Empiric Systems Theory – An Experimental Approach

Abstract

Based on an overarching science- and humanities approach to biopsychosocial interaction, such as that desired in care, healthcare, and social care, an appropriate systems theory has been introduced. Taking interactions, not single processes, as its smallest element, it allows one to focus on the meaningful content of structured interactions, as related to their present context. The latter contains its constituting quantitative and qualitative, locally, and situationally meaning-generating aspects, in the form of the interaction partners’ role-specific aspectual qualities. Engaged in specifying systematised interaction, contributing partners are seen as providing, recruiting, and implementing information, acting as individual agencies in their relational matrix to possibly converge to systematically combined co-acting units, as systems made of systems. The systematised approach gives a more empiric view of mandatorily interacting systems and their content-as-meaning-generating potency. Empiric systems theory can be applied wherever primordially embedded agencies’ processing occurs and extended decontextualization fails or is inappropriate. Its advantage is its consideration of relational structure and corresponding perspectivity right from the beginning, which enables one to conceptualise and understand systems as containers and producers of perspectival meaning. Accordingly, the theory is a semantic systems theory as well.