p.14 There must therefore always be some governing relation by reference to which the actual course
of affairs may be judged. I will call such governing relations norms.
p.35 1. Identify the minimum number of variables so interconnected that they must be considered
in order to understand the problem and to estimate the probable result of any action or inaction (in other words
identify the simplest relevant system).
2. Identify the minimum number of values which cannot be ignored in deciding what results count as costs
or benefits.
3. Identify the constraints which limit the policymakers' powers of intervention..
4. Identify points of diminishing or increasing return in pursuit of alternative possible policies.
p.40-41 Lawmakers and policymakers are concerned not with goals to be attained once and for all
but with courses; relations to be attained and maintained... Courses are directions which need no terminal point to define
them.
p.43 We can have no viable theory of causation at the human level until we have a workable theory
not only of information but of meaning. This requires a psychology of cognition and value
p.45 It would appear that the objects of attention which our minds can handle are diverse and complex.
p.52 The creature conscious in the first sense is usually attending to something... The act of attention
is selective and excludes more or less completely from consciousness in this second sense whatever is not so focussed.
An immense range of possible objects of attention will remain unconscious in this sense, though a shift of attention
would bring any one of them to consciousness.
p.53 I want first to establish the obvious but often forgotten fact that in reflective activities, mental
activities of which we are not conscious participate and predominate.
p.54 These unconscious processes... enable him [JLJ - the learner] to classify and so recognize the value
actual forms, patterns, gestalten, whether physical or conceptual, when they are presented to him, by reference to schemata
or readinesses to recognize which he has developed. These readinesses in turn are developed by use.
p.56 Thus what I have called the programming of the brain and central nervous system is a complex process;
but the result can be simply represented. What results is a growing set of perceptual and conceptual schemata with which to
organize experience and a set of emotional attitudes towards types of experience so organized. These readinesses
to see and readinesses to value... constitute what I have called an appreciative system
p.62 The regulation of a society... depends on maintaining an appreciative system sufficiently shared and
sufficiently apt to the current situation.
p.63 Every systems engineer knows that problems of control are problems not of energy but of information...
What limits control are problems of organizing information at the receiving end... The regulation of a society, as
of an individual life, depends on the setting of its appreciative system and on its ability so to adjust and maintain this
system as to make control possible even in theory.
p.66 The history of science is a sequence of imaginative leaps, which are later analyzed, refined and sometimes
radically revised by logical processes
p.69 I use the word norm in an unusually wide sense, to cover the criterion
for every judgment which classifies, whether it seems to involve a judgment of fact or value... The best
known, scientifically, are those which turn visual sensory input into perception... In some way not yet fully understood,
[the child's] central nervous system develops readinesses to group together, attend to and recognize aspects of his surroundings...
These readinesses to classify are commonly called schemata... We clearly develop readinesses to recognize...
situations of great generality and complexity
p.74 The capacity for sensory discrimination varies greatly between individuals...
By discrimination in its most general sense I mean the ability to distinguish figure from ground, signal
from noise. It is the basic limitation of any information system.
p.76 I have argued that we know anything at all only by virtue of a system of tacit norms,
developed by individual and social experience, and that this system has the threefold task of guiding action, mediating
communication and making experience meaningful and tolerable.
p.79 Cybernetics has focussed attention fruitfully on the mismatch signal; but the match signal
is equally important.
p.81 All forms of knowing, whether in science, technology, politics, ethics or art,
is the achievement of a dual process of creation and appreciation, dependent on norms, tacit, systematically organized and
in constant change
p.91 Once we credit the brain and central nervous system with powers of appreciation, we
have a formula for explaining action, limited only by the capacity of the organism on the one hand to represent the
course and possible courses of the actual, and on the other hand, to develop standards of approval and disapproval.
p.93 our energies are certainly guided by (amongst other controls) the need to
reduce mismatch signals... When we drive a car, we are not usually controlled by the aim of holding an imaginary
course but by warning signals... We are set not to hold a course but to avoid thresholds... so long as we avoid a
threshold, we can never tell, except as the result of failure, whether it deserved the respect which we accorded to it.
p.94 the experts in artificial intelligence... recognize that the first step in eliciting a cybernetic
signal is to model adequately the relevant aspects of the actual (or the hypothetical); and in some fields,
notably the economic, they have produced complex models which are in daily use.
p.167 Academics advance in their personal careers by excelling in their own disciplines, rather
than by contributing to other disciplines. I know of no case where interdisciplinary work among academics from different
disciplines... has been effective
