Book chapter
Rosenbrock's Account of Causality and Purpose
A compilation of Howard Rosenbrock's works selected and annotated by Satinder P. Gill.
Gill SP · pp. 101–142
In Gill KS (Ed.), Human Machine Symbiosis: The Foundations of Human-Centred Systems Design. Springer, London.
Introduction
The first extract is taken from Purpose and automatic control, Computing and Control Engineering Journal, March 1992, pp. 88–89, which was addressed particularly to control engineers.
This brief paper is devoted to three propositions:
- For 400 years, science has explained the world by causal relationism by which the past entails the future, and purpose is excluded. In its own terms, this explanation has been incomparably successful, but it has implications for our relationship with nature, and to one another, which are now forcing themselves insistently upon our attention.
- The causal description of the world is not something which follows inevitably from observation and experiment. It is something which we impose upon the world before we begin to study and explain it.
- Practitioners of automatic control are uniquely equipped to understand and appreciate these facts.
These propositions look forward, towards the kind of world which we shall create in the future with the resources of our science and technology. It may therefore seem odd to begin with a reference to the Middle Ages; but ideas have deep roots. It is in medieval thought, and in the scientific reaction against it, that we have to look for the origin of our current scientific outlook.