04 Nov 2018 09:00 AM - 11:00 AM(America/Vancouver)
20181104T090020181104T1100America/VancouverAll Too Human: Formalizations, Models, and Algorithms in the 20th Century Human Sciences
This panel examines how in the second half of the 20th century, the human sciences employed mathematical, engineering, and computer sciences to model, formalize, and control the human mind and behavior. The simulation of social and mental processes was relevant for computer programming, the scientific study of human nature, and the development of new forms of governance. However, as these papers argue, the translation of the social and the human into a symbolic language was far from a straightforward process and exact sciences did not provide scholars with neutral, apolitical, and purely objective models and formalizations.
To assay the political and epistemological ramifications of models and formalizations in the human sciences, the four panelists explore historical cases from educational psychology, cognitive science and social science in capitalist and socialist parts of the world. Jonnie Penn examines how Herbert Simon, Allan Newell and J. Clifford Shaw’s formalization of human adaptability was shaped by Simon’s training in political science and earlier work on the logic of administrative organization. Ekaterina Babintseva examines how in the 1960s-1970s, Soviet psychologists took different approaches to write special teaching algorithms and heuristic programs to train student’s creativity, a skill considered to be key for the country’s future economic success. Angelica Clayton looks at how models of thought as language were influenced by cybernetic models of stressed minds guided by Cold War politics. Finally, Bo An considers the long interdisciplinary history of Chinese cybernetics with a case study of Qian Xuesen’s “somatic science”.
Organized by Ekaterina Babintseva
Commentator – Jamie Cohen-Cole ( ...
Ravenna C, Third FloorHistory of Science Society 2018meeting@hssonline.org
This panel examines how in the second half of the 20th century, the human sciences employed mathematical, engineering, and computer sciences to model, formalize, and control the human mind and behavior. The simulation of social and mental processes was relevant for computer programming, the scientific study of human nature, and the development of new forms of governance. However, as these papers argue, the translation of the social and the human into a symbolic language was far from a straightforward process and exact sciences did not provide scholars with neutral, apolitical, and purely objective models and formalizations.
To assay the political and epistemological ramifications of models and formalizations in the human sciences, the four panelists explore historical cases from educational psychology, cognitive science and social science in capitalist and socialist parts of the world. Jonnie Penn examines how Herbert Simon, Allan Newell and J. Clifford Shaw’s formalization of human adaptability was shaped by Simon’s training in political science and earlier work on the logic of administrative organization. Ekaterina Babintseva examines how in the 1960s-1970s, Soviet psychologists took different approaches to write special teaching algorithms and heuristic programs to train student’s creativity, a skill considered to be key for the country’s future economic success. Angelica Clayton looks at how models of thought as language were influenced by cybernetic models of stressed minds guided by Cold War politics. Finally, Bo An considers the long interdisciplinary history of Chinese cybernetics with a case study of Qian Xuesen’s “somatic science”.
Organized by Ekaterina Babintseva
Commentator – Jamie Cohen-Cole (Department of American Studies Columbian College of Arts & Sciences)
Stressed Minds: Cybernetics and the Language of the Mind in the mid-Twentieth Century United StatesView Abstract Part of Organized SessionHuman and Social Sciences09:00 AM - 09:30 AM (America/Vancouver) 2018/11/04 17:00:00 UTC - 2018/11/04 17:30:00 UTC
This paper is a history of how “language” became a model for thought from the 1950s through the 1980s and specifically how cybernetic ideas of communication and stress pushed for the possibility of an internal language of thought. The paper begins with an introduction of psychological and cybernetic ideas of “communication” and the work done on stress in the psychological sciences during the 50s and 60s, influenced by ideas of Cold War fear and brainwashing. Cyberneticists discussed stressed systems as having problems in external and internal communication, and research on psychological stress drew from these cybernetics-based definitions. Researchers created models of “stressed minds” that rested on the breakdown of communication and ideas of diagnosis as the accessing of the state of the system, in the mathematical or psychological sense, through “noise,” that unintentional communication or behavior created by stress.
These models of stressed systems, either cybernetic or psychological, explicitly introduced the question of an internal language of thought. To discuss stress as hindering communication, particularly internal communication, some type of internal logically-consistent language must exist. For cybernetic systems, this could mean the programming language being used, but the question still remained; was there an internal language of thought? The 1970s saw a surge of debate surrounding the existence of this internal language, most clearly in Jerry Fodor’s Language of Thought Hypothesis. This paper aims to show how cybernetic influenced models of stressed minds contributed to these language-type models.
