Cybernetics as a unified science: is the study of feedback and communication a single discipline integrating mathematics, electrical engineering, neurophysiology, biology, and the social sciences, or a transient brand that splintered into separate fields?

Norbert Wiener, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

Cybernetics is the unified science of feedback, information, and control common to organisms and machines, to nervous systems and electrical circuits, to biological development and industrial automation. The unifying claim is not metaphysical but methodological: the same mathematical framework — time-series analysis, statistical prediction, the theory of servomechanisms, information measured against noise — applies wherever a system corrects its behavior on the basis of fed-back signals about its own performance.¹²

The Macy Conferences (1946-1953) demonstrated the unification empirically by bringing mathematicians, electrical engineers, neurophysiologists, anthropologists, psychiatrists, and sociologists into shared technical conversation around a common vocabulary.³⁴⁵

Sources

1. Fisher's motive in studying this subject is to be found in classical statistical theory; that of Shannon in the problem of coding information; and that of the author in the problem of noise and message in electrical filters.

   Cybernetics, pp. 30–31

2. A., Fundamental Theory of Servomechaniems, Van Nostrand, New 'York, 1946. in a state of what is known as ataxia. An ataxia of this type is familiar in the form of syphilis of the central nervous system known as tabes dorsalis, where the kinesthetic sense conveyed by the spinal nerves is more or less destroyed.

   Cybernetics, p. 27

3. The equilibrium of the human body, like most equilibria which we find in life processes, is not static but results from a continuous interplay of processes which resist in an active way any tendency for them to lead to a breakdown. Our standing and our walking are thus a continual jujitsu against gravity, as life is a perpetual wrestling match with death.

   I Am a Mathematician, pp. 271–272

4. Blanc-Lapierre and M. Loéve. I found also a considerable interest in the subject on the part of mathematicians, physiologists, and physical chemists, particularly with regard to its thermodynamic aspects in so far as they touch the more general problem of the nature of life itself.

   Cybernetics, p. 43

5. Harvard, Aberdeen Proving Ground, and the University of Pennsylvania were already constructing machines, and the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were soon to enter the same field.

   Cybernetics, p. 34

Where the argument is made

• Cybernetics, Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (MIT, 1948
• 2nd ed 1961, with the added chapters 'Self-Reproducing Machines' and 'Brain Waves and Self-Organizing Systems')
• The Human Use of Human Beings (1950 / 1954 2nd ed) on the social-scientific extension
• The Macy Conferences on Cybernetics (1946-1953, edited proceedings published later as Cybernetics, Circular Causal, and Feedback Mechanisms in Biological and Social Systems)
• the founding 1943 Rosenblueth-Wiener-Bigelow paper 'Behavior, Purpose and Teleology' (Philosophy of Science 10)

How the argument was received

Genuinely held and articulated as the founding claim of Cybernetics (1948). I will acknowledge openly that the term cybernetics has decayed in the broader academic vocabulary since the 1960s, and that what I called one science has been administratively splintered into computer science, AI, cognitive science, control engineering, systems biology, neural-network research, and second-order cybernetics. The unifying intellectual program survived under different names; the brand did not. Bird's diagnosis of paradigm as "an empty cliché" applies to cybernetics with equal force.