Systems theory as a theoretical framework

anti-trauma warnings

Abstract

Before dealing directly with any theory, we all seek information about it, without which we do not consider that theory as a theoretical framework for our research. The non-normativity, principled nature, and non-morality of Niklas Luhmann's theory of society as a meaningful communication system awakens observation to gnosiological and epistemological acuity, especially in light of the philosophical tradition of the theory of knowledge, which indicates the search for the essence of being (object and subject) as a function of knowledge, an idea present in the first epistemological reflections (theory of science), still in the Middle Ages, frequent in modernity and even today. It is not a matter of denying or proposing to overcome Aristotelian or Hegelian ontology, but simply of drawing attention to the inadequacies of these normativist perspectives in dealing with social complexity. In a nutshell: systemic observation, especially since cybernetics, awakens sociological observations and perspectives of law that have no place in other theoretical contributions; after all, it is neither a doctrine nor a scientific model. To observe systemically is to observe how social communication can be the communication that communicates. To deal with this, bibliographic research was conducted. The irony with the term trauma is due to reports of difficulties with the initial reading of Niklas Luhmann's own texts, which I am calling terminological traumas. When the difficulty lies in understanding, they are gnosiological traumas. When it occurs in the context of the very use of systemic categories in research, they are epistemological traumas. The cognitive expectation is that, in the end, the reader will understand that: “Communication is the smallest possible unit of a social system, that is, the unit to which communication can react through communication”; “the system exists”; “the system learns”; “society is the system of all possible communications”; “systems that employ meaning can only observe themselves and their environment in the form of meaning”; "systems that operate with meaning are bound to the medium of meaning. Only meaning gives them reality in the form of sequential actualization of their own operation“; ”meaning requires a selection that reduces what is and remains possible as a specific and characterizable reality, for which it requires another side of form, an excess of references, a world full of possibilities that cannot be actualized at the same time in communication."