Rather than assume a unitary cybernetics, I ask how its disunity mattered to the history of the human sciences in the United States from about 1940 to 1980. I compare the work of four prominent social scientists – Herbert Simon, George Miller, Karl Deutsch, and Talcott Parsons – who created cybernetic models in psychology, economics, political science, and sociology with the work of anthropologist Gregory Bateson, and relate their interpretations of cybernetics to those of such well-known cyberneticians as Norbert Wiener, Warren McCulloch, W. Ross Ashby, and Heinz von Foerster. I argue that viewing cybernetics through the lens of disunity – asking what was at stake in choosing a specific cybernetic model – shows the complexity of the relationship between first-order cybernetics and the postwar human sciences, and helps us rethink the history of second-order cybernetics.

中文翻译：

---

1940-80 年，不统一对美国人文科学中控制论的历史有何影响

我没有假设一个单一的控制论，而是问它的不统一性对大约 1940 年到 1980 年间美国人文科学史有何影响。我比较了四位著名社会科学家的工作——赫伯特·西蒙、乔治·米勒、卡尔·多伊奇和塔尔科特·帕森斯（Talcott Parsons）——他在人类学家格雷戈里·贝特森（Gregory Bateson）的工作下在心理学、经济学、政治学和社会学中创建了控制论模型，并将他们对控制论的解释与诺伯特·维纳、沃伦·麦卡洛克、W.罗斯·阿什比等知名控制论家的解释联系起来和海因茨·冯·福斯特。我认为，通过不统一的视角来看待控制论——询问选择特定控制论模型的利害关系——显示了一阶控制论与战后人文科学之间关系的复杂性，