Robert Vallée
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Robert Vallée, born on October 5, 1922 in Poitiers (France), is a French cybernetician and mathematician. Professor emeritus at the University of Paris-Nord and president of the World Organization of Systems and Cybernetics (WOSC) , he currently lives in Paris.
Cybernetics (from the Greek word kybernétikè, “art of leading, controlling”) is a discipline which concentrates its interest in the study of auto-regulated systems and includes several scientific disciplines. In the 20th century, great interest was focused on the study of systems which control themselves in an autonomous way. Thus, cyberneticians take inspiration from the human organism, which is able to perceive a change in its environment and to react by building artificial systems.
At the beginning of the 50’s, Robert Vallée wrote his first publications on what he named “opérateur d’observation” (which means in English “operator of observation”). The latter, in the simplest case, allows a cybernetic system to observe the state of its environment and itself. Thereafter, on the basis of these results, a decisional operator will be able to indicate the action to be taken. The two stages of perception and decision are distinguished by “intellectual convenience” , but it is interesting to gather them in a unique operator, known as “pragmatic”. A decision is influenced by the observation of events, but also by past perceptions. That means that, in the observation made at a given moment, traces of past observations are also present. Eventually, these processes follow one another in a loop. Vallée defines the study of this situation with the term “epistemo-praxeology”, underlining the existing link between knowledge (episteme), resulting from observation, and action (praxis). Regarding the observation problem, Vallée is also interested in information theory.
Robert Vallée nourishes also a private interest in sociological problems as well as for history. The first led him to describe a cybernetic creature covering the planet’s surface with its communication network (1952). The idea was taken up (under the name of “cybionte”, 1975) by another author. He has written several texts concerning cybernetics and systems, referring to Descartes, Louis de Broglie and Norbert Wiener.