Books

Books : reviews

David Berlinski.
On Systems Analysis: an essay concerning the limitations of some mathematical methods in the social, political, and biological sciences.
MIT Press. 1976

Berlinksi, a philosophy teacher, takes on Wiener, Forrester, Meadows, and just about every guru of cybernetics and the computer—particularly where these are being used to solve problems in what he calls the “paraplegic disciplines” of sociology, psychology, political science, and management science. Berlinski’s is an extended meditation and an argument for preserving mathematics and other methods in the physical sciences from what he considers their abusers.