Anatol Rapoport Quotes
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Whether sociology can ever become a full-fledged "science" (a description of a class of events predictable on the basis of deductions from a constant rationale) depends on whether the terms which sociologists employ to describe events can be analyzed into quantifiable observables.
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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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A theorem is a proposition which is a strict logical consequence of certain definitions and other proposition.
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The military forces of the revolutionary adversary are diffuse. One is never sure whether one has destroyed them unless one is ready to destroy a large portion of the population, and this usually conflicts with the political aim of the war and hence also violates a fundamental Clausewitzian principle.
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The transition from the concept of information in the technical (communication engineering) sense to the semantic (theory of meaning) sense was indeed difficult, if not impossible.
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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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It is a well-known fact that the likely contacts of two individuals who are closely acquainted tend to be more overlapping than those of two arbitrarily selected individuals.
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The outstanding feature of behavior is that it is often quite easy to recognize but extremely difficult or impossible to describe with precision.
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The "flow of information" through human communication channels is enormous. So far no theory exists, to our knowledge, which attributes any sort of unambiguous measure to this "flow".
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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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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.