Abstract

In this chapter, I review the nature of Systems Research to advance it as a way of doing complex and heterogeneous systems science. I examine semiotics and cybersemiotics as some of the thinking models that converge in systemics and describe the type of semiotic systems that can be studied with the Systems Research approach; as in the case of open systems and their transduction processes or semiosis. The representative systems of this kind comprise life and culture, yet, the study of society requires epistemic concepts of comprehensive scope, both philosophical and methodological, like the concepts in the cybersemiotic ontology and systemic-semiotic approaches. A brief comment on the relationship between systemic-semiotics and cybersemiotics is included in each section. Motivated by these ideas, the chapter’s main tenet is to present a method to represent culture using network and graph models. The aim of this kind of representations is to understand how consciousness evolves within culture, in such a fashion that culture may be understood as an organism, as is postulated by cybersemiotics. Finally, the chapter closes with a discussion on the role of cybersemiotics and systemic-semiotics in the transdisciplinary thinking models, in particular within Systems Research.