Responsibilities of Competence - Understanding Understanding: Essays on Cybernetics and Cognition - page 192

Should you care to look closer, you may discover that Theorem 2 could
serve as a corollary to Theorem 1. This will become obvious when we
contemplate for a moment the method of inquiry employed by the hard
sciences. If a system is too complex to be understood it is broken up
into smaller pieces. If they, in turn, are still too complex, they are broken
up into even smaller pieces, and so on, until the pieces are so small that at
least one piece can be understood. The delightful feature of this process,
the method of reduction, “reductionism”, is that it inevitably leads to
success.
Unfortunately, the soft sciences are not blessed with such favorable
conditions. Consider, for instance, the sociologist, psychologist, anthro-
pologist, linguist, etc. If they would reduce the complexity of the system of
their interest, i.e., society, psyche, culture, language, etc., by breaking it up
into smaller parts for further inspection they would soon no longer be
able to claim that they are dealing with the original system of their choice.
This is so, because these scientists are dealing with essentially non-
linear systems whose salient features are represented by the interactions
between whatever one may call their “parts” whose properties in iso-
lation add little, if anything, to the understanding of the workings of these
systems when each is taken as a whole. Consequently, if he wishes to remain
in the field of his choice, the scientist who works in the soft sciences is
faced with a formidable problem: he cannot afford to loose sight of the full
complexity of his system, on the other hand it becomes more and more
urgent that his problems be solved. This is not just to please him. By now
it has become quite clear that his problems concern us all. “Corruption
of our society”, “psychological disturbances”, “cultural erosion”, the
“breakdown of communication”, and all the other of these “crises” of
today are our problems as well as his. How can we contribute to their
solution?
My suggestion is that we apply the competences gained in the hard sci-
ences—and not the method of reduction—to the solution of the hard prob-
lems in the soft sciences. I hasten to add that this suggestion is not new at
all. In fact, I submit that it is precisely Cybernetics that interfaces hard com-
petence with the hard problems of the soft sciences. Those of us who wit-
nessed the early development of cybernetics may well remember that
before Norbert Wiener created that name for our science it was referred to
as the study of “Circular-Causal and Feedback Mechanisms in Biological
and Social Systems”, a description it carried even years after he wrote his
famous topic. Of course, in his definition of Cybernetics as the science
of “communication and control in the animal and the machine” Norbert
Wiener went one step further in the generalization of these concepts, and
today “Cybernetics” has ultimately come to stand for the science of regu-
lation in the most general sense.
Since our science embraces indeed this general and all-pervasive notion,
why then, unlike most of our sister sciences, do we not have a patron saint