Abstract: The early 1980s were a time for rebuilding the American Society for Cybernetics (ASC) after a few difficult years in the 1970s. Basic administrative functions were needed, and a series of annual, national conferences was resumed. Intellectual direction was provided by Heinz von Foerster and his idea of second-order cybernetics. Whereas other societies focused on technical aspects of cybernetics, ASC emphasized theory and philosophy in the biological and social sciences. New information technology was used, and there was close cooperation with scientists in Europe. An ongoing debate has been whether ASC should be a conventional academic society with a variety of special interest groups or a small, revolutionary group that self-consciously seeks to create an alternative to the prevailing view. This article describes my decisions and actions on behalf of ASC during my three years as president and in the years thereafter.

Key words: Second-order cybernetics, artificial intelligence, general systems theory, systems engineering

Context: The term “second-order cybernetics” was introduced by von Foerster in 1974 as the “cybernetics of observing systems,” both the act of observing systems and systems that observe. Since then, the term has been used by many authors in articles and books and has been the subject of many conference panels and symposia. Problem: The term is still not widely known outside the fields of cybernetics and systems science and the importance and implications of the work associated with second-order cybernetics is not yet widely discussed. I claim that the transition from (first-order) cybernetics to second-order cybernetics is a fundamental scientific revolution that is not restricted to cybernetics or systems science. Second-order cybernetics can be regarded as a scientific revolution for the general methodology of science and for many disciplines as well. Method: I first review the history of cybernetics and second-order cybernetics. Then I analyze the major contents of von Foerster’s fundamental revolution in science and present it as a general model for an alternative methodology of science. Subsequently, I present an example of practicing second-order socio-cybernetics from within. I describe some consequences of doing science from within, and I suggest some new horizons for second-order cybernetics. Results: Second-order cybernetics leads to a new foundation for conducting science and offers important contributions for a new way of organizing science. It expands the conception of science so that it can more adequately deal with living systems. Implications: Second-order cybernetics extends the traditional scientific approach by bringing scientists within the domain of what is described and analyzed. It provides models of research processes for when the scientist is within the system being studied. In this way it offers a new foundation for research in the social sciences, in management science, and in other fields such as the environmental sciences or the life sciences. Keywords: Epistemology, general scientific methodology, cybernetics, social sciences, action research, Heinz von Foerster.

Key words: Epistemology, general scientific methodology, cybernetics, social sciences, action research, Heinz von Foerster

This article consists of three parts. In the first part we describe a short history of cybernetics and an effort, which has been undertaken by a group of scientists in the United States and Europe in recent years, to expand the conception of science so that it more successfully encompasses the social sciences. The intent is to aid communication among disciplines and improve our ability to manage social systems. The second part of the article presents an effort in Russia to develop reflexivity theory into a general theory of purposeful, self-developing systems, thus improving our understanding and management of social systems. Understanding Western and Eastern approaches to cybernetics can be difficult because of the very different histories and intellectual traditions of cybernetics in the United States and Russia. The article ends with a comparison of the two approaches to cybernetics, comparing their features side by side. The differences suggest a great potential for ideas from Russian and Western scientists to enrich the further development of cybernetics and science in East and West.

Key words: cybernetics, expanding science, intellectual traditions, second-order cybernetics, social systems, third-order cybernetics.

Open peer commentary on the article “Second-Order Science: Logic, Strategies, Methods” by Stuart A. Umpleby. Upshot: The author makes a strong plea for second-order science but somehow mathematics remains out of focus. The major claim of this commentary is that second-order science requires second-order mathematics.

When cybernetics entered the scene during the forties, high ambitions immediately arose and quite unusual claims were made as compared to those of traditional epistemology: cybernetics would do away with the distinction between ’mind’ and ’body’ (Papert, 1965); it would bring a new interpretation, through the artefact, of the Kantian synthetic a priori; cybernetics would give, following Turing’s approach of computability, a mechanistic sense to Kantian schematism (Dupuy, 1985, pp. 105–106). In this text we shall analyse the statute of that sort of claims. In other words, we shall show what is the relation between epistemological questions which we call classical or theoretical and those occurring within cybernetics, and more in particular in the work of McCulloch. McCulloch was clearly an advocate of experimental epistemology. He emphasized, in contrast with Kant for instance, that the experimental inquiry into the functioning, the emergence and the consequences of knowledge can be important for epistemology in general. Furthermore, we shall inquire how McCulloch’s experimental epistemology may be relevant to classical epistemology. Firstly, we shall discuss the position of McCulloch within cybernetics. Secondly, we shall deal with the meaning of his net of formal neurons and with the meaning of the heterarchic nets. This will allow finally us to illustrate in what sense McCulloch is to be situated outside first cybernetics and how he anticipates second order cybernetics. It will also allow us to show that the experimental epistemology which he defends can get an interpretation beyond the frame of a traditional reductionism. What we are proposing here is a minimalistic interpreta­tion: the epistemology, insofar as it tends to be experimental, doesn’t have to serve as a support for reductionism, but rather aims at pointing out concrete limits within which a theoretical epistemology can be developed.

