Purpose – Taoist thought is not easily penetrable for Westerners, though it has growing importance with the globalisation of Chinese commerce. The purpose of this paper is to explore some aspects of Chinese and Taoist thought, and how they can be expressed in cybernetic terms, using a knowledge cybernetics (KC) schema. Design/methodology/approach – KC operates through metaphor the role of which...

Abstracting the real world is a major aim of Informatics. This paper introduces a new Theory and Language which allow to better abstract the real world in clear and simplified Models than today’s software does. It thereby helps crossing a number of abstraction gaps that each software project has to go through in its lifetime. Sticking to Cybernetics, this paper means that one of the first thing...

Conversation Theory and a dynamic protolanguage, Lp, are used to illustrate an al'gulllent in favour of reflective and relativistic theories in Cybernetics and Systems Studies.

This article considers the place of Le città invisibili within debate on cybernetics, both as a product its time well harbinger future advent network culture. It proposes to interpret two most emblematic images book – enchanted palace Kublai Khan, and everchanging ‘invisible cities’ visited by Marco Polo Calvino’s personal contribution definition cybertext cyberspace. Curiously, same are also f...

Though the controversies surrounding human cloning and stem cell research have recently captured the public's attention, the less well-known technologies of cybernetics and nanotechnology are equally worthy of focus in that they have the potential to transform the way we think about human beings. Unfortunately, our conceptions of cybernetics have largely been formed by Hollywood and have thus b...

The early 1980s were a time for rebuilding the American Society for Cybernetics (ASC) after a few difficult years in the 1970s. Basic administrative functions were needed, and a series of annual, national conferences was resumed. Intellectual direction was provided by Heinz von Foerster and his idea of second-order cybernetics. Whereas other societies focused on technical aspects of cybernetics...

George Soros’s reflexivity theory is quite compatible with second order cybernetics. Indeed his work shows how to apply ideas in second order cybernetics to economics, finance, and political science. This paper briefly reviews three theories of reflexivity in cybernetics. It provides an introduction to Soros’s version of reflexivity theory and reviews applications in economics and finance. Soro...

Since the core hypothesis of this research is that digital interactive media could be an appropriate medium to document reality in an enactive and collaborative way, rather than in a single and representative way, it is important to trace back the notion of enactive cognition to its Cybernetics roots. Therefore, this chapter analyses how Cybernetics has proposed a view of the observer as in con...

Originally this word “cybernetics” came from the Ancient Greece, and it meant “the art of steersman”. Cybernetics is the “old-fashion” term for what is now called as the general system’s theory, or the system science. We can admit that cybernetics was born in 1948, when the book with the same title has been written by the famous American mathematician Norbert Wiener (1894-1964) [1]. The diction...

Manual control cybernetics aims to understand and describe how humans control vehicles and devices, such that more effective human-machine interfaces can be designed. Current cybernetics theory is primarily based on technology and analysis methods developed in the 1960s and has shown to be limited in its capability to capture the full breadth of human cognition and control. This paper summarize...