Anticipating Systems : An Application to the Possible Futures of Contemporary Society

The purpose of this paper is to use a general systemic model to describe complex self-organizing systems, to interpret the present state of the Western society and build some scenarios for its possible futures. ln the first part we present the general holistic metamodel or language to interpret complex partly autonomous systems, like social, living or cognitive systems. In the second part we present C. W. Graves typology for systems of value or coping systems which we will use in the application of our model. ln the last part we use our general metamodel to represent the life cycle of the rationalist paradigm from the Renaissance to the present time and generate some prospective scenarios with the help of Graves' typology.