At 1:53 pm +0100 24/8/96, Nickols@aol.com wrote:
>Not sure what you mean here, Rol. The statement about
>the whole being more than the sum of the parts says "more"
>not better. That said, I also agree that the whole is indeed
>different from the sum of the parts, and I too have seen some
>cases where great people teamed up and produced mediocre
>results. Neither of those, however, negates the notion that
>the whole is greater or more than the sum of the parts, which
>is simply an assertion that relationships between the elements
>or components of a system contribute to the nature of that
>system in a way that is separate from any contributions made
>by the elements.
I was reminded in this discussion of a quote from one of the founders of
the Gestalt school, Kurt Koffka. Although the bit about wholes being
greater than the sums of their parts is often attributed to Gestalt
psychology, they didn't actually say that. Instead, Koffka wrote:
"It has been said: The whole is more than the sum of its parts. It is more
correct to say that the whole is something else than the sum of its parts,
because summing is a meaningless relation, whereas the whole-part
relationship is meaningful." p.176, Kurt Koffka, Principles of Gestalt
Psychology. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1935.
However, I'm more inclined to agree with Fred Nickols here. In general, a
system is a greater thing than its component parts; that is what makes it a
system (von Bertaffalny talks of 'emergence', the properties that come out
of a system that don't come out of its component parts).
But what then is a system? Peter Checkland (of the Management School here
at Lancaster) has pointed out that there are not such things as systems in
the real world waiting to be identified; we choose to identify certain
collections of people and things as systems. To talk about systems is to
talk about *a* way of looking at the world, not *the* way.
And perhaps the problem is that sometimes systems are identified as such
without really being systems (in the sense of having emergent properties)
at all. Or at least, the emergent properties that do exist are destructive
ones rather than constructive. In this sense, the whole would be less than
the sum of its parts, rather than greater than them; but it would still be
different from its parts, as Koffka says.
Cheers,
Magnus Ramage
====
Magnus Ramage
Computing Dept, Lancaster University, LA1 4YR, UK
Email: magnus@comp.lancs.ac.uk
Web: http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/computing/staff/magnus.html
--Magnus Ramage <magnus@comp.lancs.ac.uk>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>