A view or perspective on the world
[I never have time to read these but some do look very interesting]
This is a Survey of blog and wiki posts on Logical Graphs, encompassing several families of graph‑theoretic structures originally developed by Charles S. Peirce as graphical formal languages or visual styles of syntax amenable to interpretation for logical applications.
cc: FB | Logical Graphs • Laws of Form • Mathstodon • Ontolog • Academia.edu
cc: Conceptual Graphs • Cybernetics • Structural Modeling • Systems Science
My weekly posts
My dad died last week, quite peacefully, after a long period of Alzheimer’s. We had had time to prepare (’anticipatory grief’, the social worker accurately diagnosed), and close family were all able to spend time with him in hospital. But of course it is never easy.
I wrote about him here, four years ago, when his memory was already bad, but at a time when he would not have been happy to acknowledge or have me say he had dementia – still, it was a sort of tribute. It also struck me how much we had in common, in ways I had rather conveniently not focused on, happy in my uniqueness 🙂
Post | LinkedIn
Many councils have now hit ‘submit’ on their Local Government Reorganisation (LGR) proposals – or are about to. Now comes the awkward middle act: the long wait for a ministerial decision.
This is when confidence wobbles, readiness drifts, and the temptation grows to ‘wait and see’.
But this time counts. The councils that use it well – to test readiness, strengthen relationships, and line up the practical, no-regrets work (and, honestly, secure the support they need – where do you think you’re going to get a programme manager come April?) – will be the ones that hit the ground running when the decision lands.
That’s why we’ve designed a short Learning and Doing Series.
Not webinars or talking shops: each session mixes reflection with action, helping Members, officers, and partners stay aligned, visible, and credible through transition – ready to do the nearly impossible, and deliver post-Ministerial decision.
You’ll leave with real outputs – readiness heatmaps, assurance frameworks, shared leadership roadmaps – not just notes and good intentions.
Post | LinkedIn
Local Government Reorganisation is coming fast. By April 2028, every new authority must be safe, legal, and fully operational. That means statutory officers secured, ICT cutovers rehearsed, services live, and residents experiencing seamless continuity. The RedQuadrant LGR Hub is the only model that guarantees readiness while embedding lasting capability. With a single accountable structure, governance at its core, and capability pillars across adults, children’s, SEND, ICT, finance, housing, and place, the Hub ensures no gaps, no surprises. Three outcomes, every time: Safe and legal on day one; Visible assurance and confidence in delivery; Future-ready capacity with transformation built in. Find out more now: https://www.redquadrant.com/lgrhub
The new apprenticeship Leading and Commissioning for Outcomes in Complexity – Convening Systems Change can supercharge your career and transform your organisation. Fully funded Level 7 programme this year only! Real-world impact through applied systems thinking. For commissioners, system leaders, and systems change-makers. Forfurther information, see https://www.publicservicetransformation.org/level-7-apprenticeship-course-leading-and-commissioning-for-outcomes-in-complexity-convening-systems-change-free-webinar-on-20-august-2025-1230pm-uk-time/
Our newly launched tool, the Commissioning Compass, helps you to assess your commissioning system and form an action plan for improvement. It’s available for free via our Teachable site – try it now! link.redquadrant.com/commissioningcompass
We’re building our cohort for the next national commissioning academy – our flagship commissioning programme from the PSTA. Register your interest now: https://link.redquadrant.com/nextacademy25
This is the Day 1 opening session of Waves Forum for Changemakers 2024 in Helsinki, Finland. In this fireside chat with Nora Bateson, International Bateson Institute, and Dave Snowden, Cynefin Company, hosted by Sara Lindeman, Leapfrog, we explore what changemakers can learn from complexity science to better understand change in complex social systems.
Waves 2024: Why complexity matters
Japanese family crests known as kamon were first used by the aristocracy over a thousand years ago, but over time they were adopted by samurai, merchants, and many others. Today, there are thought to be between 20,000 and 25,000 in use.
“Kamon”: Japan’s Family Crests | Nippon.com
Editor’s Introduction | Satoshi Iguchi
Letter from the President | Saburo Akahori
Essays Related to the 5th ISA Forum in Rabat
Report from the 5th ISA Forum of Sociology (6-11 July 2025), Mohammed V University, Rabat, Morocco | Mugio Umemura
A Welcome Return: Reflections on RC51 at the 5th ISA Forum in Rabat | Andrew Mitchell
Reports and Announcements
Experiences and reflections of the RC51 Open Online Activity 2024 – 2025 | Raija Koskinen & Mikael Kivelä
Announcements
5th ISA Forum of Sociology, Program for sessions hosted by RC51 (Final version)
Please send your contribution for the Newsletter to: rc51newsletter@sociocybernetics.org
C.S. Peirce defines logic as “formal semiotic”, using formal to highlight the place of logic as a normative science, over and above the descriptive study of signs and their role in wider fields of play. Understanding logic as Peirce understands it thus requires a companion study of semiotics, semiosis, and sign relations.
