V. A. Gerovitch

By this author

International conference on the history of Russian science and technology: “Intelligentsia: Russian and Soviet science on the world stage, 1860-1960”

Issue 4 from 01.12.2005

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Man-machine metaphors in Soviet physiology

Issue 3 from 01.09.2002

This article examines several key shifts in the history of Soviet physiology by tracing the changing meanings of contemporary man-machine metaphors. Cybernetic metaphors entered Soviet academic discourse at a time of sharp group divisions in the physiological community. The scientific utility of machine analogies was intertwined with their philosophical and political meanings, and new interpretations of these metaphors emerged as a result of political conflicts and realignment offorces both within the scientific community and in society at large. Orthodox followers of Ivan Pavlov’s reflex theory vehemently opposed cybernetic analogies. They scorned the very idea of comparing the human being to a machine and condemned cybernetics as a variety of philosophical mechanicism and an ideological deviation from dialectical materialism. In their turn, cybernetic physiologists argued that it was the Pavlovian conditional reflex theory which degraded the organism by reducing it to a “reactive automaton,” and thereby fell under the rubric of “classical mechanicism.”

The author interprets the struggle between the orthodox Pavlovians and the adherents of physiological cybernetics as a conflict between two opposing man-machine metaphors in Soviet physiology. The Pavlovian theory was based on the telephone-switchboard metaphor of the higher nervous activity; its adherents internalized this metaphor so deeply that they could no longer see its mechanical nature. The cybernetic physiologists, on the other hand, were fascinated with the complexity and subtlety of physiological models mimicking digital computers and feedback-controlled servomechanisms. By referring to purposeful behavior, which was bracketed out by the orthodox Pavlovians, cybernetic metaphors opened new vistas for research. While both sides accused each other of “mechanistic,” reductionist methodology, they did not see anything “mechanistic” about their own central metaphors. Although on the surfathe Soviet debates over the meaning of cybernetics for physiology always stressed that the organism must not be reduced to a mechanism, Soviet physiology seemed to progress steadily from one man-machine metaphor to another. The constant travel of man-machine analogies back and forth between physiology and technology and the circular modeling of organisms and machines one upon the other has blurred the traditional categories of the “mechanistic” and the “organic” in Soviet physiology, as perhaps in the history of physiology in general.

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