Creativity for the Information Age: Algorithms, Heuristics, and Soviet Psychology of Thinking in the 1960-1970sView Abstract Part of Organized SessionHuman and Social Sciences09:30 AM - 10:00 AM (America/Vancouver) 2018/11/04 17:30:00 UTC - 2018/11/04 18:00:00 UTC
The 1960s-1970s were marked by a profound interest in creative thinking among Soviet psychologists and educators. They connected creativity to the country’s economic success in the approaching era of computerization and defined creative thinking as the ability to solve problems, make discoveries, and produce inventions. This definition of creativity led several Soviet institutions to work on the development of techniques and technologies for the control and cultivation of creative thinking in students. Such research first originated at the Laboratory of Programmed Instruction (LPO) of the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences and, later, in the 1970s, was also conducted at the Department of Psychology of Moscow State University (MSU) and the Council for Cybernetics.
This paper traces various attempts of Soviet psychologists to formalize problem-solving and write special teaching prescriptions to train creativity in students. I begin by showing how in the 1960s, the LPO worked to simulate thinking processes algorithmically. While in the 1960s, the LPO shared the cyberneticists’ belief in the omnipotence of algorithms, in the early 1970s, they came to realize that algorithms are too rigid to describe how humans solve problems. The growing skepticism about the applicability of algorithms to creative thinking led psychologists at MSU and the Council to employ heuristic programs to formalize creative thought. This paper draws on archival documents from the Soviet Academy of Sciences, State Archives of the Russian Federation as well as published work that appeared in Russian journals Issues of Psychology and Soviet Pedagogy in the 1960s-1970s.
The Logic Behind the Logic Theory Machine: Administrative Science, RAND, and the Dawn of Artificial IntelligenceView Abstract Part of Organized SessionHuman and Social Sciences10:00 AM - 10:30 AM (America/Vancouver) 2018/11/04 18:00:00 UTC - 2018/11/04 18:30:00 UTC
The Logic Theory Machine (LT) has been described as “The First Artificial Intelligence Program” (Crevier, 1993). LT was a proto-computer-program developed at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, California in 1955-56. It was designed by Herbert Simon, Allan Newell, and J. Clifford Shaw (hereafter “NSS”) to discover and construct proofs from Principia Mathematica. The RAND trio’s goal was to model human problem solving using an electronic computer, which they claimed to have accomplished with LT’s first successful operation in 1956. The purpose of this paper is to isolate the specific competencies used by NSS to justify comparisons between LT's abilities and those of a human being. This step serves to introduce the particular ways in which human nature had to be framed in order to match up neatly, by analogy, to the competencies of LT.
The structure of my paper is as follows. To begin, I introduce how Herbert Simon’s training in logical positivism under Rudolf Carnap at the University of Chicago in the 1930-40s shaped his view of the social sciences and, in turn, the design specifications of LT in the 1950s. In 1947, Simon published Administrative Behavior, an influential text designed to turn administration into a science using formalized linguistic and conceptual tools. I show how in 1955, NSS then translated these tools into a new medium—electronic computing—to formalize the adaptability of the human brain. The product, LT, served to formalize and legitimize the field of artificial intelligence.
Cybernetics in China: Qian Xuesen and Somatic ScienceView Abstract Part of Organized SessionHuman and Social Sciences10:30 AM - 11:00 AM (America/Vancouver) 2018/11/04 18:30:00 UTC - 2018/11/04 19:00:00 UTC
The paper is an interdisciplinary history of cybernetics in the People's Republic of China. Following the career of the founding cyberneticist and scientist Qian Xuesen (1911-2009), it presents a broad picture of the reception and legacy of cybernetics across social and human sciences in the second half of the 20th century and beyond in China.
The history is divided into three periods by which the presentation proceeds in chronological order. Cybernetics emerged in China in the 1950s--the first period--as an interdisciplinary science deeply tied to applied mathematics and large-scale project management. Influenced by Qian Xuesen, the development of Chinese cybernetics was connected to but ultimately different from both those of the Soviet Union and the United States. Its approach to cybernetics became more distinctive during the second historical period marked by the Sino-Soviet split of 1958 and the Cultural Revolution which ended in 1976. Its revival after the 1970s constituted the third period, when cybernetics, along with information theory and systems theory, attained the status of universal sciences and was applied not only in engineering, but in social sciences and humanities such as economics, environmental science, education, and world history as well. Here, I consider renti kexue (somatic science) of the 1980s, by situating it in the larger historical context outlined above, as a special case where cybernetics, traditional Chinese science and medicine, pseudoscience, socialist science policy, and Post-Mao culture and politics intersect. By way of conclusion, I will briefly discuss the contemporary legacy of cybernetics in China.
