W. Ross Ashby Digital Archive. Ross Ashby was one of the original members of the Ratio Club, a small informal dining club of young psychologists, physiologists, mathematicians and engineers who met to discuss issues in cybernetics. The club was founded in 1949 by the neurologist John Bates and continued to meet until 1958. The title of his book "An Introduction to Cybernetics" popularised the usage of the term 'cybernetics' to refer to self-regulating systems, originally coined by Norbert Wiener in "". The book dealt primarily with homeostatic processes within living organisms, rather than in an engineering or electronic context. Earlier, in 1946, Alan
Critical understanding context is not meant in a negative sense; rather it outlines a process of thinking. Critical understanding is used to define the process of formulating and understanding a complex problem or difficult set of ideas. In a general sense, it is, ‘a consequence of men’s [sic] beginning to reflect about their own capacity for reflection, about the world, about their position in the world.’ The notion of critical understanding is closely related to the concept of Critical Thinking, described as, ‘reasonable reflective thinking focused on deciding what to believe or do.’ Critical thinking has also been described as, ‘thinking about