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  1. The “balance of nature” metaphor and equilibrium in population ecology.Kim Cuddington - 2001 - Biology and Philosophy 16 (4):463-479.
    I claim that the balance of nature metaphoris shorthand for a paradigmatic view of natureas a beneficent force. I trace the historicalorigins of this concept and demonstrate that itoperates today in the discipline of populationecology. Although it might be suspected thatthis metaphor is a pre-theoretic description ofthe more precisely defined notion ofequilibrium, I demonstrate that balance ofnature has constricted the meaning ofmathematical equilibrium in population ecology.As well as influencing the meaning ofequilibrium, the metaphor has also loaded themathematical term with values.Environmentalists (...)
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  • The political theology of entropy: A Katechon for the cybernetic age.David Bates - 2020 - History of the Human Sciences 33 (1):109-127.
    The digital revolution invites a reconsideration of the very essence of politics. How can we think about decision, control, and will at a time when technologies of automation are transforming every dimension of human life, from military combat to mental attention, from financial systems to the intimate lives of individuals? This article looks back to a moment in the 20th century when the concept of the political as an independent logic was developed, in a time when the boundaries and operations (...)
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  • Ambiguous Weighting and Nonsensical Sense: The Problems of “Balance” and “Common Sense” as Commonplace Concepts and Decision-making Heuristics in Environmental Rhetoric.Derek G. Ross - 2012 - Social Epistemology 26 (1):115-144.
    Balance and common sense are commonplace concepts used to bring an audience to a place of shared understanding. These commonplaces also function as decision-making heuristics. I argue in this paper that the commonplaces ?balance? and ?common sense? are problematic because they suggest decision-making strategies that strip associated information of complexity and value. Through an examination of theory and responses to interviews conducted in relation to an ongoing project on environmental rhetoric, I problematize these concepts and consider how awareness of the (...)
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  • What Second Order Science Reveals About Scientific Claims: Incommensurability, Doubt, and a Lack of Explication.Michael Lissack - 2017 - Foundations of Science 22 (3):575-593.
    The traditional sciences often bracket away ambiguity through the imposition of “enabling constraints”—making a set of assumptions and then declaring ceteris paribus. These enabling constraints take the form of uncritically examined presuppositions or “uceps.” Second order science reveals hidden issues, problems and assumptions which all too often escape the attention of the practicing scientist. These hidden values—precisely because they are hidden and not made explicit—can get in the way of the public’s acceptance of a scientific claim. A conflict in understood (...)
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  • How disunity matters to the history of cybernetics in the human sciences in the United States, 1940–80.Ronald Kline - 2020 - History of the Human Sciences 33 (1):12-35.
    Rather than assume a unitary cybernetics, I ask how its disunity mattered to the history of the human sciences in the United States from about 1940 to 1980. I compare the work of four prominent social scientists – Herbert Simon, George Miller, Karl Deutsch, and Talcott Parsons – who created cybernetic models in psychology, economics, political science, and sociology with the work of anthropologist Gregory Bateson, and relate their interpretations of cybernetics to those of such well-known cyberneticians as Norbert Wiener, (...)
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  • The Cybernetic “General Model Theory”: Unifying Science or Epistemic Change?Barbara E. Hof - 2018 - Perspectives on Science 26 (1):76-96.
    "The term 'model' has become fashionable". What Mary Hesse characterized in the mid-1960s as a trend in logic, mathematics, and the natural sciences, applies today in general for a broad spectrum of disciplines. Today models appear to be of "extraordinary importance" compared to the first half of the twentieth century, when models were neither mentioned nor contemplated, either generally in scientific publications or specifically in the philosophy of science. It is even assumed that models are "the key to science" and (...)
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  • Does Cognitive Structure Ground Social Structure? The Case of the Radical Enlightenment.Laurence Fiddick - 2020 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 20 (3-4):317-337.
    Cross-culturally two widely observed forms of social structure are individualism and ascribed hierarchies. Associated with these two types of social structure are a wide range of recurrent concomitant features. It is proposed that these two forms of social structure are common, in part, because they are associated with modular forms of understanding that lend intuitive support to them. In particular, it is proposed that individualistic open societies are associated with a folk-physics mode of construal whereas closed societies are associated with (...)
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  • Contextualist-coaching for complex times.Desley Christine Lodwick - unknown
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