Anatol Rapoport Zitate

Anatol Rapoport war ein amerikanischer Mathematiker und Biologe. Er gilt als zentraler Vordenker der Systemwissenschaften.

Der emeritierte Professor für Psychologie und Mathematik an der Universität von Toronto verfasste mehr als 500 wissenschaftliche Beiträge, in denen er sich neben Mathematik und ihrer Anwendung auf psychologische und sozialwissenschaftliche Fragestellungen vor allem mit Allgemeiner Systemtheorie, Spieltheorie und Semantik beschäftigte. Weitere Beiträge galten der Konflikt- und Friedensforschung. Wikipedia

✵ 22. Mai 1911 – 20. Januar 2007

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Anatol Rapoport: Zitate auf Englisch

“A fundamental value in the scientific outlook is concern with the best available map of reality.”

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Anatol Rapoport

Anatol Rapoport Science and the goals of man: a study in semantic orientation. Greenwood Press, 1950/1971. p. 224; Partly cited in: Book review http://digitalcommons.law.lsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2040&context=lalrev by Harold G. Wren, in Louisiana Law Review, Vol 13, nr 4, May 1953 <br class="br">1950s <br class="br">Kontext: A fundamental value in the scientific outlook is concern with the best available map of reality. The scientist will always seek a description of events which enables him to predict most by assuming least. He thus already prefers a particular form of behavior. If moralities are systems of preferences, here is at least one point at which science cannot be said to be completely without preferences. Science prefers good maps.

“Conflict… is a theme that has occupied the thinking of man more than any other, save only God and love.”

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Anatol Rapoport

Quelle: 1960s, Fights, games, and debates, (1960), p. 11
Kontext: Conflict... is a theme that has occupied the thinking of man more than any other, save only God and love. In the vast output of discourse on the subject, conflict has been treated in every conceivable way. It has been treated descriptively, as in history and fiction; it has been treated in an aura of moral approval, as in epos; with implicit resignation, as in tragedy; with moral disapproval, as in pacifistic religions. There is a body of knowledge called military science, presumably concerned with strategies of armed conflict. There are innumerable handbooks, which teach how to play specific games of strategy. Psychoanalysts are investigating the genesis of "fight-like" situations within the individual, and social psychologists are doing the same on the level of groups and social classes.

“It is misleading in a crucial way to view information as something that can be poured into an empty vessel, like a fluid or even energy.”

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Anatol Rapoport

Anatol Rapoport (1956) "The Promise and Pitfalls of Information Theory"; AS quoted in: Peter Corning (2010) Holistic Darwinism, p. 364
1950s

“A thorough understanding of game theory, should dim these greedy hopes. Knowledge of game theory does not make one a better card player, businessman or military strategist.”

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Anatol Rapoport

Quelle: 1960s, "The Use and Misuse of Game Theory," 1962, p. 108

“We must admit that it is extremely difficult to formulate a theory sufficiently general to encompass all possible sufficient causes of wars. With regard to necessary causes, however,… it is weapons. Without weapons wars could not be fought. We are told that, deprived of weapons, people would still fight with sticks and stones. This, however, need not concern us. We are concerned not just with fighting but with the sort of mass insanity that can destroy the entire civilization, the product of millenia of accumulated effort, in a matter of hours. And this can be done only with real, up-to-date weapons, not sticks and stones.”

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1960s, "The Study of Conflict," 1968

“No map contains all the information about the territory it represents. The road map we get at the gasoline station may show all the roads in the state, but it will not as a rule show latitude and longitude. A physical map goes into details about the topography of a country but is indifferent to political boundaries. Furthermore, the scale of the map makes a big difference. The smaller the scale the less features will be shown.”

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Anatol Rapoport

Anatol Rapoport Science and the goals of man: a study in semantic orientation. Greenwood Press, 1950/1971. p. 85
1950s

“[Education] seems to be the only hope: to spread enlightenment sufficiently wide so that people can no longer be manipulated to give consent to policies that will surely eventually lead to their own destruction.”

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1960s, "The Study of Conflict," 1968

“The purpose of formulating [a] conflict as a game is not that of resolving the conflict by 'solving the game.' It is that of displaying the structure of the conflict and thereby exposing features of it that may be concealed by rhetoric. In particular, appreciation of the peculiar structure of some of the so-called mixed—motive conflicts represented nonzero-sum games may change the conflicting parties' perception of their situation.”

