ABSTRACT
Cybernetics is a way of thinking, not a collection of facts. Thinking involves concepts: forming them and relating them to each other. Some of the concepts that characterize cybernetics have been about for a long time, implicitly or explicitly. Cybernetics arose when the notions of self-regulation, autonomy, and hierarchies of organization and functioning inside organisms were analyzed theoretically: that is, logically, mathematically, and conceptually. Cybernetics is metadisciplinary in that it distills and clarifies notions and conceptual patterns that open new pathways of understanding in a great many areas of experience. The epistemological implications of self-reference have an even wider range of influence in the cybernetical approach to the philosophy of science. The most powerful and encouraging corroboration of the cybernetician's disengagement from the dogma of objectivity came from the "hardest" of the sciences. Self-regulation and control, autonomy and communication are certainly not new in ordinary language, but they did not figure as central terms in any science.
