The Cybernetics Group Steve Joshua Heims The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England Contents Preface Vl! Acknowledgments Xl 1 Midcentury, U.SA. 1 2 March 8-9, 1946 14 3 Describing "Embodiments of Mind": McCulloch and His Cohorts 31 4 Raindancer, Scout, and Talking Chief 52 5 Logic Clarifying and Logic Obscuring 90 6 Problems of Deranged Minds, Artists, 115 and psychiatrists " 7 The Macy Foundation and Worldwide Mental Health 164 © 1991 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any fo rm by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. This book was set in Baskerville by C(ompset, Inc. and was printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Heims, Steve J. The cybernetics group / Steve Joshua Heims. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-262-08200-4 1. Social sciences-Research-United States. 2. Cybernetics­ United States. 3. Science-Social aspects-United States. 4. Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation. I. Title. H62.5.U5H45 1991 003' .5-dc20 91-409 elP vi Cuntents 8 Lazarsfeld, Lewin, and Political Conditions 180 9 Gestalten Go to Bits, 1: From Lewin to Bavelas 201 10 Gestalten Go to Bits, 2: Kohler's Visit 224 11 Metaphor and Synthesis 248 12 Then and Now 273 Appendix Members of the Cybernetics Group 285 Notes 287 Index 327 Preface The subject of this book is the series of multidisciplinary con­ ferences, supported by the Macy Foundation and held between 1946 and 1953, to discuss a wide array of topics that eventually came to be called cybernetics. Coming in the aftermath of the Second World War, when the scientific and technical advances of the war years-for example, the modern general-purpose computer and models based on it-were just becoming public currency, the conference series played a significant historical role in the development of the human and th.e natural sciences in the United States. The cybernetics conferences and attendant events form a complex story, and I have tried to include only a portion of it in this book. I have chosen to focus on researchers in psychol­ ogy, anthropology, sociology" and psychiatry rather than on the engineers, biologists, and mathematicians. For the book to be seen in its proper light, I need to say some­ thing about the process of writing it and my own relation to the subject matter. More than twenty years ago, as a physicist dur­ ing the Vietnam War era, I felt a need to gain a broader per­ spective on the practice of the sciences and the direction they had taken in the postwar world. My method was twofold: to learn more about what people in other, related academic de­ partments�anthropology, biology, psychology, mathematics­ were up to and to acknowledge fu lly that science is a human activity, not only a body of knowledge. During this period the published proceedings of the cybernetics conferences fell into my hands, and since so many of the disciplines were repre­ sented by the attendees, a historical study of these meetings came to seem like a good way to focus my own inquiry. I decided that it might be worthwhile to pursue my study in the form of a'book, but I quickly saw that I was not yet ready PTefa ce ix published, etc.). From this point of view, conversations and dis­ cussions, including those at the center of this book and some at the periphery, took on a greater significance. I now saw that dialogue among researchers could serve as an organizing prin­ ciple for my study. With this focus, the material I had gathered began to fall into discernible, seemingly natural, patterns. At various junctions in the book, where I had the data, I could now be specific, concrete, and explicit in describing instances of how the process of science worked. Two kinds of presumed "background" to the conferences sometimes push themselves into the foreground as influences on the scientific work. One is the general political conditions in the United States at the time-the height of the Cold War­ and more specifically, the general conditions of the various nat­ ural and social sciences. Chapter I describes these circum­ stances. The second is the intellectual interests each conferee brought to the first meeting. Chapter 2 is a systematic survey of those backgrounds. A reader who dislikes preliminaries might start with chapter 3. I expect, however, that sooner or later he or she will be impelled to turn back to the first two chapters for orientation. viii Preface to deal with the huge cast and variety of disciplines involved. I contented myself with writing a book about just two of the par­ ticipants, the mathematicians John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener. When that book was finished, however, I fe lt encour­ aged to start work on the group of social scientists who had attended the