IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2015 - 67

enunciated in his 1927 book, The Public and It's Problems" [sic] [5, p. 209].
Yet, Heims and other biographers of Wiener typically
stop at noting the Deweyan ideal, without further consideration of pragmatism and the archetypal elements
of Dewey's philosophical work. In particular, they miss
that during the early 1900s, Dewey, moving from classical to radical pragmatism, was steering the philosophy toward the science of communication and control
theory using the possibility of responsive control systems built around the human nervous system and brain.
Wiener extended Dewey's pragmatism to mechanicalelectrical communication systems, yet that extension of
Dewey's work was not a radical departure from the elder
philosopher's efforts.

Digging the Rabbit Hole: Relativistic
Pragmatism and the Search for Equilibrium
In 1908, James commanded, "Test [the truth of ideas]
anywhere. Look for Alice in Wonderland" [15, p. 430].
For Dewey, the adventure became the search for the
need of "'natural signs," like "that cake of Alice in Wonderland," with its helpful "Eat me" signal that allows
"elaborate conditioning developed for purposes of communication" [10, p. 133]. Such ideas were not lost on
Wiener, who cited Through the Looking-Glass in his
essay on relativism [2]. There, he pushed aside the loose
logic of the White Queen and others schooled "long
and carefully in believing impossibilities" [31, p. 576].
Additionally, Wiener openly embraced "belief in the infinite complexity of the universe," while quietly holding
on to the humanistic principles of pragmatism - the
encouragement of democratic and openness [14, n.p.],
[31, p. 576]. With these principles, Wiener gives a nod to
James, but brings the ideas of Dewey to the fore with his
presentation of relativistic pragmatism, a phrase generally attributed to Dewey. As historian William Appleman
Williams explained, "[p]robably the single most powerful
influence on the Progressive Movement between 1910
and 1940, and hence upon American society itself, was
the relativistic pragmatism and instrumentalism developed by John Dewey" [32, p. 402].
What, exactly, do the terms relativistic pragmatism
and instrumentalism mean? For Dewey, they are closely
related. Instrumentalism came to be Dewey's particular
view of pragmatism. All things are judged in relation to
their value as ways or "instruments" for action. The truth
of an idea with instrumentalism is based in its usefulness
as determined by the successful adjustment to feedback,
not mere matters of metaphysics. Relativism is a theory
that knowledge is in relation to the limited nature of the
mind and the conditions of knowing, while "relativistic"
suggests movement at a velocity such that there is a
change in properties based on the theory of relativity,

september 2015

∕

The Macy participants' interests
intertwined and were often
"'nonscientific" disciplines, the
humanities, and flowed into the
cybernetic ethos.
a proposition favored by Wiener. When combined with
the doctrines of pragmatism - that meaning and understanding should be sought in their practical environs, that
the function of thought is to guide action, and that truth,
a loose notion, is preeminently to be tested by real-world
consequences through feedback - the term relativistic
pragmatism emerges [29; 19].
Colleagues of Dewey at Columbia University's Teachers
College came to define relativistic pragmatism as the
philosophy of organism based on the need to "maintain
equilibrium in a dynamic world" [21, pp.4,162]. When
considered together, the phrases relativistic pragmatism
and philosophy of organism can be usefully recast as
cybernetic pragmatism, in which the signals, feedback,
and mechanisms for communication and control frame
the effort of equilibrium - an ongoing concern for Wiener.
In 1896, two years after Wiener's birth, Dewey wrote
the essay, "The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology." By the
time Wiener was studying with Dewey, nearly two decades
later, the essay was "one of the most influential papers
in the domain of late-nineteenth-century culture" [10],
[17, p. 7]. Throughout the text, Dewey rejects the then
popular theory of "sensori-motor coordination," which
argued for a stimulus-response arc regarding experience.
According to Dewey, the theory "no matter how it may
prate of unity ... still leaves us with sensation ... idea ...
and motor response, or act, as three disconnected existences" [10, p.100]. The theory's logic, Dewey explains, is
flawed in its dualistic Manichaean approach. "[A] state of
things characterizing an outcome," he writes, "is regarded
as a true description of the events which led up to this
outcome [...] The reflex arc theory [...] gives us one disjointed part of the process as if it were the whole. It gives
us literally an arc, instead of the circuit; and not giving
us the circuit, of which it is an arc, does not enable us to
place, to centre, the arc" [10, pp. 105, 108-109]. Dewey's view of the circuit, embedded in the learning and
democratic processes, points toward "the theories of the
circle in hermeneutic analysis," arguably a basis for "the
cybernetic feedback loop" [17, p. 7].
Steg, writing in Philosophy of Education, goes so
far as to report that Dewey's "Reflex Arc Concept in

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