ABSTRACT
Cybernetics is one of the major scientific and intellectual movements of the postwar period. The complementary philosophies and movements in the humanities – logical positivism and phenomenology, behaviorism and Gestalt psychology, modernism and postmodernism – have pursued the argument as well. The pivotal concept that gives cybernetics its philosophical as well as scientific power is its definition of the relationship between the triad of terms information, uncertainty and entropy. Cyberneticists have recognized this essential limitation on information theory – the necessity of including the human observer in calculations about systems, particularly social systems, under observation – and have suggested codifications of this limitation in several ways. The more redundant an element in a code is, and the more redundancy or duplication in the code itself, the less information it carries. Information is maximized when all the possible signs are equiprobable since this implies a state of maximum uncertainty or maximum entropy.
