Gerard de Zeeuw (born 11 March 1936) is a Dutch scientist and Emeritus professor Mathematical modelling of complex social systems at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands.
At the Stanford University in 1963–1964 he studied mathematical psychology under Patrick Suppes en Bob Estes and finished his PhD exam.
Since 1994 he has been visiting professor at the University of Lincolnshire and Humberside in the area of systems and management, and at the London School of Economics in the field of social and organizational psychology.
They restrict or enhance certain types of collective competence: To help solve, variedly and flexibly, individuals' problems.
Finding ways for systematic enhancement turns out to be difficult...[9]In his 1985 paper De Zeeuw proposed a "the concept of a support system" as: ... a research tool to strengthen such collective competence.
To do so, he explained: ... it must reflect on its own procedures, and must design research methods that are suited to the problems of increasing competence, also via the implementation of new social systems.
[10]In response Francis Heylighen (1988) described that "a general theory of the dynamics and stabilization of distinctions based on the closure concept could help us to solve our own complex problems.
Practically such an application could be implemented as a computer-based support system... which would help actors to structure their problems, ideas and information, by recombination and closure of simple components.
[14] A linguistic turn was added by the Cybernetics work of Niklas Luhmann, Gordon Pask and De Zeeuw in relation to the uncertainty and meaning of a social message.
[14] Gerard de Zeeuw elaborated this paradigm by emphasizing "languages" and "reports" rather than for "laws" and "facts" in a social science design.