Requisite Variety
The Law of Requisite Variety states that only variety can absorb variety.
First articulated by cybernetician W. Ross Ashby, the principle states that a control system must possess at least as much behavioral variety as the system it seeks to regulate.
Implication
If the environment produces many possible disturbances, a governing system must possess a corresponding range of responses. Otherwise regulation becomes impossible.
Requisite Variety in PKOS
AI-accelerated reasoning dramatically increases the variety of possible interpretations, decisions and knowledge flows.
PKOS increases the variety available to governance systems by introducing structured reasoning artifacts such as PIFRs, inspectable reasoning processes, and semantic scaffolding.
These mechanisms allow institutions to regulate complex reasoning systems without collapsing into interpretive entropy.
Part of the PKOS Lexicon.