IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2015 - 58

The tenth suggestion slips into place in a way which
convinces an old hand that there is something in it - it
resolves the difficulties at just the right points, but not
so readily as to excite suspicions of a sheer blunder.
Once the key will go into the lock, and the bolt begins
to show signs of turning, it is a matter of mere file-work
and oil to get a perfect fit" [42, pp. 315-316].

Ignorance as Fundamental
As mentioned above, second-order cybernetics values ignorance as the basis from which knowledge is
constructed, through the acknowledgment of mutual
differences between conversants. This "out of control"
notion is based on variety amplification, and is typically
associated with later, rather than earlier cybernetics.

Numerous instances of Wiener's work
are far from the scientific ideal of
objective neutrality, being influenced
by his convictions, values and ethics.

This is not a position typical pre-World War II scientists
would be expected to have taken. Child prodigy Wiener, at the age of ten, nonetheless wrote a philosophical paper titled "The Theory of Ignorance" (see [38, p.
141]), in which he laid out the impossibility of complete
knowledge. This theme is also found in Wiener's later
work, and developed in reference to the work of Go¨del
and Russell [42, p. 313], already much in the spirit of
Glanville's "grabbing hand universe" [21, p. 122]. Heims
reports that Gödel's incompleteness proof, being an
unexpected shock to most mathematicians at the time,
came to Wiener "as a comforting reassurance that
things were as he felt them to be" [38, p. 142].

Circular Feedback and Self-Reference
Wiener and Rosenblueth were among the first to recognized that World War II-era developments in mechatronics
began to allow machines capable of both sensing and
acting, and hence capable of performing "forward-looking
searches" based on closed feedback loops [34, pp.
32-33]. They recognized circular processes as the central
issue on which their plans for an "interscientific institute"
should be based [4, p. 8] - and which eventually manifested itself in the field of cybernetics. Wiener went on
to famously describe the implications of circular positive
and negative feedback and of self-reference in the fields

of engineering and biology [4]. In his work on invention
[1] he went further, recognizing these implications also at
the wider contextual scale at which ideas occur. He recognized a circular interdependency between the inventor
and the inventor's wider context, and identifies an intellectual, a technical, a social, and an economic stage at
which inventions must find favorable climates - thereby
approaching territory that Kuhn [43] claimed eight years
later with his analysis of the intellectual context of scientific achievements, and the distinction between the
pre-paradigm, normal and revolutionary stages in the
structure of scientific advances. Von Foerster demanded
that theories of observers should be self-referential. Since
theories of living systems are proposed by living systems,
and since only living systems qualify as observers, theories of living systems should account for their authors
[12, p. 247]. Analogously, one could demand that a theory of invention should account for its inventor. Writing
about invention as an inventor, not as a bystander, being
a subject to what his theory describes, and his theory
being subject to his describing, Wiener's theory of invention fulfills this demand.

Observer Dependency
Recognition of the dependency of observations on
observers is often associated with von Glasersfeld [44]
and with von Foerster [12, pp. 211-227], who states:
"[Scientific o]bjectivity is the delusion that observations
could be made without an observer" [44, p. 280]. While
von Glasersfeld, von Foerster and others have done
much to explain and illustrate observer dependency
and its central role in the cybernetic forward-looking
search, it is not widely known that Wiener contributed much of the groundwork. While visiting Tsinghua
University in Beijing in 1936, Wiener wrote a sciencephilosophical paper on "The Role of the Observer"
[42]. In it, he lays out the observer-based constructivist
premise of second-order cybernetics: "Of course, our
experiences must have some reference outside themselves, in the sense that they cannot be considered as
completely closed and isolated. Otherwise there could
be no knowledge at all. This by no means asserts that
the experience has a reference entirely unaltered by our
participation" [42, pp. 307-308].

Indeterminism
Describing noise and error as evil nuisances in control
systems [45, pp. 318-319], Wiener nonetheless acknowledges indeterminacy in general [42, p. 311], and, in
his later manuscript on invention, in the occurrence of
inventions in particular. He describes invention as "not
subject to actuarial work" [1, p. 116] and acknowledges
that "the really fundamental and seminal idea is to a
large extent a lucky and unpredictable accident" [1, p. 25].

IEEE Technology and Society Magazine

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september 2015

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2015