Introduction

Beginning in the 1940s, the work of several groups of scientists began to coalesce around a set of ideas which represented a departure from standard scientific thought at the time (this departure from classical science continues today). Foremost on the list of these ideas is the role that feedback plays in the performance of any system. Scientists began to identify and account for the presence of positive (or amplifying) and negative (or compensating) feedback loops. Feedback plays an important role in any system which is not completely reductionist. In other words, if there is any interaction among the parts of a system, then a holistic perspective will increase the understanding and possible prediction of the system effects. Fisher (1935) was, perhaps, the first to offer a comprehensive treatise on this subject.

Other changes in thinking that were taking place at the time included the notions of causality and observation. Nearly all work until that time had assumed linearly causal relationships among phenomena. Researchers began noticing the preponderance of situations in which circularly or mutually causal explanations seemed to be more fruitful. They also had resurrected Aristotle's distinction between efficient cause and final cause. A final change mentioned here is from objective observation, which seemed fairly clear-cut in sciences dealing with inanimate objects, to other forms of observation which included aspects of subjectivity. Mitroff and Blankenship (1973) explore the differences in scientific method when the observer is part of the phenomena being observed. Dent and Umpleby (forthcoming) address these and other underlying assumptions in the various strands of research groups devoted to systems thinking.

This paper presents a history of science pertaining to several different conceptions of systems theory and cybernetics. Although several research groups worked using the ideas above, they did so in relative isolation from one another with different emphases. This paper will discuss the books and people, conferences and institutes, and politics and technology that have influenced the systems theory movement. Several schools of thought within systems science are described. Three viewpoints within the heading of cybernetics are discussed. The schools of thought discussed are general systems theory, the systems approach, operations research or systems analysis, system dynamics, learning organizations, and total quality management. Total quality management is a new addition to the list, but appropriate in many ways. This paper will not address artificial intelligence, complexity theory, family therapy, or other traditions.

These different approaches arose during and after World War II. The people who created each school of thought were working largely independently, although many of them knew each other. They came from different disciplines, they were working on different problems, they formulated different variations of the principles of systems and cybernetics, and they often chose to affiliate with different academic societies.

The authors find that students talking about systems theory and cybernetics think of it as one field. To some people, the term "systems thinking and cybernetics" means the work of Talcott Parsons (1951); to others, Katz and Kahn (1966) and Cleland and King (1968, 1972); to still others, Ashby (1960), McCulloch (1961) , and von Foerster . To date, the systems theory and cybernetics literature is highly differentiated. Perhaps for the next generation of researchers there will be a convergence of these ideas.

General Systems Theory

General systems theory was largely developed by the researchers at the University of Michigan connected with the Mental Health Research Institute (MHRI) where the Society for General Systems Research (SGSR) was based. MHRI may seem a peculiar place to find systems theory. However, at that time in the 1950's, there was money available for mental health research and their justification was that if people could learn to think comprehensively about their interactions with each other and the environment, then their mental health will improve. The Director of the Institute, James G. Miller, a psychologist and medical doctor, wrote a large book, Living Systems, which is a discussion of matter energy and information processes. Miller saw systems as having 19 critical subsystems at each level - the cell, the organ, the organism, the group, corporation, nation, and supernational organization. One distinguishing feature of Miller's work is his treatment of information. He regards information as something that goes into the mind, is processed, and then goes out. The notion is similar to a train pulling into a station and the cars being shifted around and then another train leaving the station.

Anatol Rapoport⁽¹⁾ of MHRI was the editor of the yearbook "General Systems." He is a well-known game theorist who published Fights, Games, and Debates in 1960. Also at MHRI was Kenneth Boulding, a well-known economist and widely-read author. Boulding used an ecological system model for understanding corporations and individuals as actors within a social system. His 1956 book, The Image is a very early discussion about mental models. His 1978 book, Ecodynamics: A New Theory of Societal Evolution is a good summary of his work.

