Stuart Umpleby

Life

Umpleby studied engineering, political science and communications at the University of Illinois, where he worked in Heinz von Foerster’s Biological Computer Laboratory and took courses with W. Ross Ashby. He also worked on early computer-based education and computer conferencing at Illinois. In 1975 he joined George Washington University in Washington, D.C., where he taught in the Department of Management for decades.

Influences

Von Foerster and Ashby gave him second-order cybernetics and the theory of regulation. The systems thinking of C. West Churchman and Russell Ackoff shaped his work on management, and the financier George Soros’s theory of reflexivity in markets gave him a bridge between cybernetics and economics.

Contributions

Umpleby has argued that the social sciences need a reflexive theory of knowledge, because social theories change the systems they describe. He has used second-order cybernetics to compare scientific paradigms, and has written widely on the history of cybernetics and on its organisations.

In the 1980s he helped organise a series of meetings between American and Soviet scientists on systems and cybernetics, part of the late Cold War scientific exchanges. He has served as president of the American Society for Cybernetics and received its Wiener Gold Medal in 2007.

Why it matters today

Reflexivity, the way forecasts, ratings and models change the behaviour they describe, is now a practical problem in finance, social media and AI. Umpleby’s work offers a cybernetic vocabulary for it.

Further reading

• Stuart A. Umpleby, “The Science of Cybernetics and the Cybernetics of Science”, Cybernetics and Systems (1990)
• Stuart A. Umpleby, “Reflexivity in Social Systems: The Theories of George Soros”, Systems Research and Behavioral Science (2007)