James Corbett on Cybernetics
My comment : That slogan "The purpose of a system is what it does" probably has its origin in Aristotle's De Anima . For Aristotle the soul was three different but interdependent things: the vegetative, the animal and the rational. Plants have a vegetative soul which is how they reproduce, animals have a vegetative soul and an animal soul, and human beings have vegetative, animal and rational souls. The nature of these souls he called their perfection: what they strived to be. This was the teleological purpose or final cause of the soul. So Aristotle was saying that what a system does, when it is functioning properly , is its purpose. The kinds of system the cyberneticists studied were systems which had this teleological, goal-seeking behaviour by virtue of the internal relations of their parts to one another. So when you apply this slogan to what is loosely called "the education system" you are really abusing the terms 'system' and 'purpose'. It...