Another MHRI colleague was John Platt, a physicist who wrote a number of essays on science policy including "What Is To Be Done" (1969). He also developed the concept of the step-to-man, an idea based on the envelope curve of technologies that can be constructed as a technique used in technological forecasting. A characteristic curve exists in many areas, particularly transportation, communications, and other capabilities. These curves depict increasing capabilities which reach a physical limit. Platt claims that these curves and thresholds comprise the "step-to-man" - a dramatic increase in human capabilities. Another person at MHRI was a chemist named Richard L. Meier who wrote Science and Economic Development (1956) and A Communication Theory of Urban Growth (1962). He developed ideas such as "wealth-producing cities." He was doing studies of the "Asian tiger" nations at the time when they first received that name.

One person who is widely associated with general systems theory but who was not at MHRI was Ludwig Von Bertalanffy, whose most important work in the field was entitled, General System Theory. Margaret Mead was also involved with these scientists and Richard Ericson identifies primarily with this group. The work of Walter Cannon was yet another influence at MHRI. Skip Porter, Len Troncalle, and Terry Oliva represent the next generation of systems theorists who were heavily influenced by the work at MHRI.

The Systems Approach

A group that was somewhat connected with general systems theory is usually associated with the term, the systems approach. They were located originally at the University of Pennsylvania. Then they went to the Case Western Reserve University and then back to the University of Pennsylvania. Their chief philosopher was E. A. Singer, Jr. One of Singer's students was C. West Churchman, and Churchman's first student was Russell Ackoff. Churchman remained primarily a philosopher, but Ackoff clearly went in the direction of management consulting. They initiated the field of operations research. Churchman, Ackoff, and Arnoff (1957) wrote the first textbook in the field, Introduction to Operations Research but they use the term "operations research" differently than the group discussed below. For Churchman and Ackoff, operations research was an effort to make organizations more effective. Most of the people who went into the field of operations research practiced it as applied mathematics, but Churchman and Ackoff retained an orientation toward organizations.

Singer suggested that a producer-product relationship exists when X is necessary, but not sufficient to cause Y. Consider the example of an acorn and an oak tree. An acorn is necessary to cause an oak tree, but if it is not placed in a suitable environment, the acorn will not grow into an oak. In producer-product relationships, the producer alone cannot be the cause of the product. There are always other necessary conditions. In the case of the acorn, the necessary conditions are sunlight, soil, water, and other environmental conditions. From the view of producer-product relationships, the environment becomes central to understanding and explanation.

Ackoff (1981) notes that "the use of the producer-product relationship requires the environment to explain everything whereas use of cause-effect requires the environment to explain nothing. Science based on the producer-product relationship is environment-full, not environment-free" (p. 21). Consequently, by definition, any principle offered about producer-product relationships must stipulate the conditions under which the principle applies. If the principle were to apply in all conditions, then the environmental conditions are not co-producers of the effect.

Churchman and Ackoff started off as philosophers, but they found that philosophers were less interested in their work than practicing managers. Ackoff, in particular, developed a variety of methods for use in organizations. From building mathematical models he moved toward the design of conversations, particularly how one can hold a conversation among a group of people on the future direction of an organization. He refers to his method for doing so as "interactive planning," which is described in Ackoff's 1981 and 1984 books, Creating a Corporate Future and A Guide to Controlling Your Corporation's Future.

Ackoff also developed the circular organization concept. This structure is a democratic hierarchy with three essential characteristics:

(1) the absence of an ultimate authority, the circularity of power; (2) the ability of each member to participate directly or through representation in all decisions that affect him or her directly; and (3) the ability of members, individually or collectively, to make and implement decisions that affect no one other than the decision maker or decision-makers. (Ackoff, 1994, p. 117).

The structure is circular because anyone who has authority over others is subject to the collective authority of the others. Ackoff implements the circular organization by having each manager have a board of directors. This board consists of at least the manager's manager, the manager, and all of the manager's subordinates. Each member of the board has a vote, so one can easily see that the subordinates hold a majority of the votes.

