Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
of
cybernetics
—given by Wiener, who coined the term in testimony to
the Greek
kubernētēs
or
steersman
, understanding the steersman prima-
rily as a human control mechanism (1954, 15), and through its link to
Cybernesia (the pilots' festival held in honor of Theseus' navigation to
Athens) (Plutarch 100/1914)—points to a deeper level of selection in col-
lective human experience.
A dispute within philosophy (Giambattista Vico's critique of Aristotle)
offers a strong and highly significant analogue to exploratory capability.
Aristotle's philosophy involved a systematic method of enquiry for clas-
sifying an object, in addition to providing a direct and indirect source
for subsequent understandings of genus, species, specific difference, syn-
onymy, and equivalence. An enquirer was required to ask a series of ques-
tions—Does the thing exist? What is it? How big is it? What is its quality?
Vico subjected this method of enquiry to an incisive critique:
Aristotle's
Categories
and
Topics
are completely useless if one wants to find some-
thing new in them. One turns out to be a Llull or Kircher and becomes like a man
who knows the alphabet, but cannot arrange the letters to read the great topic of
nature. But if these tools were considered the indices and ABC's of inquiries about
our problem [of certain knowledge] so that we might have it fully surveyed, noth-
ing would be more fertile for research. (1710/1988, 100-101)
The last clause of the critique deserves emphasis: “nothing would be more
fertile for research.” While retaining some of Aristotle's techniques, Vico
avoided his rigidity, transforming it into a systematic and effective means
for enhancing knowledge of an object. Analogously, while rejecting a
query's rigid transformation into a set of records assumed as desirable in
information retrieval research, similar techniques can explore the domain
of discourse covered by the information retrieval system. This process of
categorization would be somewhat similar to collecting documents under
the terms of a humanly assigned metalanguage when describing them,
which can then be exploited in searching. Thus, classification schemes
(and their analogues in thesaural relations among indexing terms) become
valuable exploratory devices.
Dickens's
Hard Times
provides another supporting analogue, although
the fiction also enacts a critique of Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy.
The logical distinctions exemplified in Bitzer's definition of a horse—
“Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders,
