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On Systems Analysis: An Essay Concerning the Limitations of Some Mathematical Methods in the Social, Political and Biological Sciences by David Berlinski (review)

This is a clever, artful book in which the footnotes provide an illuminating side-commentary on the body of the text as well as offering an insight into the cynical world of a committed formalist out to debunk ‘poor’ formalism. The text begins with an account of the assumed inadequacies of Von Bertalanaffy’s General Systems Theory (GST). The thrust of the critique is that general laws of systems, because they are so general, have little value as system descriptions or as hypotheses of system operation. Further, Berlinski argues that whilst GST may have some taxonomic value in suggesting a variety of general laws for consideration, it does not offer an adequatc law by which general laws can be classified as useful/useless as descriptions of general systems. There then follows an amusing and penetrating account of Laszlo’s systematic constructions. Berlinski does not quite go so far as to suggest that one should bury Laszlo’s commentary in the nearest ‘ordered-whole’, but he comes quite close to doing so. For, not only can Laszlo be criticised for the weakness of the epistemological features of his pre-suppositions, he can also be criticised for his formalistic presentation of informal (intuitive) notions, such as the notion of ‘hierarchy’ within natural systems. Having dealt with Von Bertalanaffy and Laszlo, Berlinski next gives attention to the disciples of GST, including Lofgren, Mesavovic, Ross-Ashby, H.A. Simon, J. W. Forrester and others who have ‘applied’ GST to social transactions. The author’s critical technique in each case is to pin-point difficulties in a specific argument used by each ofthese, who claim it as universal. Whilst this may seem a weak methodology, it is nonetheless effective, as a reading of Berlinski‘s analysis of Forrester’s book, Urban Dynamics (pp. 3 9 4 5 and 52-92) will illustrate. This text is not, however, a study in negativism. Rather, it constitutes an attempt to promote an understanding of dynamic systems using differential equations and catastrophic theory, especially as related by Sussman. Berlinski makes a valuable contribution to the understanding of a key set of problems in social science, which concerns the analysis of non-linear social processes. Pointing to the paucity of engineering models applied mindlessly by some social scientists, Berlinski suggests that the mathematics of GST, when applied to constructs, such as feedback and adaptive control, offexa poor basis for understanding discontinuous systems, since the models (other than those afforded by catastrophe theory) assume that linear models can be constructed of non-linear events. By revealing just how valueladen many of the applications of differential equations have been, Berlinski affords a valuable glimpse into the world of the ‘systems-con’. The message and spirit ofthis text is perhaps best conveyed in a quotation from Hendricks that Berlinski himself uses: ‘There are