Cybernetics is still headline news, and increasingly we hear about its applications to new fields of scientific and industrial endeavour. Stafford Beer's new book Cybernetics and Management is an admirable account on the relation that exist between cybernetics and the problems of management in industry [and]... covers a range of applications that have not previously been dealt with in print.
This book an attempt will be made to outline the principles of cybernetics and relate them to what we know of behaviour, both from the point of view of experimental psychology and also from the point of view of neurophysiology.
The title of the book, The Brain as a Computer, is intended to convey something of the methodology involved; the idea is to regard the brain itself as if it were a computer-type control system, in the belief that by so doing we are making explicit what for some time has been implicit in the biological sciences.
In many ways it is true to say that syntax is mathematical logic, semantics is philosophy or philosophy of science, and pragmatics is psychology, but these fields are not really all distinct.