If I can reconstruct what was going through my mind 29 (!) years ago when I read and reviewed the book, it wasn't so much that I objected to the _fact_ of Beniger addressing such a wide range of topics, but rather that I wasn't impressed by how he did so: "long-winded, excessively detailed, ... not as well-grounded as the remaining, historical parts of the book". Bluntly, I was not at all as confident in Beniger's mastery of this material, and so his reliability as an informant, as I was confident in his historical narrative. I'd have to re-read it to see _why_ I had that impression, and perhaps it was unfair. Certainly, in retrospect, those lines in my review also had an element of "the average person only knows the formulas for olivine and one or two feldspars" [https://xkcd.com/2501/] (though in justice to young-Cosma, he also wrote "perhaps this is demanded by Beniger's audience, historians and social scientists who are unfamiliar with these matters").
Oh, I completely agree that this part of the book could have been executed better (I will have more to say about this in subsequent posts). What I find more worthy of critique in the book is that it has a giant blind spot where Hayek's ideas should rightfully be discussed (not just The Sensory Order, but also his papers like "Rules, perception, and intelligibility," "The theory of complex phenomena," and especially "The religion of the engineers: Enfantin and the Saint-Simonians").
Schliesser's Synthetic Philosophy (SP) sounds a lot like General Systems Theories (GSTs) of the lore. It is especially interesting that both Cosma Shalizi and Henry Farrell's critiques apply (without changes in imo) to GSTs too. I'm curious if you've thought about similarities and dissimilarities between SP and GST of von Bertalanffy, Boulding, Parsons and Rappaport and others.
"There is a relationship, but, as far as I can tell, it's not straightforward. When Ludwig von Bertalanffy had originally conceived general systems theory, he specifically wanted to avoid mathematical formalization.
On the other hand, he ended up importing many of the ideas from control theory indirectly through cybernetics (e.g., feedback, open vs closed systems, etc.). That said, there were systems theorists who had been contributing to control theory as well, such as Mihajlo Mesarovic.
There was also an outgrowth of GST associated with social action theorists like Talcott Parsons, Niklas Luhmann, etc. If I remember correctly, Habermas was critical of this line of work because of their instrumentalist bent, which he attributed to the influence of cybernetics.
Most of the influence of control theory on GST came from cybernetics through Wiener and Ashby; in fact, the latter had more contacts than Wiener with the "modern" framework of control theory, which tended to be more abstract, going beyond the simple servomechanism metaphors."
To clarify: Eric’s question was about the relationship between control theory and GST, but I think my answer applies for your question as well. If you can get your hands on Mesarovic and Takahara’s “General System Theory: Mathematical Foundations,” you will find some discussion there as well. In particular, they see von Bertalanfft’s project as metatheory, specifically in the context of philosophy of science applied to complex systems.
To the list of authors at the interface of philosophy, mathematics, engineering and science, I will add Mario Bunge. (See: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2024691).
Bunge's exact scientific metaphysics, in my mind, is (or at least very close to) Eric's Synthetic Philosophy project.
Eric's papers (his 2019 Biology and Philosophy paper and the one presented to Aristotlean Society) identify past "acts of synthetic philosophy", and you have too in this post. In other posts here (as well as in some of your threads on twitter), you've often similarly identified "acts of cybernetics and general systems theories" in older works. To me this seems like a hermeneutic pursuit more common in literary theories where identifying sub-texts are acknowledged to a virtuous goal. In my own inquiries, I've been guilty of the same thing.
Should we consider such pursuits as serving filling the science critics or historians of ideas niches or is it also to identify conceptual strands that possess promise for making genuine advances in the field, by systematizing approaches to committing "acts of synthetic philosophy" in the present?
If I can reconstruct what was going through my mind 29 (!) years ago when I read and reviewed the book, it wasn't so much that I objected to the _fact_ of Beniger addressing such a wide range of topics, but rather that I wasn't impressed by how he did so: "long-winded, excessively detailed, ... not as well-grounded as the remaining, historical parts of the book". Bluntly, I was not at all as confident in Beniger's mastery of this material, and so his reliability as an informant, as I was confident in his historical narrative. I'd have to re-read it to see _why_ I had that impression, and perhaps it was unfair. Certainly, in retrospect, those lines in my review also had an element of "the average person only knows the formulas for olivine and one or two feldspars" [https://xkcd.com/2501/] (though in justice to young-Cosma, he also wrote "perhaps this is demanded by Beniger's audience, historians and social scientists who are unfamiliar with these matters").
Oh, I completely agree that this part of the book could have been executed better (I will have more to say about this in subsequent posts). What I find more worthy of critique in the book is that it has a giant blind spot where Hayek's ideas should rightfully be discussed (not just The Sensory Order, but also his papers like "Rules, perception, and intelligibility," "The theory of complex phenomena," and especially "The religion of the engineers: Enfantin and the Saint-Simonians").
This might be a question for Eric Schliesser too.
Schliesser's Synthetic Philosophy (SP) sounds a lot like General Systems Theories (GSTs) of the lore. It is especially interesting that both Cosma Shalizi and Henry Farrell's critiques apply (without changes in imo) to GSTs too. I'm curious if you've thought about similarities and dissimilarities between SP and GST of von Bertalanffy, Boulding, Parsons and Rappaport and others.
In fact, Eric had asked me that same question on Twitter: https://x.com/nescio13/status/1795369638777479534.
This is what I wrote in response:
"There is a relationship, but, as far as I can tell, it's not straightforward. When Ludwig von Bertalanffy had originally conceived general systems theory, he specifically wanted to avoid mathematical formalization.
On the other hand, he ended up importing many of the ideas from control theory indirectly through cybernetics (e.g., feedback, open vs closed systems, etc.). That said, there were systems theorists who had been contributing to control theory as well, such as Mihajlo Mesarovic.
There was also an outgrowth of GST associated with social action theorists like Talcott Parsons, Niklas Luhmann, etc. If I remember correctly, Habermas was critical of this line of work because of their instrumentalist bent, which he attributed to the influence of cybernetics.
Most of the influence of control theory on GST came from cybernetics through Wiener and Ashby; in fact, the latter had more contacts than Wiener with the "modern" framework of control theory, which tended to be more abstract, going beyond the simple servomechanism metaphors."
To clarify: Eric’s question was about the relationship between control theory and GST, but I think my answer applies for your question as well. If you can get your hands on Mesarovic and Takahara’s “General System Theory: Mathematical Foundations,” you will find some discussion there as well. In particular, they see von Bertalanfft’s project as metatheory, specifically in the context of philosophy of science applied to complex systems.
To the list of authors at the interface of philosophy, mathematics, engineering and science, I will add Mario Bunge. (See: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2024691).
Bunge's exact scientific metaphysics, in my mind, is (or at least very close to) Eric's Synthetic Philosophy project.
Eric's papers (his 2019 Biology and Philosophy paper and the one presented to Aristotlean Society) identify past "acts of synthetic philosophy", and you have too in this post. In other posts here (as well as in some of your threads on twitter), you've often similarly identified "acts of cybernetics and general systems theories" in older works. To me this seems like a hermeneutic pursuit more common in literary theories where identifying sub-texts are acknowledged to a virtuous goal. In my own inquiries, I've been guilty of the same thing.
Should we consider such pursuits as serving filling the science critics or historians of ideas niches or is it also to identify conceptual strands that possess promise for making genuine advances in the field, by systematizing approaches to committing "acts of synthetic philosophy" in the present?