[opening paragraph]: In early April this year the Conference Problems of Participation and Communication was held in Amsterdam. Two contributions concerned the Year 2000 (Y2K) Problem, also known as the Millennium Bug: the Problem that many computing systems recognise the date partially, by only (for instance) the last two digits of the year – and will, therefore, confuse the year 2000 with the year 1900, with consequent, potentially damaging results. I had been aware of the technical nature of the problem for some years. What I had not thought through were the social and systemic facets. The conference presentations brought home the complacency with which I had been facing the problem. Enquiry amongst other conference attendees indicated that they, too, had been lax in their thinking.

Excerpt: The “nonsense” perpetuated in the scientific convention that there is a world we can know without our being party to that knowing, that there are experiments without experimenters and observations without observers, is certainly re-inforced by the conventions of scientific reportage. How accurate is this image of scientific reportage? What do we actually write (as opposed to state and believe that we write)? Are these conventions actually shibboleths? With the editor’s agreement the three of us have worked together to present an overview of this research, presented within a referential framework of second order cybernetics, and to provide enough literature references to enable the interested reader to further pursue these understandings. Each worked separately at first, and then together in assembling the totality: which is not to say that each of us agrees wholeheartedly with every position taken here. But that is neither necessary, nor necessarily desirable: the process and the outcome are dialogical (or do I mean trilogical?).