[DSRP Evidence](https://dsrpevidence.org/) # Working Monograph on Aristotelian Causality in Systems Thinking ## Details **Authors** Christopher, Curley **Year** 2025 **Publisher** Medium (self-published) **Kind of work** blog **Discipline** Philosophy **Secondary disciplines** Systems Science, Business & Management **Kind of engagement** public **Applied** false [Read it](https://medium.com/@curley.christopher/working-mono-on-aristotelian-causality-in-systems-thinking-eef02dad0eb1) ## In authors' words ### What they set out to do (purpose) The author argues that Western business thinking inherited a Newtonian account of causality that recognizes only the efficient cause, that this account fails on complex, recursive and chaotic systems, and that Aristotle's formal, material and final causes should be restored to systems work, with design serving as the formal cause. ### How they did it (methods) A self-described working monograph and note to the author's own thinking, roughly 1,800 words and licensed CC BY 4.0, with no abstract. It opens on Contested Garment apportionment, which the author contrasts with Aristotelian proportionality; traces Newtonian, Cartesian and Kantian influence on business thought; expounds the four causes and the essentialism behind them, with pitcher and chair examples and an admitted preference for nominalism; argues that reductionism held from roughly 1700 to 1900 and then failed, citing quantum phenomena, recursive biology, Condorcet's paradox and the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction; states two objections to DSRP; and closes with a business application using a mortgage value stream and agile user stories, in which he identifies two errors — confusing the final cause with a requirements list, and confusing it with the efficient cause. ### What they found (results) The author concludes that reductionist methods remain useful but insufficient and that the formal, material and final causes must be restored. Against DSRP he states two objections. The first is that it 'treats causality as force alone', so that 'In Cabrera, there's still an agent forcing the system forward', where systems such as the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction reach oscillating equilibrium without the force of agency. The second, given in a parenthesis, is that DSRP's 'distinctions aren't themselves distinct'. He also writes that design thinking and systems thinking are closely associated 'if they're not just the same thing from a different perspective (the P in Cabrera's DSRP)'. ## Commentary ### In short DSRP makes an explicit, falsifiable claim: all thinking, and more generally all organized information, decomposes into distinctions, systems, relationships, and perspectives. The condition for refuting that claim is equally explicit: identify an organized body of information that cannot be decomposed into these four patterns. Evidence supporting the claim is publicly available, counterexamples are actively solicited, and proposed counterexamples are published and examined. By comparison, Aristotle's four causes, offered here as an alternative, are presented as a philosophical framework rather than an empirically tested ontology. No condition is specified under which their completeness or necessity would be rejected. The objections also misunderstand the kind of claim DSRP makes. DSRP's R pattern is not a theory of physical causation. It is a claim about the elementary structure of relationships: every relationship has an action and a reaction, neither of which requires an intentional agent. The Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction illustrates this distinction particularly well. Its chemical oscillations emerge from coupled autocatalytic processes, inhibition, feedback, and diffusion. These involve relationships with action and reaction, organized within a system of interacting parts. No conscious agent or external director is required. The oscillating behavior emerges from the organization of those interactions. DSRP does not need additional categories of causation to represent this organization. The proposed alternative also confuses 'composite concepts with elementary structures' Aristotle's formal, material, efficient, and final causes may be useful categories of explanation, but their usefulness does not establish them as irreducible primitives. A formal cause involves distinctions and part-whole organization. A material cause involves identifying constituents and their relationships to a whole. An efficient cause involves relationships through which change occurs. A final cause involves a perspective from which an outcome is identified as an end, together with relationships connecting means to that end. These are not missing elements of DSRP; they are higher-order constructions that can be expressed through its four elementary patterns. The question is not whether Aristotle's categories are useful, but whether they identify anything that cannot be constructed from DSRP. The parenthetical objection that distinctions are not themselves distinct is similarly undeveloped. As written, it restates a central feature of the theory rather than contradicting it. DSRP holds that the four patterns are mutually implicative, not independently isolated. A distinction is made from a perspective; a system requires distinctions between parts and wholes; relationships depend on distinctions between what is related. The patterns are analytically distinguishable without being operationally separable. Demonstrating their interdependence therefore does not refute DSRP; it is precisely what DSRP predicts. The connection drawn between design and perspective is a legitimate one, and the Cabreras have explored this same connection in their work on design thinking. Design involves taking a perspective from which a situation is framed, a desired outcome is distinguished, and parts and relationships are organized toward that outcome. The central disagreement is therefore not whether Aristotle's four causes provide useful explanations. It is whether those categories are 'elementary and necessary, or whether they are themselves composite constructions of more fundamental patterns'. Showing that the four causes can be expressed using DSRP does not, by itself, establish DSRP's ontological necessity. That is an empirical question, and one for which DSRP specifies a falsification condition. Any proposed alternative should be subjected to the same standard. **Patterns it shows** D, R, P **Added** 2026-10-09 **How to cite this** Christopher, Curley (2025). Working Monograph on Aristotelian Causality in Systems Thinking. Medium (self-published).