Scientific and Philosophical Origins
The generative sciences originate from the monadistic philosophy of Leibniz. This was further developed by the neural model of Walter Pitts and Warren McCulloch. The development of computers or Turing Machines laid a technical source for the growth of the generative sciences. However, the cornerstones of the generative sciences came from the work on cellular automaton theory by John Von Neumann, which was based on the Walter Pitts and Warren McCulloch model of the neuron. Cellular automata were mathematical representations of simple entities interacting under common rules and parameters to manifest complex behaviors.
The generative sciences were further unified by the cybernetic theories of Norbert Wiener and the information theory of Claude E. Shannon and Warren Weaver in 1948. The mathematician Shannon gave the theory of the bit as a unit of information to make a basic decision, in his paper A mathematical theory of communication (1948). On this was further built the idea of uniting the physical, biological and social sciences into a holistic discipline of Generative Philosophy under the rubric of General Systems Theory, by Bertalanffy, Anatol Rapoport, Ralph Gerard, and Kenneth Boulding. This was further advanced by the works of Stuart Kauffman in the field of self-organization. It also has advanced through the works of Heinz von Foerster, Ernst von Glasersfeld, Gregory Bateson and Humberto Maturana in what came to be called constructivist epistemology or radical constructivism.
One of the most influential advances in the generative sciences came from the development of the cognitive sciences through the theory of generative grammar by the American linguist Noam Chomsky (1957). At the same time the theory of the perceptron was advanced by Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert at MIT. It was also in the early 1950s that Crick and Watson gave the double helix model of the DNA, at the same time as psychologists at the MIT including Kurt Lewin, Jacob Levy Moreno and Fritz Heider laid the foundations for group dynamics research which later developed into social network analysis.
In 1996 Joshua M. Epstein and Robert Axtell wrote the seminal work Sugarscape. In their work they expressed the idea of Generative science which would explore and simulate the world through generative processes.
Michael Leyton, professor of Cognitive Psychology at Rutgers University, has written a book on "generative geometry".
Read more about this topic: Generative Science
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