(1) The science of
communication and
control in animal and machine. (2) Perhaps because the field is still young, there are many definitions of cybernetics. Norbert Wiener, a mathematician, engineer and social philosopher, coined the word "cybernetics" from the Greek word meaning steersman. He defined it as the science of communication and control in the animal and the machine. Ampere, before, him, wanted cybernetics to be the science of government. For philosopher Warren McCulloch, cybernetics was an experimental epistemology concerned with the communication within an observer and between the observer and his environment. Stafford Beer, a management consultant, defined cybernetics as the science of effective organization. Anthropologist Gregory Bateson noted that whereas previous sciences dealt with matter and energy, the new science of cybernetics focuses on form and pattern. (3) A way of looking at things and a
language for expressing what one sees (Margaret Mead)
The term derives from the Greek word for steersman. Initially, the science of
control and
communication in the animal and the machine (Wiener). Before this modern definition, the science of
government (Ampere). Now an interdisciplinary approach to
organization, irrespective of a
system 's material
realization. Whereas
general systems theory is committed to
holism on the one side and to an effort to generalize STRUCTURal,
BEHAVIORal and
development al features of living organisms on the other side, cybernetics is committed to an epistemological perspective that views material
wholes as analysable without loss, in terms of a set of components plus their organization (
see epistemology, analysis ,
system ). Organization accounts for how the components of such a system interact with one another, and how this interaction determines and changes its structure. It explains the difference between parts and wholes and is described without reference to their material forms. The disinterest of cybernetics in material implications separates it from all sciences that designate their empirical domain by subject matters such as physics, biology, sociology, engineering and general systems theory. Its epistemological focus on organization, pattern and communication has generated methodologies, (
see methodology ) a logic,
law s, theories and insights that are unique to cybernetics and have wide-ranging implications in other fields of inquiry. In cybernetics, theories tend to rest on four basic pillars:
variety, circularity, process and observation. Variety is fundamental to its
information, communication and
control theories and emphasises multiplicity, alternatives, differences, choices,
networks, and
intelligence rather than force and singular necessity.
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