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Anatol Rapoport, Conflict in man-made environment. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974; As cited in M.J. Apter, ‎J.H. Kerr, ‎S. Murgatroyd (1993) Advances in Reversal Theory. p. 63-64
1970s and later

“A theorem is a proposition which is a strict logical consequence of certain definitions and other propositions”

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Anatol Rapoport. " Various meanings of “theory”." http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~fczagare/PSC%20504/Rapoport%20(1958).pdf American Political Science Review 52.04 (1958): 972-988. <br class="br">1950s

“The accusations of cultism leveled against Korzybski's followers are not altogether unfounded. In the United States there is a large floating population of 'truthseekers'. Many of them lack the capacity of strenuous intellectual effort required in a fruitful pursuit of knowledge and wisdom; others lack the power of critical evaluation, which would enable them to tell the genuine from the false. Still others cannot be comfortable until they find a panacea to believe in. These people support 'movements' and cults. They are as likely to 'go for' Christian Science as for technocracy, for psychoanalysis as for theosophy, for the Great Books programme as for dianetics. And so inevitably one finds some of them among the adherents of general semantics… Whether they were actually helped by general semantics or by other factors cannot be determined without sufficient controls. But they went about spreading the faith, thus giving a cultist flavour to the 'movement'.”

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Quelle: 1950s, "What is Semantics?", 1950, p. 6 ; as cited in: Schaff (1962;94-95)

“For a general semanticist, communication is not merely words in proper order properly inflected (as for the grammarian) or assertions in proper relation to each other (as for the logician) or assertions in proper relation to referents (as for the semanticist), but all these together, with the chain of 'fact to nervous system to language to nervous system to action.”

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1950, p. 14; as cited in: Adam Schaff (1962). Introduction to semantics, p. 105.
1950s, "What is Semantics?", 1950

“Our first objective in undertaking the experimental program described here has been to gain some understanding of what goes on in long sequences of plays of Prisoner's Dilemma. We have attempted to gain this understanding by postulating a system going through a sequence of states and by attempting to formulate some mathematical models from which the dynamics of the system could be deduced. Once such a model is found, its parameters, properly interpreted, become the key terms in the emerging psychological theory. This strategy can be deemed successful, if the parameters so discovered are independent of the process itself, if they suggest further investigation, and if the further investigations, in turn, lead to a more inclusive theory.”

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Quelle: 1960s, Prisoner's dilemma: A study in conflict and cooperation (1965), p. 185

“(Game theory is) essentially a structural theory. It uncovers the logical structure of a great variety of conflict situations and describes this structure in mathematical terms. Sometimes the logical structure of a conflict situation admits rational decisions; sometimes it does not.”

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Quelle: 1960s, Prisoner's dilemma: A study in conflict and cooperation (1965), p. 196

“The American Revolution was ignited by the slogan ‘no taxation without representation’, a slogan suggested by democratic ideals… Ought not the present day version of the old slogan be ‘No annihilation without representation?”

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1960s, "The Study of Conflict," 1968

“At present game theory has, in my opinion, two important uses, neither of them related to games nor to conflict directly. First, game theory stimulates us to think about conflict in a novel way. Second, game theory leads to some genuine impasses, that is, to situations where its axiomatic base is shown to be insufficient for dealing even theoretically with certain types of conflict situations… Thus, the impact is made on our thinking process themselves, rather than on the actual content of our knowledge.”

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Quelle: 1960s, Fights, games, and debates, (1960), p. 242; As cited in: Han Dorussen. " Min beste fagbok: Anatol Rapoport: Fights, Games, and Debates http://www.sv.ntnu.no/iss/issavisa/98-1/bestebok.htm" at sv.ntnu.no, 1998

“Although the drama of games of strategy is strongly linked with the psychological aspects of the conflict, game theory is not concerned with these aspects. Game theory, so to speak, plays the board. It is concerned only with the logical aspects of strategy.”

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Quelle: 1960s, "The Use and Misuse of Game Theory," 1962, p. 110

“There are two suffixes in our language (and similar ones in other European languages) which suggest organized knowledge. One is the venerable, academic "ology," that reminds one of university curricula and scholarship. The other is the energetic and somewhat mysterious "ics," which has a connotative flavor of magic. Where "ology" suggests academic isolation (ichthyology, philology) "its" suggests a method of attack on life’s problems. It contains a faint throwback to the ancient dreams of the philosopher’s stone and of "keys" to the riddles of the universe. Ancient words ending in "ics" are mathematics and metaphysics. Of more recent origin are economics, statistics, semantics, and cybernetics.”

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1950, p. 12 (1952, p. 123) lead paragraph
1950s, "What is Semantics?", 1950

“The predictions of physical theories for the most part concern situations where initial conditions can be precisely specified. If such initial conditions are not found in nature, they can be arranged. Such arrangements are considerably easier to realize with inanimate than with animate matter, because the properties of animate matter are much more sensitive to being tampered with than inanimate matter. In particular, living tissue in vitro may behave quite differently than in situ. Controlled biological experiments are, of course, possible, but they are more difficult and their scope is more limited than that of physical experiments. For this reason, biology has had to depend to a greater extent than physics on theories of larger speculative scope, in which reasoning by imaginative analogy plays a more important role.”

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Anatol Rapoport (1956) "The Search for Simplicity"
1950s

“Crisis in its simplest terms is defined as an upset in a steady state… the habitual problem-solving activities are not adequate and do not rapidly lead to the previously achieved balance state.”

