Герович Вячеслав Александрович

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.”