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Switch to: References
Citations of:
The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision
Critical Inquiry 21 (1):228-266 (1994)
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In this article, I shall examine some of the issues and questions involved in the technology of autonomous robots, a technology that has developed greatly and is advancing rapidly. I shall do so with reference to a particularly critical field: autonomous military robotic systems. In recent times, various issues concerning the ethical implications of these systems have been the object of increasing attention from roboticists, philosophers and legal experts. The purpose of this paper is not to deal with these issues, (...) |
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… in which we pass through eleven episodes in the history of cybernetics, each episode focusing on one of its perspectives on learning. We end with a coda where we define ‘cybersocial systems’ and... |
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This article examines how experimental psychology experienced a revolution as cognitive science replaced behaviorism in the mid-20th century. This transition in the scientific account of human nature involved making normal what had once been normative: borrowing ideas of democratic thinking from political culture and conceptions of good thinking from philosophy of science to describe humans as active, creatively thinking beings, rather than as organisms that simply respond to environmental conditions. Reflexive social and intellectual practices were central to this process as (...) |
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Objections to the computational theory of cognition, inspired by twentieth century phenomenology, have tended to fixate on the embodiment and embeddedness of intelligence. In this paper I reconstruct a line of argument that focusses primarily on the abstract nature of scientific models, of which computational models of the brain are one sort. I observe that the critique of scientific abstraction was rather commonplace in the philosophy of the 1920s and 30s and that attention to it aids the reading of The (...) |
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While behaviourist psychology had proven its worth to the US military during the Second World War, the 1950s saw behaviourism increasingly associated with a Cold War discourse of ‘totalitarianism’. This article considers the argument made in Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism on totalitarianism as a form of behaviourist control. By connecting Arendt’s Cold War anti-behaviourism both to its discursive antecedents in a Progressive-era critique of industrial labour, and to contemporaneous attacks on behaviourism, this paper aims to answer two interlocking (...) |
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This paper offers some insights and clarifications of the paramount role that Mexico has had in the forging of first-order cybernetics. Our account starts with Arturo Rosenblueth as a key intellectual figure in the foundation and formation of the field. After revisiting a historical context of people and places, we proceed to a cultural and media archeological investigation that helps us obtain new insights into the ongoing effort to intertwine the complex intellectual networks across different countries in Latin America, North (...) |
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The group of mathematicians known as Bourbaki persuasively proclaimed the isolation of its field of research – pure mathematics – from society and science. It may therefore seem paradoxical that links with larger French cultural movements, especially structuralism and potential literature, are easy to establish. Rather than arguing that the latter were a consequence of the former, which they were not, I show that all of these cultural movements, including the Bourbakist endeavor, emerged together, each strengthening the public appeal of (...) |
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This article tells the story of the oil and gas origins of the Gaia hypothesis, the theory that the Earth is a homeostatic system. It shows how Gaia’s key assumption—that the climate is a fundamentally stable system, able to withstand perturbations—emerged as a result of a collaboration between the theory’s progenitor, James Lovelock, and Royal Dutch Shell in response to Shell’s concerns about the effects of its products on the climate. The article explains how Lovelock elaborated the Gaia hypothesis and (...) |
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The first part of this essay relates a minimal and primordial concept of agency to be found in science and technology studies to an overall ontology of liveliness. The second part explores the relation between minimal and higher-level conceptions of agency concerning goal-orientedness and adaptation, and moves towards specifically biological concerns via a discussion of cybernetic machines. |
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Noise is a common experience in the contemporary world. Din from traffic, construction sites, factories, and neighbors bother urban residents. Radio listeners, television watchers, and mobile phone users have to endure statics and fading from time to time. Music lovers have debated whether jazz, atonal composition, rock and roll, rap, and abstract expressionism are art or nuisance. Scientists try to retrieve genuine signals from fluctuating data. Engineers design devices, software, or systems to filter out disturbance to the normal functioning of (...) |
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Randomness, uncertainty, and lack of regularity had concerned savants for a long time. As early as the seventeenth century, Blaise Pascal conceived the arithmetic of chance for gambling. At the height of positional astronomy, mathematicians developed a theory of errors to cope with random deviations in astronomical observations. In the nineteenth century, pioneers of statistics employed probabilistic calculus to define “normal” and “pathological” in the distribution of social characters, while physicists devised the statistical-mechanical interpretation of thermodynamic effects. By the end (...) |
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The information age can be dated to the work of Norbert Wiener and Claude Shannon in the 1940s. Their work on cybernetics and information theory, and many subsequent developments, had a profound influence on reshaping the field of psychology from what it was prior to the 1950s. Contemporaneously, advances also occurred in experimental design and inferential statistical testing stemming from the work of Ronald Fisher, Jerzy Neyman, and Egon Pearson. These interdisciplinary advances from outside of psychology provided the conceptual and (...) |
