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2002
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(2002): Love-Hate for Man-Machine Metaphors in Soviet Physiology. From Pavlov to “Physiological Cybernetics”. In: Science in Context 15 (02), S. 339-374. DOI: 10.1017/S0269889702000479
Abstract: This article reinterprets the debate between orthodox followers of the Pavlovian reflex theory and Soviet "cybernetic physiologists" in the 1950s and 60s as a clash of opposing man-machine metaphors. While both sides accused each other of "mechanistic," reductionist methodology, they did not see anything "mechanistic" about their own central metaphors: the telephone switchboard metaphor for nervous activity (the Pavlovians), and the analogies between the human body and a servomechanism and between the human brain and a computer (the cyberneticians). I argue that the scientific utility of machine analogies was closely intertwined with their philosophical and political meanings and that new interpretations of these metaphors emerged as a result of political conflicts and a realignment of forces within the scientific community and in society at large. I suggest that the constant travel of man-machine analogies back and forth between physiology and technology has blurred the traditional categories of the "mechanistic" and the "organic" in Soviet neurophysiology, as perhaps in the history of physiology in general.
Keywords: American Cybernetics, Cold War, cybernetic physiologists, History and Philosophy of Science, Im (wissenschaftlichen) Diskurs, machine analogy, man-machine, mechanistic vs. organic, mechanistisches Weltbild, Mechanizismus, Mensch und Maschine, Mensch-Technik-Relationen (MTR), Metapher, metaphor, Ontologische Differenzierungen: Tier, Mensch, Maschine, Pavlov, Reflexionen über MTR, technische Metaphern
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