Ackoff's (1994) most recent book is entitled, The Democratic Corporation: A Radical Prescription for Recreating Corporate America and Rediscovering Success. The titles of these books offer clear evidence of Ackoff's orientation toward organizations. Together with Fred Emery, Ackoff (1972) wrote On Purposeful Systems. Churchman also wrote a widely-known books, The Systems Approach (1968) and The Design of Inquiring Systems (1971). Recent contributors to this strand of systems thinking include Ian Mitroff, Peter Checkland, Robert Flood, Michael Jackson and Ali Geranmayeh.

Operations Research

The British introduced the Americans to operations research during World War II. For 100 years or more, the British had been operating a global empire, so they had to move people and material all over the world. To manage a global empire they had to have the right number of people, guns, tents, food, and ammunition in each of their various colonies. Hence, they had developed a variety of methods to optimize the allocation of resources and to improve logistics. They also developed methods which we now call covert operations, which are ways of creating divisions within the opposing group or of playing off one tribe against another. If two tribes are "encouraged" to fight among themselves, they won't produce a united front. Consequently, the British had developed ways of making their own systems work while making sure that the opponent's systems did not work. In World War II, the Americans learned both operations research and covert operations from the British.

During World War II, one of the most famous problems in operations research was the design of the optimal size of a convoy to cross the North Atlantic. A very large convoy meant that a small number of destroyers could protect a large number of freighters. However, the convoy would be moving only as fast as the slowest ship. And, if you divided up the convoy into smaller pieces, they might be better able to elude the German submarines. It was a problem of optimization, how large a convey should be.

After World War II, the people who were doing this kind of work began to apply these methods inside business organizations. For example, the "whiz kids," including Robert McNamara, took over management of Ford Motor Corporation in the 1950s.

During the "cold war", the military relied heavily upon a number of think tanks such as the RAND Corporation (for the Air Force) and Research Analysis Corporation or RAC (for the Army). These operations had a number of successes. One of the famous studies that RAND did was on the location of strategic bases. The geopolitical doctrine during the Eisenhower administration was the strategy of "containing" the Soviet Union. The Air Force had the idea of ringing the Soviet Union with air bases. If the Soviets stepped across their border, the policy dictated massive retaliation by aircraft from all of these bases against the Soviet Union. The Air Force went to RAND and asked them for advice about where to put the bases. RAND recommended against bases ringing the Soviet Union because if the Soviet Union decided to attack, they would not have very far to go to reach an American target. By having several bases near the Soviet Union, the United States was increasing the probability of another Pearl Harbor fiasco. RAND instead recommended keeping the airplanes in the United States and setting up a DEW line or distant early warning line across Canada so that if the Soviet Union decided to attack, the Americans could see them coming and have time to get the airplanes in the air.

System Dynamics

Another tradition of system theory, known as system dynamics, originated at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. MIT's leading system theorist was Jay Forrester, a remarkable engineer who invented the magnetic core memory for computers. He also built the Whirlwind computer, which is now in the Smithsonian Institution. The Whirlwind computer had a remarkable string of "firsts." It had the first magnetic core memory, the first keyboard entry, the first light pen entry (which is rather similar to a mouse), and the first multi-tasking (for example, the computer could both print and calculate at the same time). After these successes with hardware, Forrester invented the "dynamo" language, which is a computer software program for dealing with large, complex systems. His first set of applications of dynamo were published under the title Industrial Dynamics.

Forrester was interested in explaining the origin of business cycles. Business cycles can disrupt organizational functioning tremendously. The fluctuation in inventory levels and number of employees is a difficult business problem. Forrester showed that a random perturbation such as the Christmas buying season can set off cycles and fluctuations simply due to the lag in information that occurs as the orders go back from the retail stores to the wholesalers to the manufacturing plants. This chain reaction can generate a business cycle. Armed with this knowledge, a business could do a better job of smoothing out manufacturing and inventory systems.

