Vitology and Systems Theory: Viability, Wholeness, and Part–Whole Relations

This article presents a theoretical comparison between Vitology and systems theory in order to distinguish established systems knowledge from the possible scientific added value of the Vitological approach. It is shown that the conception of a system as an organized whole, interactions among parts, boundaries, openness, hierarchy, multilevel organization, state dynamics, and possible divergence between local and system-level outcomes cannot be treated as independent scientific novelties of Vitology. After removing this general systems content, a narrower candidate hypothesis is examined: viability may be considered an additional scalable coordinate of system description characterizing the relationship between a system’s current state and trajectory and the preservation of its future existence and accessible viable possibilities. This approach requires distinctions between current state and future viability, observable functional recovery and recovery of reserve, local outcomes and changes in whole-system viability, and current boundary position and the dynamics of the space of future viable states. Special attention is given to multilevel viability and Fragment-Centered Dominance as a candidate construct describing reproducible divergence between improvement at the level of a part and deterioration in the viability of a higher-level system. The integrative character of viability is proposed not as a compulsory reduction of systems of different nature to a single universal numerical indicator, but as the preservation of a common functional research meaning under domain-specific and level-specific operationalization. The independent scientific value of this approach is made conditional on its ability to provide additional predictive information relative to existing systems characteristics and baseline models. The article establishes a theoretical basis for the subsequent transition from comparison with fundamental scientific theories to empirical testing of candidate regularities of viability. Keywords Vitology; systems theory; viability; system state; wholeness; part–whole relations; multilevel organization; scalability; viability coordinate; recovery reserve; viability boundary; future viable states; Fragment-Centered Dominance; scientific novelty; falsifiability; empirical testing.