This essay is part of the Autonomy and Cohesion series.

We can’t deal with most things in life on our own. We don’t have a large enough repertoire of responses to all the stimuli of the environment. We get together and form tribes, communities, companies, networks, states, or, in other words, wholes. And the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, as the saying goes.

This aphorism is often attributed to Aristotle, while, more likely, it came in this form much later, possibly through Gestalt psychology. Whatever the source, it seems popular and further amplified by those trying to explain concepts such as system and emergence.

While widespread and evocative, the saying doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. It yields at greater and parts. When it comes to parts, for social systems, it’s not whole and parts but rather a whole of other wholes. System of systems. And systems formation does not work with a whole-part scheme.¹When it comes to social systems, system formation is a matter of system/environment differentiation, which also applies to subsystems. It “does not involve the decomposition of a “whole” into “parts,” in either the conceptual sense (divisio) or the sense of actual division (partition).” See Luhmann, N. (2013). Theory of Society, Volume 2 (R. Barrett, Trans.). Stanford University Press. https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=16878

Regarding greater, the “whole is neither more nor is it less than the sum of its parts: it is different,” wrote Heinz von Foerster in 1976.² von Foerster, H. (2003). Objects: Tokens for (Eigen-)Behaviors. In Understanding Understanding: Essays on Cybernetics and Cognition (pp. 261–271). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-21722-3_11 (Original work published 1976)  Later, in an interview, he offered another clarification by simply modifying the popular saying and giving an example:

I would add the following correction to this principle. You require an additional measurement function for this: The measure of the sum of the parts is greater than the sum of the measures of the parts. One is the measure of the sum; the other is the sum of the measures. Take, for example, the measurement function “to square,” which makes this immediately apparent. I have two parts, one is a, the other b. Now I have the measure of the sum of the parts. What does that look like? a + b as the sum of the parts squared, gives us a²+2ab+b². Now I need the sum of the measures of the parts, and with this I have the measure of a(=a²) and the measure of b(=b²): a²+b². Now I claim that the measure of the sums of the parts is greater than the sum of the measures of the parts and state that: a²+b²+2ab is greater than a²+b².

With “the measure of the sum of the parts is greater than the sum of the measures of the parts,” the aphorism makes more sense, and when the whole in question is a social system, variety is a good measure. The whole has (potentially) more variety than the sum of the varieties of the agents making up the whole.³ This follows the mainstream notion that people are part of the social system. We can entertain another possibility, defended by Luhmann, that people, while structurally coupled with the social systems, are part of their environment, while the social systems emerge from closed networks of communications. The LORV still applies, but this time, it is due to the variety of communications compared with the variety of the system and the irritations it has to respond to.

Agents can get more protection, respond more successfully to external stimuli, and achieve more ambitious goals. That’s, of course, the law of requisite variety.

Forming a whole brings one of the biggest problems every society and generation has faced since there have been people on the planet: how to balance the needs of individuals and groups. But let’s keep this moral box closed for now and focus on a related question: how does the system maintain identity, function, and viability?

The whole, be it a tribe, organization, network, or state, stays a whole as long as it has cohesion. Cohesion is brought about by natural forces and artificial tools and technologies, as elaborated in another essay from this series.

The way cohesion is maintained varies. For some social systems, it is through command and control. On the other extreme are systems where coordination mechanisms are technical standards and protocols, and autonomy is only reduced by participatory interoperability constraints. Between these extremes, there are different zones corresponding to idealized versions of actual social systems, forming a cohesion spectrum.

The CABIN model

The CABIN model proposed here distinguishes five zones in the cohesion spectrum.

Continue reading →

• 1
  When it comes to social systems, system formation is a matter of system/environment differentiation, which also applies to subsystems. It “does not involve the decomposition of a “whole” into “parts,” in either the conceptual sense (divisio) or the sense of actual division (partition).” See Luhmann, N. (2013). Theory of Society, Volume 2 (R. Barrett, Trans.). Stanford University Press. https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=16878
• 2
  von Foerster, H. (2003). Objects: Tokens for (Eigen-)Behaviors. In Understanding Understanding: Essays on Cybernetics and Cognition (pp. 261–271). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-21722-3_11 (Original work published 1976)
• 3
  This follows the mainstream notion that people are part of the social system. We can entertain another possibility, defended by Luhmann, that people, while structurally coupled with the social systems, are part of their environment, while the social systems emerge from closed networks of communications. The LORV still applies, but this time, it is due to the variety of communications compared with the variety of the system and the irritations it has to respond to.