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. The origin and history of Landauer’s principle is traced through the development of the thermodynamics of computation at IBM from 1959 to 1982. This development was characterized by multiple conceptual shifts: memory came to be seen not as information storage, but as delayed information transmission; information itself was seen not as a disembodied logical entity, but as participating in the physical world; and logical irreversibility was connected with physical, thermodynamic, irreversibility. These conceptual shifts were characterized by an ambivalence opposing (...) |
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The promises of nanotechnology have been framed by a variety of metaphors, that not only channel the attention of the public, orient the questions asked by researchers, and convey epistemic choices closely linked to ethical preferences. In particular, the image of the ‘therapeutic missile’ commonly used to present targeted drug delivery devices emphasizes precision, control, surveillance and efficiency. Such values are highly praised in the current context of crisis of pharmaceutical innovation where military metaphors foster a general mobilization of resources (...) |
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Information security governance has become an elusive goal and a murky concept. This paper problematizes both information security governance and the broader concept of governance. What does it mean to govern information security, or for that matter, anything? Why have information technologies proven difficult to govern? And what assurances can governance provide for the billions of people who rely on information technologies every day? Drawing together several distinct bodies of literature—including multiple strands of governance theory, actor–network theory, and scholarship on (...) |
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It was no accident that the first neuroscience community, the Neurosciences Research Program (NRP), took shape in the 1960s at MIT, the birthplace of cybernetics. Francis O. Schmitt, known as the founding father of the NRP, was a famous biologist and an avid reader of cybernetics. Focusing on the intellectual and institutional context that Schmitt was situated in, this article unveils the way that the brain was conceptualized as a distinct object, requiring the launch of a new research community in (...) |
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: This paper discusses how Herbert Simon's initial interest in decision making became transformed into a focus on understanding human problem solving in response to the concrete conditions of the Cold War and the practical goals of the military. In particular, it suggests a connection between the seachange in Simon's interest and his shift in patronage. As a result, Simon is portrayed as a component of the scientific-military World War II cyborg that further evolved during the Cold War. Moving from (...) |
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This paper examines a specific appeal to philosophical anthropology—Andy Clark's—and the role it plays in shaping his account of our fundamental cyborg humanity." By focusing on the theme of embodiment, we also inquire into how phenomenology might benefit from Clark's account as well as how Clark's account might benefit from further engagement with phenomenology. Throughout, we explore inter- and intra-disciplinary questions that highlight the contribution the philosophy of technology can make to our understanding of embodiment and philosophical anthropology. |
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Although the term integration is central to the definition of brain death, there is little agreement on what it means. Through a genealogical analysis, this essay argues that there have been two primary ways of understanding integration in regard to organismal wholeness. One stems from neuroscience, focusing on the role of the brain in responding to external stimuli, which was taken up in phenomenological accounts of life. A second, arising out of cybernetics, focuses on the brain’s role in homeostasis. Recent (...) |
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Contemporary art is brimming with images of a future shaped by environmental destruction, technological innovation, and new forms of sociality. This article looks beyond the content of such images in order to examine the infrastructures that underpin them. Paying attention to two key infrastructures in particular—the Cold War faith in prediction and the extraordinary explosion of scenario planning in the years that followed—the article explores the ways in which speculation was transformed into a tightly defined field of expertise straddling military, (...) |
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The Second World War was a watershed in history in many ways. I focus on the World War II discontinuity as it relates to the intersection of scientific and military enterprise. I am interested in how we should conceptualize that intersection and in offering a preliminary tracing of the “World War II regime” that has grown out of it—a regime that includes new forms of scientific and military practice but that has invaded and transformed many other cultural spaces, including—my primary (...) |
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Starting in the 1950s, computer programs for simulating cognitive processes and intelligent behaviour were the hallmark of Good Old-Fashioned Artificial Intelligence and ‘cognitivist’ cognitive science. This article examines a somewhat neglected case of simulation pursued by one of the founding fathers of simulation methodology, Herbert A. Simon. In the 1970s and 1980s, Simon had repeated contacts with Marxist countries and scientists, in the context of which he advanced the idea that cognitivism could be used as a framework for simulating dialectical (...) |
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In the 1950s and 1960s, cyberneticians defined and utilized a concept previously described by electronic engineers: the black box. They were interested in how it might aid them, as both a metaphor and as a physical or mathematical model, in their analysis of complex human-machine systems. The black box evolved as they applied it in new ways, across a range of scientific fields, from an unnamed concept involving inputs and outputs, to digital representations of the human brain, to white boxes (...) |
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In 1947, the Cornell psychiatrist Keeve Brodman and a handful of colleagues began developing what would become one of the most widely used health questionnaires of its time—the Cornell Medical Index (CMI). A rigidly standardized form, the CMI presented 195 yes-no questions designed to capture the health status of “the total patient.” Over the following decades, Brodman’s project of standardizing medical history taking gradually evolved into a project of mathematizing and computerizing diagnosis: out of the CMI grew the Medical Data (...) |
