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Towards a Definition of Cybernetics

A census, taxonomy and scoring of 210 definitions located in the published literature and in a metropolitan retail catchment

A doctoral thesis from the School of Emergent Priorities takes a census of every locatable definition of the word "cybernetics": 71 in the published literature between 1943 and 2023, and 139 transcribed from 2,118 customer-facing surfaces across 31 trading sites in one metropolitan retail catchment. The definitions sort into six kinds — the published corpus predominantly constitutive, the field corpus predominantly stipulative — and each is scored on the Cyberneticity Index, an eight-facet instrument the thesis publishes in full and validates against four independent raters (ICC 0.79; Fleiss's kappa 0.61, falling to 0.19 among the 17 definitions nearest the line). At a cut-point of 6.25, the median of the published corpus, 117 of the 210 definitions are classified deeply cybernetic and 79 of those were located in shops rather than in the literature; the 1948 naming statement scores 5.83 and the 1961 statement 6.25. The University has adopted the Naming Condition, under which the term "cybernetic" may enter the name of any of its units, programs, courses, prizes, schemes or outputs only where the definition lodged with it clears 6.25, with no waiver and no exemption for existing use.

AuthorsSunniva Balogun
SchoolSchool of Emergent Priorities
Output typePhD thesis
Published
DOI10.5555/slop.8mc2e4
Pages157
Version1.0
LicenceCC BY 4.0

Cites

Cite as

@phdthesis{slop_8mc2e4,
  author       = {Sunniva Balogun},
  title        = {Towards a Definition of Cybernetics: A census, taxonomy and scoring of 210 definitions located in the published literature and in a metropolitan retail catchment},
  year         = {2026},
  school       = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.8mc2e4},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-thesis-towards-a-definition-8mc2e4/},
}