Macy Conferences

The Macy conferences were a set of meetings of scholars from various academic disciplines held in New York under the direction of Frank Fremont-Smith at the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation starting in 1941 and ending in 1960. The explicit aim of the conferences was to promote meaningful communication across scientific disciplines,[1] and restore unity to science.[2] (consilience) There were different sets of conferences designed to cover specific topics, for a total of 160 conferences over the 19 years this program was active;[3] the phrase "Macy conference" does not apply only to those on cybernetics, although it is sometimes used that way informally by those familiar only with that set of events. Disciplinary isolation within medicine was viewed as particularly problematic by the Macy Foundation, and given that their mandate was to aid medical research, they decided to do something about it.[4] Thus other topics covered in different sets of conferences included: aging, adrenal cortex, biological antioxidants, blood clotting, blood pressure, connective tissues, infancy and childhood, liver injury, metabolic interrelations, nerve impulse, problems of consciousness, and renal function. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macy_conferences

The Group Processes Conferences were held between 1954 and 1960. They are of particular interest due to the element of reflexivity: participants were interested in their own functioning as a group, and made numerous comments about their understanding of how Macy conferences were designed to work. For example, there were a series of jokes made about the disease afflicting them all, interdisciplinitis,[29] or how multidisciplinarian researchers were neither fish nor fowl.

As previously mentioned, there is a lack of comprehensive documentation on the Macy Conferences. Part of this derives from the fact that the first five conferences - by all accounts the most lively and energizing - were never formally documented with published proceedings. Part of this derives from the fact that it was not until Steve Joshua Heims undertook his massive research decades after the fact that anyone addressed the Macy Conferences as a historical subject. Even Heims' work, impressive though it is, doesn't bother to give a uniformly detailed historical account of the conferences. This summary is not claimed to provide a comprehensive account of the conferences. It is simply a collated set of basic facts along with such illustrative tidbits as can be gleaned from Heims' The Cybernetics Group, Dupuy's Mechanization of the Mind, and other sources.