How Sociocybernetics Can Help Understand Possible World Futures

Abstract

Sociocybernetics is concerned with applying theories and methods from cybernetics and the systems sciences to the social sciences by offering concepts and tools for addressing problems holistically and globally. Cybernetics is a transdiscipline (Latin “trans” - across) that abstracts, from the many domains it adumbrates, models of great generality. Such models serve several purposes: they bring order to the complex relations between disciplines; they provide useful tools for ordering the complexity within disciplines; they provide a “lingua franca” for inter-disciplinary communication; they may also serve as powerful pedagogic and cultural tools for the transmission of key insights and understandings to succeeding generations. However, as noted by Immanuel Wallerstein (1997), past President of the International Sociological Association, if a transdisciplinary approach is to make a real contribution in the natural and social sciences, it must be more than a list of similitudes. It must also be epistemologically sophisticated and well-grounded. Cybernetics, with its explicit distinction between first order studies of observed systems and second order studies of observing systems, can claim, not only to satisfy this criterion, but also to be making significant contributions to epistemological debates.