Discussion and Reviews

Abstract

The interdisciplinary symposium on behavioral theory has become within the last decade a common occurrence in American academic life. The pattern was set largely by the well-known Conferences on Cybernetics sponsored by the Macy Foundation. Indeed, what is known today as “Behavioral Science” stems from the cooperative effort of workers who constitute the usual cast of characters of similar conferences: representatives from psychology, the social sciences, biology, communication engineering, and mathematics. The following are reviews of three such conferences. Two of them, “Problems in Human Communication and Control” and “Information Theory in Psychology,” revolve largely about the same focal point of interest, namely information theory and its relation to behavior, particularly to problems of communication and control. The third, “Toward a Unified Theory of Human Behavior”, is broader in scope, in that the approaches to behavior characteristic of psychiatry, anthropology, and the social sciences (in which the conceptualizations usually differ largely from those of quantified science) are equally emphasized. The levels of discourse of the published material, on which these reviews are based, are also different. The National Science Foundation Conference is a single conference of a few days' duration and is presented as a transcript of a recording with only enough editing to smooth out the inevitable roughness of very lively oral exchange of views. The material of the Illinois conference (also a single conference) is published as a collection of formal papers interspersed with running comment by the editor. “Toward a Unified Theory of Human Behavior,” representing four conferences held over two years, is a rather thoroughly edited account in which the contributions have been organized around more or less formal oral presentations followed by discussion. It is reviewed with interspersed critical evaluations by a representative of another group which over a prolonged time has wrestled with related problems and who consequently sympathetically recognizes at once the difficulties and the potential contributions of such interactions. In reviewing the two conferences on information theory and allied topics, we have concentrated our own editorial comments in the following remarks.

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