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Dear Ahmed,
your characterisation of cybernetics, and your lumping together
of cybernetics, cognitive science and complexity theory are correct.
In the year 1973. A big chunk of Cybernetics has moved on:
http://www.alice.id.tue.nl/references/foerster-2003.pdf
Just sayin'.
I agree the term heuristics is problematic. Humans make mental
models of what they encounter. These models may not be explicit,
sharable, objective, static or permanent (as the word heuristics
implies). They are shaped, re-shaped and negotiated through
ongoing interactions. In this way they are more performative
than descriptive.
Cybernetics (as you see it), cognitive science and complexity theory
are sciences and thus have a descriptive rather than performative
agenda. Descriptive, reductionist and (linearly) causal simplification
- - i.e. simplistic/dominant control models - continue to lead to
innumerable and significant problems. In this regard it seems you
and Don are saying the same thing. The word heuristics may not
be a good choice.
Tom
www.tfischer.de
On 20/03/16 12:49, Ahmed Ansari wrote:
> I would question this: "Because understanding the complex,
> non-linear complexities of the world is far too complex for human
> minds (for that matter, for any minds). Heuristics are the method
> humans have adopted in order to simplify their life."
>
> Heuristics are not the sole and only way human societies have
> developed to deal with, understand and explain the complexity of
> the world around them and social order. Historically, heuristics
> and the computational reduction of the world, of which they are a
> part, are a product of the Enlightment, of modernity, and of
> western civilization - they most certainly have not played a
> primary role in understanding the world for many societies, at
> least until the colonization of societies around the world by the
> Europeans and the postcolonial twentieth century world whereby
> western civilization retained its global economic, socio-cultural,
> political and epistemological hegemony through the substantiation
> of global institutions like the IMF and UN (of course, these ways
> of thinking about reality and the world remain dominant because of
> the global dominance of knowledge developed under specific
> traditions in the west today). Any decolonial scholar like Mignolo,
> Quijano, Dabashi etc. would immediately point this out. But apart
> from decolonial\postcolonial critiques, contemporary theories in
> sociology and philosophy that focus on nuanced explanations of how
> the social and the material are intertwined and inextricable -
> actor-network theory, living systems theory etc. - all strive for
> explanations of complex phenomenon at the macro level that are not
> reductive. One can ask why we don't see more of these fields and
> disciplines informing design today, but that again is a question
> the answer to which lies in the peculiar politics and culture and
> history of contemporary design practice and pedagogy (as an aside,
> it would be an interesting task to trace exatly which ideas from
> which disciplines have hegemonized and normalized mainstream design
> practice and discourse).
>
> I think it is worth remembering that cybernetics, cognitive
> science, and complexity theory are all twentieth century
> disciplines that developed out of a certain metaphysical and
> epistemological tradition, under specific historical circumstances,
> and have all demonstrated severe limitations, as well as dangerous
> potentials, as the present day unsustainability of most modern
> societies, and the extreme degrees of systemic inequalities today
> show. In fact, the entire lexicon of twentieth century western
> philosophy, as well as cultural and critical theory, has shown us
> the dangers of reducing the complexity of systems that are not only
> social and technical but also cultural (value laden) and political
> (embodying the dynamics of various kinds of power relations) to
> easily explainable and verifiable descriptions. One can quote any
> number of publications and scholars from within the tradition one
> subscribes to (cybernetics, computation, systems theory etc.) to
> validate one's claims, but it is worth remembering that an equally
> vast amount of equally influential literature exists in both the
> same tradition and in other traditions (philosophy of technology,
> critical and cultural theory, living systems theory etc.) that may
> serve to critique it.
>
>
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