Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
system; room temperature might never fluctuate at all. And the result that
Conant and Ashby formally proved in this essay (subject to formal conditions
and qualifications) was that the minimal condition for optimal cause control
was that the regulator should contain a model of the regulated system.
Intuitively, of course, this seems obvious: the regulator has to “know” how
changes in the environment will affect the system it regulates if it is to pre-
dict and cancel the effects of those changes, and the model is precisely that
“knowledge.” Nevertheless, something interesting is going here. In fact, one
can see the cause-controlled regulator as an important elaboration of Ash-
by's ontological theater. The servomechanism, the homeostat, and DAMS
staged, with increasing sophistication, an image of the brain as an adaptive
organ performatively engaged with a lively world at the level of doing rather
than knowing. This is undoubtedly the place to start if one wants to get the
hang of the ontology of cybernetics. But, like CORA and M. docilis , the cause-
controlled regulator invites us to think about the insertion of knowledge into
this performative picture in a specific way. The virtue of knowledge lies not in
its transcendental truth but in its usefulness in our performative engagements
with the world. Knowledge is engaged with performance; epistemology with
ontology. This performative epistemology, as I called it before, is the message
of the cause-controlled regulator as ontological or epistemological theater;
this is how we should think about knowledge cybernetically. Conversely, the
cause-controlled regulator is a concrete example of how one might include
the epistemic dimension in bringing ontology down to earth in engineering
practice. That is what interests me most about this example. 56
basic researcH is like sHooting an arrow into tHe air, and, wHere it
lands, painting a target.
hoMeR ADkiNs, cHemist, quoted in bucHanan (2007, 213)
Now we can return to the critique I began earlier. In discussing the homeostat
I noted that it had a fixed and pregiven goal—to keep its essential variables
within limits, and I suggested that this is a bad image to have in general. At
that stage, however, the referent of the essential variables was still some in-
ner parameter analogous to the temperature of the blood—a slippery concept
to criticize. But in his more epistemological writings, Ashby moved easily to
a discussion of goals which clearly pertain to states of the outer, rather than
the inner, world. An essay on “Genius,” written with another of his students,
 
Search WWH ::




Custom Search