Mulej's Dialectical Systems Theory — A proven next step after Bertalanffy's General Systems Theory

摘要

Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1978, p. VII) explicitly stated that he had created his General Systems Theory against over-specialization, i.e. to support interdisciplinary creative cooperation as the best way toward the necessary holism of approach and wholeness of outcomes of human activity. But he did not support this intention methodologically a lot. The now-a-days usual narrow over-specialization provides for no/poor humans capacity of interdisciplinary creative cooperation. Earlier it was much less dangerous than today, as the current socio-economic crisis shows. Narrow specialization is still necessary, but equally so is the other specialists' capacity: cooperation helps humans prevent oversights and resulting failures, because it enables more holistic thinking/behavior. But there are very few humans around the world, who can/may teach holistic thinking. The role of the narrow specializations which is unavoidable is so strong that people hardly see that holistic thinking — enabled by interdisciplinary creative cooperation — makes specialization of any profession much more beneficial than any operation inside a specialization alone. Nobody, whatever their profession, can live well without co-operation with people of other professions. De Bono's ‘6 Thinking Hats’ support it, so does Mulej's Dialectical Systems Theory (DST) from the same period of time. Both of them have been fruitfully applied all four decades since.