Toward a holistic cybernetics: from science through epistemology to being / Schwarz, Eric

In: Cybernetics and Human Knowing, Alborg. - - 1996

Mainstream positivist science is still strongly rooted in the presuppositions of the empirico-logicism, which we recall here: 1) The first is the pre-existence of space and time. 2) The second is materialist realism: there is a reality out there, independent and separable from the observer, and ultimately reducible to stocks and fluxes of matter and energy (centimetergramm-second world). (The status of the reality of the observer is not discussed). 3) A third belief is dualism, which means separation between the movements of real matter in space and time and some immaterial immutable laws ruling these movements, whose origin is not discussed; radical (monist) materialists hold that the laws are only human constructs. 4) A last important feature of rationalist science is determinism: the movements of things follow formalizable laws that obey the constraints of aristotelian logic, summarized by the principle of non-contradiction. This last presupposition explains why classical science is "infected by mathematics" as Herbert Simon once remarked. Furthermore, in that context, determinism is essentially taken as a synonym of predictibility.

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