meetings. Here I must add a warning: I have not practiced sociology, psychology, economics, psychiatry, or an­ thropology, and consequently I am looking at these fields as an outsider. My main interest is in what the people I discuss felt to be interesting and important at the time, not necessarily in what seems so today. Such an outsider's perspective can provide new insights, because it sidesteps the shared premises and practices within a discipline (recall Alexis de To cqueville writing on America), but it also inevitably leads to a glossing over of many important details and technical points. To try to avoid major misunderstandings, I have consulted with specialists in the dis­ ciplines I discuss. This book, however, is not intended as a source of information about t<:<chnical details. It is perhaps best characterized as the result of one person's historical examina­ tion and interpretation of portions of a very interesting confer­ ence series and of its participants. One of my first steps was to contact as many of the partici­ pants as I could. Most, unfortunately, are now no longer alive. I began to read the participants' published writings, viewing them as contributions to "progress" within their specific disci­ plines. I also obtained whatever biographical information was readily available. But it didn't work. Much of the so-called social science was unconvincing to me as science in any traditional sense. In fact, some of it seemed to have only a thin scientific veneer, which apparently sufficed to make it acceptable. More­ over, as I wrote I found my study as a whole becoming centrif­ ugal; it simply would not cohere. Something was wrong with my approach. Stymied, I put the manuscript aside. When I returned to the project a few years later, I came at the subject matter in a different way, probably because I had picked up on changing attitudes among historians. and sociol­ ogists of science. Instead of trying to review the specific contri­ butions of individuals, I now started to look at fields as a whole and to explore the role of elite groups within fields, groups whose shared assumptions and consensus about what is valid and valuable establish the fields' priorities and guide the di­ rection of research (including who gets funding, what gets Acknowledgments A large number of people have been helpful in the preparation of this book, which has been in process, intermittently, for many years. It is, in fact, the second half of the project begun in the book about von Neuman and Wiener, and some of the people are already mentioned there. Harvey Shepard and Millard Clements, in their steady friendship, have been important through the years over and above any specific conversations. Leila Head, my daughter, with her professional devotion to the facts behind official obfuscation, is a continuing source of inspiration. Sharon Lamb, Susan Sklan, and Te rri Payne Butler each read a chapter or more of the book critically, and each was a source of encour­ agement at a moment when it made a difference. The following people have contributed at one point or another, through con­ versation or by reading and commenting on a chapter or in some other way: Jonathan Bayliss, lain Boal, Jean-Pierre Du­ puy, Arthur Grant, Jay Haley, Joy Harvey, Rachel Joffe, Anita Landa, Mark Levine, John Lisman, Frank Manuel, Jennifer Markell, Robert Morison, Seymour Papert, Robbie Pfeufer, Ed­ ward Reed, Morris Schwartz, Silvan Schweber, Oliver Selfridge, Ann Sinclair, Michael Sokal, Lora Tessman, Erin Walsh, Shel­ don White, Michael Wold, and William Woodward. I greatly appreciate the interest shown by those members from the cybernetics group, most of them now deceased, who had taken time to talk or correspond with me. I am also grate­ ful to other pt!ople who are not named individually here but have at some point during the past twenty-two years influenced or informed me in regard to some facet of the cybernetics group. I cite particular names and their contributions where appropriate in the notes. Archives at the Massachusetts lnsti- The Cybernetics Group xii Aclmowledgment.s tute of Technology, Yale University, Harvard Medical School, the Library of Congress, the American Philosophical Society, and the National Library of Medicine were consulted in the course of the research, and I thank the archivists and librarians for their helpfulness. 1 Midcentury, U.S.A. The aim of this book is to describe a moment when a new set of ideas impinged on the human sciences and began to trans­ form some traditional fields of inquiry. A proper description of this historical event entails not only attending to published re­ search in the human sciences but also to individuals, to small groups, and to the larger social and political matrix in which the event was embedded.