In the late 1950s or early 1960s, At one time, the former mayor of Boston, Kevin White, was a visiting scholar at MIT and he had an office near Forrester. White and Forrester were talking about the problems of managing a city, and White described the problem of Boston in the following way. If you are a democratic mayor, as White was, then you have an obligation to develop programs for those who are less fortunate. Of course you have to pay for these programs, so you raise taxes. The result is that poor people move into the city to take advantage of the programs and rich people move out to get away from the high taxes. Before long the central business district becomes impoverished. This phenomenon occurred in cities across the country. This analysis was described in the book, Urban Dynamics. The book's implicit recommendation was that prosperity could be restored by cutting services to the poor and providing tax breaks for the rich. Then the rich would move in, the poor would move out, and the city would prosper. This idea did not go over well among liberal academics, particularly, political scientists and sociologists, on college campuses. It was highly controversial and many books and articles were written on the idea. But at least it presented the problem in a very clear fashion, so that it could be discussed and debated.

The next study that Forrester did was entitled World Dynamics. This work materialized because of a contact with an Italian industrialist name Arellio Pecci, who was concerned about the future of humankind. Pecci served on several corporate boards of directors. Pecci tried to convince his fellow board members of the importance of trends in population, natural resources, and pollution. But the other members of the boards of directors would say, "Yes Arellio, but we have to be concerned with profits in the current quarter." When Pecci would talk to his colleagues in politics about population, natural resources and pollution, they would say, "Yes, Arellio, that is very important, but we are concerned about the next election." When Pecci raised the problem with academics, they would say, "Yes Arellio, that is right, but you see I am a specialist and this is an interdisciplinary problem."

Pecci decided that he would have to take his message to the general public and have them rise up and demand that their leaders pay attention to these global problems. He wondered how to present the message. He thought, well, in Biblical times, one would claim to have heard a voice booming out of the clouds saying "repent ye sinners for the end is near." But, that would not work in a secular society. So, he thought, suppose a computer said it? If a powerful" computer "said" it, people might take notice. That was the route they took. Pecci called together people from government, business, and academia, including Jay Forrester. On the way home from the meeting, Forrester wrote the draft of a computer model on world dynamics. It was a path-breaking program because up to that time many people had studied population resources and pollution, but they had always studied them in isolation. They had made independent projections, but no one had put them all together in an integrated model to show how these various factors were interrelated. Forrester developed an integrated model called World II, which was published in a book called World Dynamics.

This work, however, did not attract the attention that Pecci intended. To draw increased attention, some of Forrester's students, including Dennis and Donella Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and others received a grant from the Volkswagen Foundation to do a more comprehensive model called World III. When the results of that model were released, they marketed it extensively. In addition to the computer model, they created a short layperson's overview titled The Limits To Growth and translated it into several languages. They also had a press conference on Capitol Hill. All of this created quite a stir in 1972. As a result, modeling activities sprang up in countries around the world. Every time one of these countries - Japan, Argentina, Britain - came out with a new study attempting to refute The Limits To Growth, they would present the results at an institute in Austria called the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis. After 10 years of these meetings, in 1982 Donella Meadows, John Richardson, and Gerhart Bruckmann published a book called Groping in the Dark. The book title is a reference to the well-known joke about the drunk who is looking for his keys under a lamp post even though he dropped them some distance away where it is dark. Meadows was goading academics, who have a tendency to study problems that are illuminated by their academic discipline, even though those problems do not reflect the most significant problems in the world around them. Next, Meadows, Meadows, and Randers came out with a book in 1992 called Beyond The Limits. The trilogy of titles is intended to communicate that in 1972 the authors had pointed to limits to growth on a finite planet. By 1992, they claimed that the world had already gone beyond the limits of the carrying capacity of the planet and that a collapse to a sustainable level of population and production would occur. This paper's first author went to the press conference where the authors spoke about their 1992 book. It was a much smaller gathering with many fewer representatives of the press than the 1972 press conference. It did not generate nearly the publicity that occurred in 1972. Still, the researchers contend that they will keep trying to get their message heard. They speculate that it may take another 20 years for these problems to get the attention they deserve.

Forrester then worked on the problem of economic dynamics and did studies of economic long waves. Now this group is working very heavily on introducing systems thinking at the grade school and high school levels. They have also developed a number of software packages to make this kind of modeling easier and more accessible to a large number of people. Some of the other people working in this area today are John Morecroft, George Richardson, Peter Senge, and John Sterman.

