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be formulated and judged. The cybernetician does not know the appropriate
terms—the language, the relevance conditions—for describing his or her
object in advance; they have to be discovered in interaction with that object.
Further, we know we have found suitable terms (not a true description) when
we use them to construct a model of the object which enables us to understand
its behavior when subject to additional interferences. Cybernetic interference
produces new languages in which to address and interrogate its object.
But second, as in his usage of “conversation,” it seems clear that Pask's
sense of “language” is not necessarily verbal or representational in the usual
sense. The model that grows in the cybernetician's interaction with some ob-
ject might be nonverbal—as in the “model” of the factory that builds up in
the chemical computer as it comes into equilibrium with the factory—and
it may be a material object which bears no resemblance at all to the thing
modelled—a thread structure does not look like Bill Smith happily making
ornamental plaques; the homeostat does not look like a brain. Or it might be a
conceptual construct—one of Stafford Beer's models of the Chilean economy,
for example. All that matters is that the model facilitates continued commerce
with the object itself.
Where does this leave us? Clearly, Pask's account of the cybernetic method
indeed points to a performative epistemology. Second, we can think of his
chemical computers as a vivid act of epistemological theater. The thread
structures stage for us the idea that knowledge (of the factory, of the manager)
need not take a representational form. Third, Pask's contrast between the
scientific and the cybernetic methods warrants some brief elaboration. One
could sum up the findings of the last twenty years and more of science studies
as the discovery that real scientists are more like Paskian cyberneticians than
his stereotype of them. They, too, struggle open-endedly with their objects and
invent new languages and models to get to grips with them (Pickering 1995).
But we need to think here of Pask's two kinds of observer and their different
stances with respect to the world. Such open-ended struggles indeed happen
in scientific practice, but this is thrust into the background of the modern
sciences and forgotten, effaced, in the “hypothesis testing” model of science.
And the argument I having been trying to make throughout this topic—albeit
with an emphasis on ontology rather than epistemology—is that these stances
are consequential. Although we are all in the same boat, they make a differ-
ence: cybernetics, in its practices and in its products—chemical computers
that develop new senses being a striking example of the latter—is different
in its specificity from the modern sciences. This is, of course, precisely Pask's
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