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Cybernetics' central concept of circular causality is of wide applicability, leading to diverse applications and relations with other fields. Many of the initial applications of cybernetics focused on engineering, biology, and exchanges between the two, such as medical cybernetics and robotics and topics such as neural networks, heterarchy. [35]
The perceptual control theory is deeply rooted in biological cybernetics, systems biology and control theory and the related concept of feedback loops. Unlike some models in behavioral and cognitive psychology it sets out from the concept of circular causality.
Circular cumulative causation is a theory developed by Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal who applied it systematically for the first time in 1944 (Myrdal, G. (1944), An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, New York: Harper). It is a multi-causal approach where the core variables and their linkages are delineated.
Simple causal reasoning about a feedback system is difficult because the first system influences the second and second system influences the first, leading to a circular argument. This makes reasoning based upon cause and effect tricky, and it is necessary to analyze the system as a whole.
According to George Richardson's book "Feedback Thought in Social Science and Systems Theory", [2] the first published, formal use of a causal loop diagram to describe a feedback system was Magoroh Maruyama's 1963 article "The Second Cybernetics: Deviation-Amplifying Mutual Causal Processes".
Causal analysis is the field of experimental design and statistics pertaining to establishing cause and effect. [1] Typically it involves establishing four elements: correlation, sequence in time (that is, causes must occur before their proposed effect), a plausible physical or information-theoretical mechanism for an observed effect to follow from a possible cause, and eliminating the ...
Cybernetics became a surprise bestseller and was widely read beyond the technical audience that Wiener had expected. In response he wrote The Human Use of Human Beings in which he further explored the social and psychological implications in a format more suited to the non-technical reader.
Second-order cybernetics, also known as the cybernetics of cybernetics, is the recursive application of cybernetics to itself and the reflexive practice of cybernetics according to such a critique. It is cybernetics where "the role of the observer is appreciated and acknowledged rather than disguised, as had become traditional in western ...