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Informatic philosophy of behavioral sciences
Author(s) -
Frischknecht Federico
Publication year - 1986
Publication title -
behavioral science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.371
H-Index - 45
eISSN - 1099-1743
pISSN - 0005-7940
DOI - 10.1002/bs.3830310303
Subject(s) - symbol (formal) , positivism , behavioural sciences , epistemology , cognitive science , politics , computer science , philosophy of science , sociology , social science , psychology , philosophy , political science , law , programming language
The symbol system and/or information‐processing approach launched by Herbert Simon and his colleagues at Carnegie‐Mellon has not yet achieved its full epistemological and methodological potential in the behavioral sciences. This paper tries to explicate the full implications of this informatic approach to behavioral science, with special emphasis on systems on the level of the organization, administration, and politics Social sciences deal with symbolic phenomena. Human thought, social interaction, administration, and politics are essentially symbol manipulations that could not be studied with rigor and precision until languages and systems were available to describe symbol processing. This approach leads to the conscious use of symbols to describe symbols, and hence to the definite possibility of studying symbols themselves as if they were objects, neither attributing existence to them, as idealist philosophy did, nor ignoring them, as positivism attempted to.