This article first sketches the transition from first-order to second-order cybernetics. Next it presents an analysis of George Spencer Brown’s Laws of Form. Against this background, Niklas Luhmann’s constructivism is afterwards analyzed in more detail. It is thereby shown how second-order observations “work” within modern society. Relevance: This article presents an analysis of the constructivist position developed by Niklas Luhmann in his late writings.

The enactive approach is usually associated with a revolutionary project that aims to transform in a radical way our understanding of mind and cognition. Bold theoretical moves such as the rejection of cognitive representations or the assumption of a deep continuity between life and mind, among other enactive ideas, justify this perception. Nonetheless, when we assume a broader historical perspective, including the long cybernetic tradition that preceded the emergence of cognitive sciences, the image of the enactive approach looks different. Put in the context of the paradigmatic shift that took place between first-order and second-order cybernetics, especially in the case of Maturana’s autopoietic theory, the enactive paradigm, so I will try to show in this work, appears rather like a conservative or revisionist project. Better said, it appears as a slightly hybrid paradigm, wherein original and progressive elements coexist with revisionist components. The paper aims to offer an alternative interpretation of the enactive approach and contribute to a better understanding of its identity as a research program, and its present and its possible future challenges. Relevance: The paper offers a reconstruction of the historical relationship between autopoietic theory and the enactive approach, and evaluates the internal consistency of the enactive approach.

This thesis is about the ontology of living beings as natural systems, their behavior, and the way in which said behavior, under special conditions of social coupling, may give rise to mental phenomena. The guiding questions of the thesis are: 1) What kinds of systems are living beings such that they behave the way they do? 2) How, through what kinds of mechanisms and processes, do living beings generate their behavior? 3) How do mental phenomena appear in the life of certain living beings? 4) What are the natural conditions under which certain living beings exhibit mental phenomena? To answer these questions the thesis first assumes, then justifies and defends, a Strict Naturalistic (SN) stance with respect to living beings. SN is a metaphysical and epistemological framework that, recognizing the organizational, dynamic and structural complexity and peculiarity of living beings, views and treats them as metaphysically ordinary natural systems; that is, as systems that, from the metaphysical point of view, are not different in kind from rivers or stars. SN holds that if in natural sciences rivers and stars are not conceived as semantic, intentional, teleological, agential or normative systems, then living beings should not be so conceived either. Having assumed SN, and building mainly on the second-order cybernetic theories of Ross Ashby and Humberto Maturana, the thesis answers question 1) by saying that living beings are (i) adaptive dynamic systems, (ii) deterministic machines of closed transitions, (iii) multistable dissipative systems, and (iv) organizationally closed systems with respect to their sensorimotor and autopoietic dynamics. Based on this ontological characterization, the thesis answers question 2) by showing that living beings’ behavior corresponds to the combined product of (i), (ii), (iii) and (iv). Points (i) and (ii) support the idea that living beings are strictly deterministic systems, and that, consequently, notions such as information, control, agency or teleology—usually invoked to explain living beings’ behavior—do not have operational reality but are rather descriptive projections introduced by the observer. Point (iii) helps to understand why, despite their deterministic nature, living beings behave in ways that, to the observer, appear to be teleological, agential or “intelligent”. Point (iv) suggests that living beings’ sensorimotor dynamics are closed circuits without inputs or outputs, where the distinction between external and internal medium is, again, an ascription of the observer rather than a functional property of the system itself. Having addressed the basic principles of living beings’ behavior, the thesis explores the possible origin of (truly) mental phenomena in the particular domain of social behavior. Complementing Maturana’s recursive theory of language with Vygotsky’s dialectic approach the thesis advances, though in a still quite exploratory way, a sociolinguistic hypothesis of mind. This hypothesis answers questions 3) and 4) by claiming that the essential properties of mental phenomena (intentionality, representational content) appear with language, and that mind, as a private experiential domain, emerges as a dialectic transformation of language.

Problem: First-order scientific research is often not aware of the hidden assumptions provided by an epistemological perspective based upon realism. Beyond philosophical considerations about the epistemological foundations, some practical normative implications deriving from them are crucial: in the field of communication and media studies, some scholars criticize media coverage, e.g., on climate change, as biased and distorted from reality. Method: From a constructivist perspective, the article presents a detailed meta-analysis of the course of argumentation provided by two empirical communication studies that follow an objectivist approach. Result: With the help of a second-order research strategy, it is possible to uncover their ontological assumptions and criticize their normative implications. Implications: Social scientists should be careful with normative suggestions for the system under study (e.g., journalists) unless they are applied within these systems themselves.

Key words: Meta-analysis, second-order research, epistemology, communication studies, climate change, bias.

Open peer commentary on the article “On Climate Change Research, the Crisis of Science and Second-order Science” by Philipp Aufenvenne, Heike Egner & Kirsten von Elverfeldt. Upshot: I discuss the concepts of detection and attribution as they are used in scientific discussions about the cause of global warming.