John Mingers, “Systems Thinking, Critical Realism and Philosophy: A Confluence of Ideas” (Routledge, 2014(

New Books in Sociology · Jan 22, 2018 · 1h 4m

In the fields of systems and cybernetics, such movements as Soft Systems Methodology and Second-Order Cybernetics have undermined the objective realist view from nowhere at the core of scientific practice. Instead, they foreground a constructivist view of knowledge insisting that human consciousness has no direct access to any possible external reality and, thus, when considering social systems, ontological questions need to be put aside in favor of strictly epistemological ones. In the view of John Mingers, this epistemological turn has done much good through its pluralistic approach to…