Chapter 16: Knowledge Cybernetics and Social Behavior

This book was inspired by the work of Eric Schwarz and his cybernetics theory of Viable Systems. From this we created a Social Viable Systems (SVS) theory that is more epistemologically orientated that the principally ontological work of Schwarz, sufficient to define a social paradigm of the autonomous social collective. In developing this theory two realizations have emerged. The first is that the coupling of the ontology and epistemology has led to the theory of what we call knowledge cybernetics. The second is that in order to formulate this theory we have had to develop the idea of migration, of which knowledge migration is an illustration. The development of the concept of migration has itself demanded a new way of discussing relationships, and the result is what we might call the embryonic theory of context. In the introduction to this book we said that the term migration is relatable to contexts. A global context is relative to an autonomous system, and it can be related to its local sub-contextual domains. An illustration of how this can work is provided in Table 14.3.