Open AccessBook
Constructing a Social Science for Postwar America: The Cybernetics Group, 1946-1953
TLDR
In this article, the Macy Foundation conferences were designed to forge connections between wartime science and post-war social science, and a richly detailed account explores the dialogues that emerged among a remarkable group that included Wiener, von Neumann, Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, Warren McCulloch, Kurt Lewin, Molly Harrower and Lawrence Kubie.Abstract:
In this sequel to his double biography of John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener, Steve Heims recounts another story in 20th-century intellectual history - a series of encounters that captured a moment of transformation in the human sciences. Focusing on the Macy Foundation conferences, which were designed to forge connections between wartime science and post-war social science, Heims's richly detailed account explores the dialogues that emerged among a remarkable group that included Wiener, von Neumann, Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, Warren McCulloch, Kurt Lewin, Molly Harrower, and Lawrence Kubie. Heims shows how those dialogues shaped ideas in psychology, sociology, anthropology and psychiatry.read more
Citations
More filters
Book ChapterDOI
Cybernetics and Second-Order Cybernetics
Francis Heylighen,Cliff Joslyn +1 more
TL;DR: This chapter discusses the development of cybernetics in the 21st Century through the lens of human evolution, as well as specific cases such as self-organization, learning and model- building.
Causal architecture, complexity and self-organization in time series and cellular automata
TL;DR: This work develops computational mechanics for four increasingly sophisticated types of process—memoryless transducers, time series, transducers with memory, and cellular automata, and proves the optimality and uniqueness of the e-machine's representation of the causal architecture, and gives reliable algorithms for pattern discovery.
Book
The Modern Invention of Information: Discourse, History, and Power
TL;DR: Analyzing texts in Europe and the United States, Ronald E. Day's critical reading method goes beyond traditional historiographical readings of communication and information by engaging specific historical texts in terms of their attempts to construct and reshape history.
Book
Realising Systems Thinking: Knowledge And Action In Management Science (Contemporary Systems Thinking)
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors deal with the contribution of a systems approach to a range of disciplines from philosophy and biology to social theory and management, and weaves together material from some of the pre-eminent thinkers of the day.
Book
Systems Thinkers
Magnus Ramage,Karen Shipp +1 more
TL;DR: A significant aim of the book is to broaden and deepen the readers interest in systems writers, providing an appetising taster for each of the 30 thinkers, so that the reader is encouraged to go on to study the published works of the thinkers themselves.
References
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
The specificity of the scientific field and the social conditions of the progress of reason
TL;DR: The sociology of science rests on the postulate that the objective truth of the product even in the case of that very particular product, scientific truth lies in a particular type of social conditions of production, or, more precisely, in a determinate state of the structure and functioning of the scientific field as discussed by the authors.
Book
Contemporary Sociological Theory: Expanding the Classical Tradition
Ruth A. Wallace,Alison Wolf +1 more
TL;DR: In this article, Hochschild and Collins present a survey of the body-theoretic foundations of social theory and its application in modernism and post-modernism, including the theory of rational choice, social exchange, and individual behavior.