Рефлексивные процессы и управление. Сборник материалов XI Международного симпозиума 16-17 октября 2017 г., Москва - стр. 7

Expanded Abstract. When the International Academy for Systems and Cybernetic Sciences met in Chengdu, China, in 2015, the theme of the conference was Systemic Solutions for Systemic Problems. It seemed to me that problems could arise on several conceptual levels. Examples of problems at the first level would be finding better ways to build roads and buildings and increasing production and improving trade. At a second level there may be problems with the theories we use to solve problems, for example if we do not have a theory or understanding of a new disease. A third level of problems lies in philosophy, for example if we do not have an adequate epistemology to guide our work with social systems, where people both observe and act, thereby experiencing and creating uncertainty. Those reflections led me to think that there is a fourth level, namely the historical experiences of societies that shape the theories and philosophies that have been invented to guide our problem solving activities. But I did not feel that I knew enough about Chinese history, culture, and philosophy to speculate on differences between East and West.

Soon thereafter Vladimir Lepskiy said that he and his colleagues in Russia were developing third order cybernetics (Lepskiy 2010, 2015a, 2015b). We quickly agreed to organize a panel of scholars from Russia and the West (the U.S. and Western Europe) to discuss these ideas. We met in January 2017 in Rome at a conference of the World Organization for Systems and Cybernetics. As I read the abstracts and papers prepared by Russian scholars, I realized that this was another example of history influencing science and philosophy in addition to science and philosophy influencing history.

The Russian scholars were saying that post non-classical cybernetics, the third stage in the development of cybernetics, would be more humanistic than previous conceptions of cybernetics. These descriptions made me think of the work of Locke, Rousseau, and Voltaire, a literature from the seventeenth century which had contributed greatly to the development of democratic ideas in the west. However, the Russians were citing more recent Russian scholars. So, I wondered whether the Russians were reinventing ideas developed earlier in other countries or were they developing important new ideas?

I interpret Lepskiy‘s topic as another version of the question, How do historical experiences in a society shape the development of its science and philosophy? This paper will focus on how societies evolve and restructure themselves by identifying problems and then designing laws and institutions and procedures to solve those problems.