Cyberneticians and Ideas

These descriptions of ideas are the outcome of a series of class assignments overseen by Stuart Umpleby during the late 1970s and early 1980s in which students analyzed the writings of several cyberneticians and systems theorists. The analyses were called "disciplinary matrices," after an idea in the postscript to Thomas S. Kuhn's book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Organizing ideas into a "disciplinary matrix" can be thought of as an alternative to a dictionary or an encyclopedia.