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Cybernetics for the Social Sciences
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Bernard Scott has met a long-felt need by authoring a book that shows the relevance of cybernetics for the social sciences (including psychology, sociology, and anthropology). Scott provides user-friendly descriptions of the core concepts of cybernetics, with examples of how they can be used in the social sciences. He explains how cybernetics functions as a transdiscipline that unifies other disciplines and a metadiscipline that provides insights about how other disciplines function. He provides an account of how cybernetics emerged as a distinct field, following interdisciplinary meetings in the 1940s, convened to explore feedback and circular causality in biological and social systems. He also recounts how encountering cybernetics transformed his thinking and his understanding of life in general.
Bernard Scott, Ph.D. (1976), Brunel University, retired from Cranfield University as Reader in Cybernetics in 2010. He now works as an independent scholar. He has many publications to his credit, including
Explorations in Second Order Cybernetics (echoraum, 2011).
Cybernetics for the Social Sciences
Bernard Scott
Abstract
Keywords
Prolegomena
Part 1 About This Publication and a First Look at Cybernetics Part 2 A Life in Cybernetics
Part 3 The Story of Cybernetics
Part 4 Some Key Concepts of Cybernetics
Part 5 On Messages
Part 6 Cybernetics and the Integration of the Disciplines
Part 7 In Defence of Pure Cybernetics
Part 8 Socioybernetic Understandings of Consciousness
Part 9 Reflections on the Sociocybernetics of Social Networks
Part 10 Some Sociocybernetic Understanding of Possible World Futures
Part 11 Sociocybernetic Understandings of Culture
Part 12 Summing up and What Comes Next
Acknowledgements
References
All social scientists wishing to understand how cybernetics is relevant for their disciplines, including professionals, post-graduate and undergraduate students, and educated laymen, and cyberneticians interested in its explanation and applications.