The
process of adaptation operates, as do the adjustments of any selforganizing system, by what cybernetics has taught us to call
negative feedback: responses to the differences between the
expected and the actual results of actions so that these differences
will be reduced. This will produce an increased correspondence of
expectations of the different persons so long as current prices
provide some indications of what future prices will be, that is, so
long as, in a fairly constant framework of known facts, always only
a few of them change; and so long as the price mechanism operates
as a medium of communicating knowledge which brings it about
that the facts which become known to some, through the effects
of their actions on prices, are made to influence the decision of
others
eo i najluđeg
One of the most important of these self-generating orders is the wide-ranging division of labour which implies the mutual adjustment of activities of people who do not know each other. This foundation of modern civilization was first understood by Adam Smith in terms of the operation of feedback mechanism by which he anticipated what we now know as cybernetics. The once popular organismic interpretations of social phenomena, that tried to account for one unexplained order by the analogy with another equally unexplained, has now been replaced by system theory, originally developed by yet another Viennese friend, Ludwig von Bertalanffy, and his numerous followers. This has brought out the common features of those diverse complex orders which are also discussed by information and
communication theory and semiotics.
