Article ID: CBB064725087

How Disunity Matters to the History of Cybernetics in the Human Sciences in the United States, 1940–80 (2020)

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Rather than assume a unitary cybernetics, I ask how its disunity mattered to the history of the human sciences in the United States from about 1940 to 1980. I compare the work of four prominent social scientists – Herbert Simon, George Miller, Karl Deutsch, and Talcott Parsons – who created cybernetic models in psychology, economics, political science, and sociology with the work of anthropologist Gregory Bateson, and relate their interpretations of cybernetics to those of such well-known cyberneticians as Norbert Wiener, Warren McCulloch, W. Ross Ashby, and Heinz von Foerster. I argue that viewing cybernetics through the lens of disunity – asking what was at stake in choosing a specific cybernetic model – shows the complexity of the relationship between first-order cybernetics and the postwar human sciences, and helps us rethink the history of second-order cybernetics.

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Article Stefanos Geroulanos; Leif Weatherby (2020) Cybernetics and the Human Sciences. History of the Human Sciences (pp. 3-11). unapi

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Authors & Contributors
Weatherby, Leif
Boldyrev, Ivan
Olessia Kirtchik
Bjørn Thomassen
Keith, Doga Sonmez
Dost-Gozkan, Ayfer
Concepts
Cybernetics
Human sciences
Discipline formation
Psychology
Social sciences
Computer science
Time Periods
20th century
21st century
20th century, late
19th century
Places
United States
Great Britain
France
Soviet Union
Turkey
Ottoman Empire
Institutions
Rockefeller Foundation
Harvard University
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