Although a term first used in French (‘cybernetique’) by André M. Amperé (1775-1836), it is generally credited to Norman Weiner (1894-1964) who derived it in 1947 from the Greek word for ‘steersman’ to denote the study of communication, feedback, and control mechanisms in living systems and machines. Subsequently developed together with Arturo Rosenblueth (1900-1950), Julian Bigelow (1913-2003) and William Ross Ashby (1903-1977), it drew originally on electrical engineering and the Shannon-Weaver information theory, but also on mathematics, biology, neurophysiology, anthropology, and psychology to study and describe actions, feedback, and response in systems of all kinds. Known as first-order cybernetics, its earliest applications were to designing control mechanisms for physical (i.e., closed) systems (e.g., aiming of artillery weapons) based on circular causality (i.e., negative feedback and the maintenance of homeostasis). This approach was followed by second-order cybernetics or applied cybernetics that can be defined as a theory of the observer based on functional-constructivism (i.e., with how observers are part of the systems that they have constructed and with which they interact), and that emphasises the role of positive feedback in open systems in that process. More recently, third-order cybernetics, building on social constructivism, has appeared that involves studying how observers and systems co-evolve across different social systems. Even more recently, there has been a claim for fourth-order cybernetics that seems to concerned with how multiple realities that are shaped by social, cultural, economic, ethnic, gender and disability values impinge upon power relationships within society. All told, cybernetics, which is a prime example of an interdiscipline, has had a major influence across a very wide range of the natural and social sciences, including anthropology, cognitive science, computer science, connectionist modelling, and the study of motor control.
See Artificial intelligence (AI), Circular causality, Closed system, Closed-loop and open-loop control, Cognitive science, Computational models, Connectionist models, Constructivism, Entropy, Feedback, Interdiscipline, Linear dynamical systems, Motor control, Open system