General Model Theory

As wikipedia tells us (emphasis ours):

Stachowiak's first monograph is called "Thinking and Knowing in the Cybernetic Model" (1965). He generalised and systematised the model concept in the standard work "Allgemeine Modelltheorie" (General Model Theory, 1973), which has never been translated into English. According to this, all cognition is cognition in models. Models are representations of "reality", which, however, necessarily shorten what is represented. The respective shaping of the models depends on the model constructor, his historical and social situation as well as his cognitive or creative interests. Thus, in addition to the depictive and foreshortening features, it is especially the pragmatic feature that determines how models are dealt with.

This work is thus of great interest of anyone working on modeling, and a lack of an English translation is a striking gap in the literature. As it happens, programmers think a lot about modeling. For example, take these posts from Model Practice:

• General Model Theory by Stachowiak
• Stachowiak’s K-System of Modelling

It is easy to find a number of posts such as these, making use of Stachowiak's key concepts, but it makes one yearn for reading the primitive work rather than its derivations. I felt this need keenly when I was writing up my own PhD Thesis (Section "Why Model?").

Unfortunately, I am spectacularly under-qualified for this particular task: first and foremost, I do not speak German and know very little of the language; secondly, though a "doctor of philosophy", I am not an actual philosopher but a mere computer scientist, and mostly a software engineer at that; and, finally, English is not my native language. I appear to have one only redeeming quality, which is that there are no other takers. We also have technology on our side: the translation will be performed by automated mains — chiefly by recourse to ChatGPT and Google Translate.

The project is composed of the following key files:

• orginal_german.txt: Book content as sourced from the Internet Archive.
• Stachowiak (1973)_ Allgemeine Modelltheorie.pdf: PDF of the original book.
• german.org: Book content in the original German but formatted into Emacs' org-mode, from whence automated generation of other formats — such as PDF and LaTex — can be attained. This file contains a number of small fixes from the original text file, which are likely artefacts of an OCR process.
• english.org: Book content translated to English. Translation is made with the help of ChatGPT, with the following prompt: "you are a german to english translator for academic philosophy books. i will give you text in german and you will return the translation of the text, without any other comments."

The approach is as follows: I will be manually moving content from the original German into the German org-mode representation, with minor fixes; it is then translating it into English via translation tools, and the output is proofread. We also compare it to the translation done by Google Chrome on the org-mode page. The org-mode documents generate two types of artefacts, via builds:

• HTML output, browsable as a site. View the German and English documents.
• PDF output. This is added to each build. At present the quality of the PDFs is not great; we need to add a lot of LaTex magic to make it readable.

Note that I am working on this project in my copious free time, so work will be slow and halting. Any form of contributions are welcome, particularly in the form of Pull Requests. If you want to do so, please see CONTRIBUTING.md and CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md.

All of my work is available via the licence CC-BY-4.0. I assume that, since Stachowiak's work is available in the Internet Archive, it falls under public domain. However this is entirely not clear, as per Wikipedia:

A public-domain book is a book with no copyright, a book that was created without a license, or a book where its copyrights expired or have been forfeited.

In most countries the term of protection of copyright expires on the first day of January, 70 years after the death of the latest living author. The longest copyright term is in Mexico, which has life plus 100 years for all deaths since July 1928.

Once I understand the exact status of the work I will update this page.