Organizational Learning

Another group at MIT and Harvard University developed the notion of organizational learning. Chris Argyris and Donald Schon⁽²⁾ were the key figures in this group. Argyris was a student of Kurt Lewin, who was a participant in the Macy Foundation meetings that were chaired by Warren McCulloch (discussed below). Argyris has referred to Ashby's influence on his notion of double loop learning (1974, pp. 18-19). Donald Schon was a frequent collaborator with Argyris. Together they wrote Theory in Practice (1974) and Organizational Learning II: Theory, Method, and Practice (1996). Schon also wrote Educating the Reflective Practitioner (1987).

A key contribution of this group is the distinction between what they refer to as Model I and Model II. Each model describes a set of values and theories-in-use by people. Model I is the prevailing theory-in-use and consists of the following values: define goals and try to achieve them, maximize winning and minimize losing, minimize generating or expressing negative feelings, and be rational. Model I behaviors are self-reinforcing and self-sealing because they place people in double binds and because a feature of Model I is making actions that are threatening or potentially embarrassing undiscussable. Argyris and Schön maintain that Model II is a more productive theory for organizations to use because it leads to double loop learning. Important values in Model II are: valid information; free and informed choice; and internal commitment to the choice and constant monitoring of its implementation. Model II action strategies include: "design situations where participants can be origins of action and experience high personal causation, [the] task is jointly controlled, protection of self is a joint enterprise and oriented toward growth, and bilateral protection of others" (p. 118).

The most successful of this group in terms of books published is Peter Senge, who was a student of both Argyris and Jay Forrester. His book, The Fifth Discipline, has gone through more than 20 printings. The Fifth Discipline Field Book is the follow-up book. This group consists of academics, but they have extensive management consulting experience working with corporations and government agencies. In addition to Senge, the next generation of contributors to organizational learning include Robert Putnam, Diana McLain Smith, and Nancy Dixon.

Total Quality Management

Another field, which comes not out of an academic setting, is the field of total quality management or continuous quality improvement. One of the key figures (others include Joseph Juran and Phillip) in total quality management is W. Edwards Deming (1960, 1986, 1993), who has a very interesting personal history. He was born in 1900 and was at the Hawthorne Works of the Western Electric Corporation at the time that Elton Mayo did the very important studies about human behavior. Mayo reported that no matter what work parameters were changed in a group of people, their performance improved. He also pointed out that workers respond more to their peers than to management. Deming was there at the time, but he did not work on that Hawthorne study. He was collaborating with Walter Shewhart (1939), who was a statistician working on quality control methods. The methods of statistical quality control came out of an industrial setting. Deming also did some work at New York University. When Deming was "discovered" in the 1980s in the United States, he was teaching for George Washington University, not in the School of Management, but in the Continuing Engineering Education Program of the School of Engineering. Since then, Deming's long history of consulting with Japanese organizations has been well documented (Walton, 1986) and resulted in the Japanese naming its most prestigious industrial award after Deming.

By 1980, the Americans were in a near panic. In several major industries, the Japanese were selling products in the United States for less than the American companies could produce them. American manufacturers were building plants in other countries, sending jobs overseas, and quite a number of CEOs believed that competing with the Japanese was the road to bankruptcy. It was at that time that NBC aired a special television report called "If Japan Can, Why Can't We?" They interviewed people about why it is that Americans could not compete with Japan. The program explored several reasons why the Americans were not competitive including: low labor costs in Japan, conflict between government and industry in the United States (i.e. burdensome government regulation), conflict between labor and management in the United States, and Japanese culture. However, whenever they asked the Japanese why they were so productive, they would say that they learned how to produce quality products from the Americans and they pointed specifically to Edwards Deming. When the people who did the program asked Americans who Edwards Deming was, they did not know, even though he was treated like a god in Japan. At the time, he was virtually unknown in the United States.

When the NBC report aired, Deming was teaching short courses for 14 to 15 engineers. However, after the program, he was besieged by calls from corporations across the country asking for Deming to "come and save us." So he began teaching the same classes to groups of 400 to 500 CEOs and senior managers. American corporations began to listen to Deming and the United States established a similar prize for corporate excellence called the Malcolm Baldrige Award, named after a former Secretary of Commerce under Reagan.

