemhood.