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Crayton Walker, can serve to illustrate some consistent strands of Ashby's
thinking on this (Ashby and Walker 1968).
The topic of “Genius” is more or less self-explanatory. In line with the
above discussion, Ashby and Walker aim at a deflationary and naturalistic ac-
count of the phenomena we associate with word “genius.” But to do so, they
sketch out an account of knowledge production in which the importance of
predefined goals
is constantly repeated. “On an IQ test,
appropriate
[selection
of answers in a multiple choice test] means correct, but not so much in an
objective sense as in the sense that it satisfies a decision made
in advance
(by
the test makers) about which answers show high and which low intelligence.
In evaluating genius, it makes an enormous difference whether the criterion
for appropriateness [i.e., the goal] was decided
before
or
after
the critical per-
formance has taken place. . . . Has he succeeded or failed? The question has
no meaning in the absence of a declared goal. The latter is like the marksman's
saying he really meant to miss the target all along” (Ashby and Walker 1968,
209-10). And, indeed, Ashby and Walker are clear that they understand these
goals as explicit targets in the outer world (and not, for example, keeping one's
blood temperature constant): “In 1650, during Newton's time, many math-
ematicians were trying to explain Galileo's experimental findings. . . . In Mi-
chelangelo's day, the technical problems of perspective . . . were being widely
discussed” (210). The great scientist and the great artist thus both knew what
they were aiming for, and their “genius” lay in hitting their specified targets
(before anyone else did).
I can find nothing good to say about this aspect of Ashby's work. My own
historical research has confronted me with many examples in which great
scientific accomplishments were in fact bound up with shifts in goals, and
without making a statistical analysis I would be willing to bet that most of
the accomplishments we routinely attribute to “genius” have precisely that
quality. I therefore think that while it is reasonable to regard the fixity of the
homeostat's goals as possibly a good model for some biological processes and
a possibly unavoidable electromechanical limitation, it would be a mistake to
follow Ashby's normative insistence that fixed goals necessarily characterize
epistemological practice. This is one point at which we should draw the line
in looking to his cybernetics for inspiration.
Beyond that, there is the question of how cognitive goals are to be achieved.
Once Ashby and Walker have insisted that the goals of knowledge produc-
tion have to be fixed in advance, they can remark that “the theorems of infor-
mation theory are directly applicable to problems of this kind” (Ashby and
Walker 1968, 210). They thus work themselves into the heartland of Ashby's