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This article aims to draw a portrait of the influence of cybernetics on soft science. To this end, structuralism, post-structuralism and postmodern philosophy will be successively analyzed in a perspective based on importing concepts stemming from the cybernetic paradigm. By focusing more specifically on the American postwar context, we intend to remind the audience that many soft science specialists were involved in the elaboration of this ‘new science’. We will then retrace the influence of the cybernetic paradigm on structuralism. Starting (...) |
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Genes and messages have a long association in biology, dating back at least to Weismann. But, through most of this history, even with the dramatic concreteness that molecular biology lent to this association, the image dominating most thinking about messages was drawn from the nineteenth-century technology of the telegraph. In the mid-twentieth century, a new technology, the computer, arrived to displace the telegraph. With that displacement, the meanings of many terms—of “message,” “information,” “organization,” indeed, “organism” —have, over the past few (...) |
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This article examines central tensions in cybernetics, defined as the study of self-organization, communication, automated feedback in organisms, and other distributed informational networks, from its wartime beginnings to its contemporary adaptations. By examining aspects of both first- and second-order cybernetics, the article introduces an epistemological standpoint that highlights the tension between its definition as a theory of recursion and a theory of control, prediction, and actionability. I begin by examining the historical outcomes of the Macy Conferences to provide a context (...) |
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During the first two decades of the Cold War, a new kind of academic figure became prominent in American public life: the credentialed social scientist or expert in the sciences of administration who was also, to use the parlance of the time, a “man of affairs.” Some were academic high-fliers conscripted into government roles in which their intellectual and organizational talents could be exploited. McGeorge Bundy, Walt Rostow, and Robert McNamara are the archetypes of such persons. An overlapping group of (...) |
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"The term 'model' has become fashionable". What Mary Hesse characterized in the mid-1960s as a trend in logic, mathematics, and the natural sciences, applies today in general for a broad spectrum of disciplines. Today models appear to be of "extraordinary importance" compared to the first half of the twentieth century, when models were neither mentioned nor contemplated, either generally in scientific publications or specifically in the philosophy of science. It is even assumed that models are "the key to science" and (...) |
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ABSTRACT This essay argues that a new way of understanding science and nature emerged and flourished in the human sciences in America between roughly 1920 and 1970. This new outlook was characterized by the prefiguration of all subjects of study as systems defined by their structures, not their components. Further, the essay argues that the rise of this new outlook was closely linked to the Organizational Revolution in American society, which provided new sets of problems, new patrons, and new control (...) |
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This article traces the relationship between neoliberal thought and neural networks through the work of Friedrich Hayek, Donald O. Hebb, and Frank Rosenblatt. For all three, networked systems could accomplish acts of evolution, change, and learning impossible for individual neurons or subjects—minds, machines, and economies could therefore all autonomously evolve and adapt without government. These three figures, I argue, were also symptoms of a broader reconceptualization of reason, decision making, and “freedom” in relation to the state and technology that occurred (...) |
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Cybernetics saturates the humanities. Norbert Wiener’s movement gave vocabulary and hardware to developments all across the early digital era, and still does so today to those who seek to interpret it. Even while the Macy Conferences were still taking place in the early 1950s, talk of feedback and information and pattern had spread to popular culture – and to Europe. The new science created a shared language and culture for surpassing political and intellectual ideas that could be relegated to a (...) |
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This article situates the emergence of cybernetic concepts in postwar French thought within a longer history of struggles surrounding the technocratic reform of French universities, including Marcel Mauss’s failed efforts to establish a large-scale centre for social-scientific research with support from the Rockefeller Foundation, the intellectual and administrative endeavours of Claude Lévi-Strauss during the 1940s and 1950s, and the rise of communications research in connection with the Centre d’Études des Communications de Masse (CECMAS). Although semioticians and poststructuralists used cybernetic discourse (...) |
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ArgumentFor more than thirty years after World War II, the unconventional economist Kenneth E. Boulding was a fervent advocate of the integration of the social sciences. Building on common general principles from various fields, notably economics, political science, and sociology, Boulding claimed that an integrated social science in which mental images were recognized as the main determinant of human behavior would allow for a better understanding of society. Boulding's approach culminated in the social triangle, a view of society as comprised (...) |
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Cyberpunk fiction has been called “the supreme literary expression, if not of postmodernism then of late capitalism itself.” This thesis aims to analyse and question this claim by rethinking cyberpunk Action, postmodernism and late capitalism in terms of three - interlocking - themes: cybernetics, the Gothic and fiction. It claims that while what has been called “postmodernism” has been preoccupied with cybernetic themes, cybernetics has been haunted by the Gothic. The Gothic has always enjoyed a peculiarly intimate relation with the (...) |
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