Cybernetics and Social Science

Abstract

r NHE NAME of cybernetics is familiar to most sociologists, but the content of the new subject if it has any and its relevance to the , social scientist if such relevance exists are not widely known. It is the purpose of this paper to exhibit, if possible, something of this content and of that relevance as compactly and with as little mathematics as possible. This task should not be necessary, for Professor Norbert Wiener who named the subject has written a popular book on it which tries also to display its social consequences.l This, however, is not altogether successful, for many people find the exposition still obscure, and Professor Wiener is a better mathematician than sociologist. There are three questions which the sociologist will ask: What is cybernetics ? What is its relevance to the sciences of man ? And, whence has this new development in scientific thought come ? A short answer can be given to the first question, but any fuller exposition must be marshalled in a different order, first of origin and content, and then in Part II in the discussion of relevance. Here is the short statement which will be examined, expanded, and its implications traced in what follows: Cybernetics is the analytic study of the isomorphisms2 of communication structure in mechanisms, organisms and societies. Definitions are never very helpful so we will turn first to the origins of the subject in the history of science. This is appropriate; the development of science as a social enterprise is a function of the growth of certain new kinds of communication and their formalization into patterns of behaviour, that is, tnto social institutions,8 the legitimate central objects of sociological inorestigation . The immediate origin of cybernetics ss to be found in the development of calculating machines, of guided missiles, and of the anatomy and physiology

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