LOGIC OF THE THIRD, THE

This book is a scientific basis for understanding the urgent need for a Great Transformation to a third step in social evolution. Already being a community of common destiny, humanity can form an actual unity through diversity to avoid extinction. Social actors can recognise informational imperatives for cognition, communication and co-operation to achieve such a unity. By doing so, they apply a logic that underlies the structuration of any agency, which is a real logic of self-organising systems from the physical to the social. This logic is the Logic of the Third — the Third is a meta-structure that emerges in a leap. The agents interact and when they co-act they are likely to form a real meta-structure of organisational relations. Informational agents anticipate this by generating requisite information in their attempt to cope with complex challenges. Such an information is a meta-structure too. The Third helps achieve synergy effects. This book discusses considerations from philosophy, systems theory, the study of information, social systems, social information, ecology and technology. It addresses ethical issues connected with the long-forgotten arms race in an atomic age, the global warming not yet under control, the pandemic misunderstood, the social question still unanswered. Contents: Towards a Science of Transformation: Revisiting the World, Systems and Information Steps to a Theory of the Social and of Social Information: From Systemism and Information to Criticism From Criticism to Critical Utopia Towards a Science for, about, and via the Techno-Eco-Social Transformtion: From Critical Utopia to Visioneering. Rethinking Future Information Technology: Emergentist Techno-Social Systemism Readership: Advanced undergraduates, graduates, researchers. 'This book is an essential contribution to the reform in thinking needed to face the complexity of our troubled times and the uncertainties of our future.' - Edgar MorinCentre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS)École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) 'Wolfgang Hofkirchner's new book, a direct continuation of his 2013 Emergent Information, is a major contribution to breaking down the still almost impermeable boundaries between disciplines. It encourages one to think in terms of meta-levels of reality, objective and scientific as well as subjective and ideational. It encourages us further to seek out the unity-in-diversity in the meta-system transitions in all real processes that instantiate the Third. The Logic of the Third, in my view, could well become the most important new document at the intersection of science, philosophy and sociology of the 21st Century.' - Joseph E Brennerauthor of Logic in Reality (Springer 2008) and co-author of Philosophy in Reality 'The world, science and technology are undergoing drastic changes and thus need innovative thoughts. The author of the book tells a truth — humans urgently need a paradigm shift that enables them to construct a harmonious human society for the future on the path of 'unity through diversity'. This is named 'The Logic of the Third' by the author. I hope that the book be distributed as wide as possible. The more readers the book has, the better.' - Professor Yixin ZhongAI School, Beijing University of Post and Telecommunications 'We are in an era of rapid transformation with both great hope and great crisis. How to avoid the crisis, and how to make the good hope come true? In this book, Wolfgang Hofkirchner puts forward the great prospect of a third transformation of the human developmental mode. This prospect is of great realism and innovation, which deserves attentions of politicians, philosophers and scientists. As far as the current situation is concerned, neither the existing Eastern social system nor the existing Western social system can become a ready-made system model that can reasonably adapt to the new social transformation. It is necessary to establish a new system of society labeled...