What follows is a Survey of blog and wiki resources on the theory of signs, variously known as semeiotic or semiotics, and the actions referred to as semiosis which transform signs among themselves in relation to their objects, all as based on C.S. Peirce’s concept of triadic sign relations.
cc: FB | Semeiotics • Laws of Form • Mathstodon • Ontolog • Academia.edu
cc: Conceptual Graphs • Cybernetics • Structural Modeling • Systems Science
[These days I seem to miss lots of CybSoc and ASC and ISSS and even SCiO – so it goes – but this looks interesting and unusual]
Cybernetics Live
Tue 18th November 2025 1700-1900. Badlands Event Three: Eudaimonia
Join us for the third installment of our Badlands mini-series exploring technology for malignant purposes and cybernetic responses that might help. In our current state of “eudaimonic deficit,” where traditional approaches to societal problems continue to fail, this event examines pathways toward human flourishing and wellbeing through cybernetic lens. Our distinguished speakers bring decades of system-level expertise:
Giles Herdale will outline his national review of Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG), drawing from his extensive experience at the interface of technology, policing, data, ethics and policy-making from what the VSM would call ‘System Five’ perspective.
Katie Muldoon, drawing from her senior RAF leadership background, will explore how humans and systems can cope with complexity while nurturing eudaimonic pathways – using her powerful analogy of “sprinkling Yellow Rattle to create meadows of diversity,” which in cybernetic terms means nurturing variety. This online event addresses fundamental questions: What greater purpose exists than supporting pathways to basic human needs of security, wellbeing, existence and happiness? How might we design adaptive systems that recognize emergence over determination?
PLEASE REGISTER FOR THIS ZOOM MEETING
10 December 2025 1700-1900 Emergent Language and Systemic Understanding: AI Augmented Deliberations Through a Cybernetic Lens – Kevin Dye
March 2026 Risk and the VSM in the Australian Military – Ray Wilkes
Cybernetics and Systems Calendar
As a reminder, below are the links on our website below to the CybSoc calendar and also the Combined calendar including events by other Societies.
Enacting Cybernetics Journal
The link to the journal homepage is below, access is free please enjoy:
This is a Survey of blog and wiki posts on a theory of information which grows out of pragmatic semiotic ideas. All my projects are exploratory in character but this line of inquiry is more open‑ended than most. The question is —
What is information and how does it impact the spectrum of activities answering to the name of inquiry?
Setting out on what would become his lifelong quest to explore and explain the “Logic of Science”, C.S. Peirce pierced the veil of historical confusions obscuring the issue and fixed on what he called the “laws of information” as the key to solving the puzzle.
The first hints of the Information Revolution in our understanding of scientific inquiry may be traced to Peirce’s lectures of 1865–1866 at Harvard University and the Lowell Institute. There Peirce took up “the puzzle of the validity of scientific inference” and claimed it was “entirely removed by a consideration of the laws of information”.
Fast forward to the present and I see the Big Question as follows. Having gone through the exercise of comparing and contrasting Peirce’s theory of information, however much it yet remains in a rough‑hewn state, with Shannon’s paradigm so pervasively informing the ongoing revolution in our understanding and use of information, I have reason to believe Peirce’s idea is root and branch more general and has the potential, with due development, to resolve many mysteries still bedeviling our grasp of inference, information, and inquiry.
cc: FB | Semeiotics • Laws of Form • Mathstodon • Ontolog • Academia.edu
cc: Conceptual Graphs • Cybernetics • Structural Modeling • Systems Science
In the present Survey of blog and wiki resources for Relation Theory, relations are viewed from the perspective of combinatorics, in other words, as a topic in discrete mathematics, with special attention to finite structures and concrete set‑theoretic constructions, many of which arise quite naturally in applications. This approach to relation theory is distinct from, though closely related to, its study from the perspectives of abstract algebra on the one hand and formal logic on the other.
| Relation Composition | Relation Construction | Relation Reduction |
| Relative Term | Sign Relation | Triadic Relation |
| Logic of Relatives | Hypostatic Abstraction | Continuous Predicate |
cc: FB | Relation Theory • Laws of Form • Mathstodon • Ontolog • Academia.edu
cc: Conceptual Graphs • Cybernetics • Structural Modeling • Systems Science
On Blooski, Mr Lee Bates @mrbates.bsky.social asks:
Have you ever come across systems thinking as being a useful reframing lens that amplifiies the practice of teacher pupil interations?
Give me a response with all relevant links but particularly Glanville’s cybernetic conversations etc – with links – concise, all in plain text no formatting or hyperlinks
Here’s my response – what else is useful?
