IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2015 - 56

Figure 1. Norbert Wiener with cybernetic bug "Palomilla".

a cybernetic perspective. To Simon and to others,
incompatibilities between design and natural science
indicated a deficiency of design. The response to this
perception was to call for design to clean itself up and
become a proper scientific discipline [6, pp. 111-138],
[27, p. 80]. Wiener and others took a bolder stance for
cybernetics. Instead of pushing cybernetics back into
the frame of science, they pushed cybernetics forward,
beyond science. This places Wiener, a mathematician
and scientist, in between two scholarly worldviews:
The generally accepted scientific one in which he was
brought up and in which he excelled, and the new
cybernetic one, which he helped forge.
Pickering [39], pp. 17-33 portrays the difference
between science and cybernetics as the difference
between an agenda of description and prediction on
the one hand, and continuous performative adaptation,
i.e. a "vision of forward-looking search" on the other
hand [39, p. 18]. It is at least in part due to this vision
that design has emerged as a central cybernetic theme.
Pickering emphasizes a "distinctly cybernetic notion of
design" that differs from modern science and engineering by emphasizing continuous interaction as opposed
to the execution of descriptive blueprints - as well as "a
degree of respect for the other" [37, p. 32].
Wiener's wartime work on a "statistical predictor"
for anti- aircraft artillery (together with Rosenblueth
and Bigelow) exemplifies key aspects of the cybernetic
"vision of forward- looking search" by combining two
temporal kinds of causes described by Aristotle (see
[12, p. 298]): causa efficiens (explanatory description:
"because of...") and causa finalis (control: "in order
to..."). Soon after U.S. engagement in World War II,

Rosenblueth, Wiener, and Bigelow recognized
the need to integrate effective causality and
final causality to achieve predictive purposive
systems. In doing so, they categorized such
systems as "second-order" - several decades
before second-order cybernetics is said to
have emerged: "Throwing a stone at a moving
target requires a second-order prediction; the
paths of the target and of the stone should
be foreseen" [40, pp. 20-21]. Final causes,
strictly speaking, lie outside of the domain
of natural science because they go beyond
description and explanation, and involve value
judgments and purposefulness. The problem of aiming anti-aircraft guns automatically
entails, besides common challenges of artillery - the arcing of projectile trajectories and
effects of wind - also challenges arising from
the speed of airplanes and their distance from
defense stations. Projectiles take 15 seconds
or longer to reach the position of an enemy
aircraft, during which a pilot may fly evasive maneuvers. To disable or destroy it, the gun must be aimed
ahead of the aircraft so that projectile and aircraft
collide once both have covered the distances between
their positions at the time of firing and the predicted
collision position. Both causal modes are present:
Because of data acquired about an enemy aircraft's
flight path and assumptions about likely pilot behavior, the gun is aimed at a predicted collision location
ahead of the aircraft in order to shoot it down [38, pp.
183-184]. The performance of a prototype of the system was "positively uncanny" in the case of flight path
predictions for short time intervals. However, when it
became clear that the system would not achieve the
expected performance for longer time intervals, which
was necessary to achieve practical value for field application, the project was terminated [39, pp. 87-90]. The
two different causal modes at work in the automated
aiming of anti-aircraft guns are distinguished along
similar lines as those Simon [6, pp. 132-133] uses
to distinguish between natural science and design:
"The natural sciences are concerned with how things
are [..] Design, on the other hand, is concerned with
how things ought to be, with devising artifacts to
attain goals." The intentional manipulation of future
affairs by present action, shared by cyberneticians
and designers, is evident in the heteronymous uses of
the word "project" (from Latin pro = forth, jacere = to
throw): Designers "throw forth" projects, and artillerists "throw forth" projectiles. (See Figure 1.)
Yet more suitable analogies between the creative
process and engineered cybernetic systems can be
found in the cybernetic "tortoises" and "bugs" built

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