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Quelle: 1960s, Prisoner's dilemma: A study in conflict and cooperation (1965), p. 24

“The behavior of two individuals, consisting of effort which results in output, is considered to be determined by a satisfaction function which depends on remuneration (receiving part of the output) and on the effort expended. The total output of the two individuals is not additive, that is, together they produce in general more than separately. Each individual behaves in a way which he considers will maximize his satisfaction function. Conditions are deduced for a certain relative equilibrium and for the stability of this equilibrium, i. e., conditions under which it will not “pay” the individual to decrease his efforts. In the absence of such conditions "exploitation" occurs which may or may not lead to total parasitism.”

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Anatol Rapoport. "Mathematical theory of motivation interactions of two individuals," The Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics(1947) 9: 17-28 , March 01, 1947
1940s

“The outcome of a non-constant-sum game may be dictated by the individual rationality of the respective players without satisfying a criterion of collective rationality.”

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Anatol Rapoport. (1974). Game Theory as a Theory of Conflict Resolution p. 4
1970s and later

“The first attempts to consider the behavior of so-called "random neural nets" in a systematic way have led to a series of problems concerned with relations between the "structure" and the "function" of such nets. The "structure" of a random net is not a clearly defined topological manifold such as could be used to describe a circuit with explicitly given connections. In a random neural net, one does not speak of "this" neuron synapsing on "that" one, but rather in terms of tendencies and probabilities associated with points or regions in the net.”

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Anatol Rapoport. "Cycle distributions in random nets." The bulletin of mathematical biophysics 10.3 (1948): 145-157.
1940s

“It is one thing to say that the dwelling has symbolic and cosmological aspects… and another to say that it has been erected for ritual purposes and is neither shelter nor dwelling but a temple.”

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Anatol Rapoport (1969:40); As quoted in: Michael Parker Pearson, ‎Colin Richards (2003) Architecture and Order: Approaches to Social Space. p. 49 : Commented on the theory of religious origin
1960s

“Who Are the Semanticists? To answer this question, let us go to the writings of those who make frequent references to semantics or to equivalent terms which have to do with the study of meaning. We find that a number of prominent thinkers have occupied themselves with this study. In England these include Whitehead, Russell, Ogden, Richards, Ayer, and others; in Austria (later scattered, fleeing from fascism), a group of writers who called themselves the Vienna Circle, which included Carnap and Frank (now in in the United States), Wittgenstein (now in England), and Neurath (deceased); the United States is represented by Charles Morris, and Poland by Tarski and Korzybski (deceased), both of whom emigrated to the United States.”

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1950, p. 12 (1952, p. 123)
1950s, "What is Semantics?", 1950

“Game theory applies to a very different type of conflict, now technically called a game. The well-known games such as poker, chess, ticktacktoe and so forth are games in the strict technical Bark and counterbark sense. But what makes parlor games games is not their entertainment value or detachment from real life.”

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Quelle: 1960s, "The Use and Misuse of Game Theory," 1962, p. 108

“We live in an age of belief-belief in the omnipotence of science. This belief is bolstered by the fact that the problems scientists are called on to solve are for the most part selected by the scientists themselves.”

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Quelle: 1960s, "The Use and Misuse of Game Theory," 1962, p. 108

“Centralization of society's vital services in giant computer centers, reservoirs, nuclear power plants, air- traffic control centers, 100-story skyscrapers, and government compounds increases its vulnerability. … choosing his targets, today's saboteur could pollute a city's water supply, dynamite power transmission towers, cripple an airport control center, destroy a corporate or government computer center.”

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Anatol Rapoport, as quoted in: Gerald McKnight (1973) Computer crime, p. 203
1970s and later

“It is the shortcomings of game theory (as originally formulated) which force the consideration of the role of ethics, of the dynamics of social structure, and of social structure and of individual psychology in situations of conflict.”

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p, vii (1974)
1960s, Fights, games, and debates, (1960)

“One cannot play chess if one becomes aware of the pieces as living souls and of the fact that the Whites and the Blacks have more in common with each other than with the players. Suddenly one loses all interest in who will be champion.”

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Anatol Rapoport, Strategy and Conscience. Harper & Row, 1964. p. 195
1960s

“Many psychologists, sociologists and especially anthropologists and psychiatrists raise serious objections against routine attempts to "extend the methods of the of the physical sciences" to the study of man. These objections cannot be dismissed simply on the grounds that they are not constructive; for inherent in the objections may well be a conviction that there can never be a "behavioral science" as scientists understand science. Whether there can be such a science or not will be decided neither by citing successful applications of "scientific method" to carefully circumscribed sectors of human behavior nor by pointing out what has not yet been done. Therefore on the question of whether a behavioral science can in principle be constructed, we shall take no sides. That some kinds of human behavior can be described and even predicted in terms of objectively verifiable and quantifiable data seems to us to have been established.”

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Quelle: 1960s, Prisoner's dilemma: A study in conflict and cooperation (1965), p. v

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