This area of work is important for the field of systems theory and cybernetics because it is very easy to describe the principles of total quality management from the point of view of systems theory and cybernetics. There is an emphasis on increasing the autonomy of workers, of reducing hierarchical relationships, increasing feedback throughout the production process, having good relationships with customers and suppliers, and not playing people off against one another, to name a few. These methods have proven to be quite effective and are increasingly adopted in corporations and government. Interestingly, the lag between the creation of the Deming Prize and the Baldrige Award is 35 years, from 1950 to 1985. Current leaders in this field are primarily consultants and authors, not academics. They include Brian Joiner, William Scherkenback, and A. Blanton Godfrey.

Cybernetics

STUART TO ADD IEEE, Artificial Intelligence, ASC is McCulloch - Europe and US.

The final conception of systems thinking and cybernetics discussed in this paper is cybernetics. Within cybernetics, we will distinguish three traditions, which will be referred to as "Wiener's Cybernetics," "Turing's Cybernetics," and "McCulloch's Cybernetics." Each of these sub-divisions dates to the 1940s. In 1943, Rosenblueth, Wiener, and Bigelow published "Behavior, Purpose and Teleology" and McCulloch and Pitts published "A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Imminent in Nervous Activity." In 1950 Turing published "Computing Machinery and Intelligence." Other important cybernetic publications in the 1940s include Wiener's (1948) Cybernetics: Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, Shannon's (1949) The Mathematical Theory of Communication, and Von Neumann and Morgenstern's (1944) Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. Cyberneticians refer to predecessors such as Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Ronald Fisher. The generation after the 1940s included the scholars Heinz von Foerster, Ross Ashby, Gordon Pask, Humberto Maturana, and Stafford Beer. The following generation includes Crayton Walker, Klaus Krippendorff, Roger Conant, Stuart Umpleby, Ranulph Glanville, Michael Ben-Eli, Paul Pangaro, Barry Clemson, Francisco Varela, and Fernando Flores.

A series of conferences were instrumental to all sub-divisions of cybernetics. The Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, of the Macy department store family, funded the Macy Foundation Conferences, which were chaired by Warren McCulloch. Heinz von Foerster was the recording secretary for the last five of ten conferences, and because he did not know English well, Margaret Mead assisted him with the proceedings. The ten Macy Conferences were held between 1944 and 1954. The conferences were attended by researchers including Ashby, von Neumann, Bateson, Mead, von Foerster, Wiener, McCulloch, and Bigelow. About 1960 there were three conferences on self-organizing systems sponsored by the Office of Naval Research. The American Society for Cybernetics was founded in 1964 and held its first meeting in 1967.

Wiener's Cybernetics

During World War II, Rosenblueth and Wiener were engaged in designing radar-guided anti-aircraft guns. In the literature this problem is often described as the duck-hunter problem. Before there were general purpose electronic computers, Rosenblueth and Wiener set out to design a machine that would sense its environment - a behavior customarily performed by human beings and social organizations. Rosenblueth, a biologist, and Wiener, an applied mathematician, realized that they were dealing with a teleological phenomenon. Teleology is the philosophical study of natural processes that are caused not by events in the immediate past but rather by events in the future. This sort of thinking was out of favor with a scientific community that was attempting to develop a mechanistic theory of the universe. Since Wiener and Rosenblueth succeeded in constructing a mechanism that displayed purposeful behavior, perhaps the distinction between a mechanistic philosophy and teleology was not as great as it had once seemed. Ashby (1952) devoted his life to further developing this idea. He sought to develop a mechanistic (i.e. non-teleological) theory of intelligent behavior.

Weiner, in his book Cybernetics, proposed the notion of a second industrial revolution. The first industrial revolution occurred when machines began to replace human muscle work and the second industrial revolution occurred when machines began to replace the human capacity to process information and make decisions, that is, the machinery replaced human cognitive capabilities.

That idea was picked up by Daniel Bell (1973) when he wrote a book called The Coming of Post Industrial Society, where he distinguished the agricultural period and the industrial period and then described a post-industrial period. Later, Alvin Toffler wrote a book called The Third Wave, incorporating the same three stages of economic and social development.

