This is a publisher's offprint donated to Fenwick Special Collections on 12 July 2004. IT IS A REVISED AND PUBLISHED VERSION WHICH WARFIELD DISLIKED INTENSELY BECAUSE OF PUBLISHER'S TREATMENT OF HIS REFERENCE SECTION IN A MANNER WHICH DAMAGED THE INTENT OF HIS ARTICLE. Warfield's original manuscript concluded with the presentation of a topically subdivided reference section, giving titles of about a hundred significant papers and books in a dozen separate subject areas. The topical subdivisions which John Warfield used in the reference section were deleted in this published version because the journal editorial policy prohibited categorized references, so all the references in the published version had to be lumped into one big long list, to the author's dismay SEE ALSO in Textual Materials table these two other titles, for Warfield's original versions: Forecast for Systems Science, Original Manuscript for "A Proposal for Systems Science"

Excerpts from Abstract FOR PUBLISHED VERSION: "Because systems science is commonly perceived to be very broad in its scope and far reaching in its implications for practitioners, it is not unreasonable to suppose that systems science can be seen as filling multiple scientific roles. In order to fulfill this common perspective, systems science ought to be able to appear in at least five roles: As a science of description… As a science of generic design… As a science of complexity…As a science of action… As a science that is open to imports from other disciplines and incorporates means of identifying and integrating essential components of those disciplines, when clearly required in a problematic situation. It is proposed that systems science will fill all of these roles…"