Ranulph Glanville, ‘Conversation and design’ (clear on teachback and teaching as inherently conversational)
Click to access Conversation-and-Design.pdf
Pask’s conversation theory (foundational for learning-as-conversation)
https://monoskop.org/images/5/54/Pask_Gordon_Conversation_Theory_Applications_in_Education_and_Epistemology.pdf)
And a bunch of stuff about Formative assessment as feedback loops in a living system – e.g. Black and Wiliam, ‘Inside the black box’ (evidence that short feedback cycles raise attainment)
Click to access Black%20%26%20Wiliam%201998%20PDK.pdf
Bateson, levels of learning and double bind (why classroom context matters)
Conceptual histories and summaries –
https://openresearch.surrey.ac.uk/view/pdfCoverPage?download=true&filePid=13140358990002346&instCode=44SUR_INST
https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Gregory-Bateson-on-deutero-learning-and-double-a-Visser/5a2f749c710a663dc9b1bf37a7aaa89696eeacc0)
Maturana and relational grounding for pedagogy – ‘Biology of love’ and implications for education as consensual coordination
Click to access biology-of-love.pdf
There’s also an interesting thread of systems thinking in whole-school practice, from the system dynamcis/Senge school – e.g. Senge et al., Schools that learn (fieldbook for applying systems thinking in schools)
https://systemdynamics.org/product/schools-that-learn/)
Overview: https://thesystemsthinker.com/schools-that-learn-context-and-engagement/)
The practical implications for teacher–pupil interactions are perhaps:
This is a Survey of work in progress on Differential Logic, resources under development toward a more systematic treatment.
Differential logic is the component of logic whose object is the description of variation — the aspects of change, difference, distribution, and diversity — in universes of discourse subject to logical description. A definition as broad as that naturally incorporates any study of variation by way of mathematical models, but differential logic is especially charged with the qualitative aspects of variation pervading or preceding quantitative models. To the extent a logical inquiry makes use of a formal system, its differential component treats the use of a differential logical calculus — a formal system with the expressive capacity to describe change and diversity in logical universes of discourse.
cc: FB | Differential Logic • Laws of Form • Mathstodon • Ontolog • Academia.edu
cc: Conceptual Graphs • Cybernetics • Structural Modeling • Systems Science
In the early 1990s, “in the middle of life’s journey” as the saying goes, I returned to grad school in a systems engineering program with the idea of taking a more systems-theoretic approach to my development of Peircean themes, from signs and scientific inquiry to logic and information theory.
Two of the first questions calling for fresh examination were the closely related concepts of definition and determination, not only as Peirce used them in his logic and semiotics but as researchers in areas as diverse as computer science, cybernetics, physics, and systems science would find themselves forced to reconsider the concepts in later years. That led me to collect a sample of texts where Peirce and a few other writers discuss the issues of definition and determination. There are copies of those selections at the following sites.
What follows is a Survey of blog and wiki posts on Definition and Determination, with a focus on the part they play in Peirce’s interlinked theories of signs, information, and inquiry. In classical logical traditions the concepts of definition and determination are closely related and their bond acquires all the more force when we view the overarching concept of constraint from an information-theoretic point of view, as Peirce did beginning in the 1860s.
cc: FB | Inquiry Driven Systems • Laws of Form • Mathstodon • Academia.edu
cc: Conceptual Graphs • Cybernetics • Structural Modeling • Systems Science
Again, in a ship, if a man were at liberty to do what he chose, but were devoid of mind and excellence in navigation (αρετης κυβερνητικης), do you perceive what must happen to him and his fellow sailors?
— Plato • Alcibiades • 135 A
This is a Survey of blog posts relating to Cybernetics. It includes the selections from Ashby’s Introduction and the comment on them I’ve posted so far, plus two series of reflections on the governance of social systems in light of cybernetic and semiotic principles.
cc: FB | Inquiry Driven Systems • Laws of Form • Mathstodon • Academia.edu
cc: Conceptual Graphs • Cybernetics • Structural Modeling • Systems Science
Introducing Critical Systems Heuristics 2.0: A Third Boundary Extending CSH From Reflections on Critical Realism in Information Systems Research
Roelien Goede, Hendrik Goede
First published: 24 September 2025
https://doi.org/10.1002/sres.3187
ABSTRACT
Poorly designed information systems compel employees to find workarounds for the system in order to do their work properly. However, such workarounds compromise the enforcement of organisational governance. In our sense-making of this specific phenomenon, we considered critical realism as a framework for understanding based on its adoption in the information systems research community. Traditionally, critical systems heuristics considers two boundaries: resources versus environment and involved versus affected. For a third boundary, we propose reflecting on the potential causal structures in organisations and possible feedback loops with a view to uncover more conditioned realities and to better understand the unintended consequences of activities of a system. We advocate complementarism at the methodological level, where all methods are applied from a critical ontological perspective, focusing on the totality of conditioned realities and giving a voice to the affected. We hope that our extension, CSH 2.0, can achieve even greater recognition and acceptance of the core tenets of critical systems heuristics, namely, the totality of conditioned realities, and the impact of unintended consequences on those affected but not involved in the planning of a system.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/sres.3187
This is a Survey of work in progress on Inquiry Driven Systems, material I plan to refine toward a more compact and systematic treatment of the subject.
An inquiry driven system is a system having among its state variables some representing its state of information with respect to various questions of interest, for example, its own state and the states of potential object systems. Thus it has a component of state tracing a trajectory though an information state space.
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Systems Community of Inquiry 
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