Turing's Cybernetics

The British scientist Alan Turing is well-known for having developed the concept of the universal Turing machine and the Turing test. He was also involved in the "ultrasecret," the decoding of German messages during World War II. British intelligence obtained a copy of the German coding machine called the Enigma Machine. The machine was manufactured in Poland and some members of the Polish underground sent it out piece by piece to the British Intelligence Organization. The machine operated with some wheels that could be set into a particular code. Then a message would be typed and the Enigma Machine would automatically translate it into a different set of letters. When the other person received the message, he would set the machine to the particular code and then out would come a useful message. The Germans had great confidence in the Enigma Machine. They felt their communications were very secure. But, the messages of the German high command were being read by British Intelligence throughout the war. The ability to know the Germans' war plans in advance led to a relatively quick Allied victory.

Unfortunately, that experience from World War II is what shaped the popular imagination of American capabilities during the post-war period. Americans did not know why their country performed so successfully during that war. However, in 1975, when the documents from the war were declassified, a British historian named Anthony Cave Brown (1975), who had written a history of World War II, realized that the history of World War II had to be rewritten. His reinterpretation of the war is the book Bodyguard of Lies. The title comes from Churchill's words, "In warfare, truth is so precious it must be safeguarded with a bodyguard of lies."

Who continued this work, a few sentences on what has happened lately - NSA and CIA. C.S. and A.I.

McCulloch's Cybernetics

McCulloch's cybernetics was quite different from Wiener's and Turing's. McCulloch was interested in experimental epistemology, understanding knowledge by understanding the brain. The 1943 article by McCulloch and Pitts, "A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Imminent in Nervous Activity" describes how a nerve network operating in a normal manner results in an idea. The paper makes an initial attempt at a formal theory of that activity. McCulloch, a philosopher and neuroanatomist, and Pitts, a mathematician, had similar interests. They reasoned as follows: A network of neurons is in the brain. As each neuron fires, it stimulates or inhibits the firing of other neurons. The result of this activity is something we experience as ideas. This phenomenon occurs in nature. Scientists, or natural philosophers, seek to explain natural phenomena. The preferred type of explanation is a formal theory. Hence, the title of their article - a formal theory of how the activity of a network of neurons results in ideas. The McCulloch and Pitts article seemed to a number of observers, such as John von Neumann, to be the key that they were looking for.

Need more. How about on how this strand developed after this first paper? Maturana and Varela, autopoiesis, family therapy

Conclusion

This needs to be written, perhaps using the info below.

Reference Table 1.

What I wanted to emphasize or would like to emphasize is that each one of these groups had a different set of concerns. The general system theorists were very much interested in evolution and hierarchy. They treated information in a physical way, as I indicated. The cyberneticians on the other hand were interested in cognition, adaptation, understanding issues that most other systems scientists are not so concerned with. For example, the system dynamicists are completely focused on modeling some system. They deal with the issue of knowledge acquisition, but only in terms of how one understands what is happening in some referent system. For them, the process of understanding is encompassed by the methodology of modeling. It is not philosophy. They are concerned with verifying their models using historical data. They are not concerned with cognition as a problem in itself.

Interest in cognition is what distinguishes the cyberneticians from the other fields, although the other fields are beginning to adopt a more constructivist epistemology.

Now there are people like the Learning Organization Group and the Total Quality Management Group which are doing things that are really compatible with constructivist cybernetics, but they tend not to emphasis epistemology or philosophy because they are concerned with the practical problems of making organizations work more effectively. They are interested in effective communication, but they still tend to assume a realist epistemology. However, their interest in effective communication moving in the direction of subjectivist epistemologies. A few people in system dynamics are interested in constructivism, but it is not presently their focus of attention.

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1. Rapoport was later the Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Vienna, Austria. He later served as an advisor to Shevardnadze who was the foreign minister under Gorbachev at the time. Hence, Rapoport was one of the people behind the scenes during the coming of glasnost and perestroika. For a discussion of Rapoport's tit-for-tat strategy, see Robert Axelrod's

2. Schon recently died in September, 1997