The present issue is a memorial issue for Francisco Varela both as a scholar and as a colleague. Varela passed away in his home in Paris on May 28 2001. He was part of the editorial board of this journal and thus in this memorial issue we would like to look into his heritage. Most of the papers we present have authors that have known and worked with Varela in some period of their and his life: Ranulph Glanville, Louis Kauffman, Andreas Weber. Weber makes the case that Varela’s thinking can provide a foundation for biosemiotics and as such it provides a further foundation for the cybersemiotic project. Most interesting and promising is his comparison with Varela’s concept of the organism and Bruno Latour’s concept of quasi-objects. The other articles all have some relationship to Varela’s elaboration on the work of Spencer-Brown. Using the metaphor of the Uroboros, Marks-Tarlow, Robertson, and Combs explore the notion of re-entry in Varela’s ‘A Calculus for Self-Reference ’ and his contribution to a theory of consciousness. In their articles, Glanville and Kauffman reflect upon their experience working with Varela on joint papers.

The paper presents a discussion of the epistemological and ontological problems of attempts to found information concepts on the often implicit mechanistic idea that the physical sciences hold the key to the nature of reality and information. It is furthermore shown through an analysis of the ethological and the Batesonian understanding of cognition and behavior that it is impossible to remove the fundamental epistemological position of the observer through a definition of information as neg-entropy. Instead Maturana and Varela’s concepts of autopoiesis and multiverse are invoked. But where the idea to derive information from the concept of negentropy is too physicalistic Maturana’s idea of a multiverse seems to be too close to a constructivistic idealism. To develop a more fruitful non-reductionistic world view it is shown that the more pragmatic understanding of physics, where thermodynamics is understood as the basic discipline and mechanics as an idealization, opens for a non-reductionistic con-ceptualization of chaos. Attention is drawn to C. S. Peirce’s conception of pure chance as living spontaneity which is to some degree regular as a realistic but non-reductionistic theory, which comprises a solution to the different world view problems of Bateson and Maturana. A fruitful connection between second order cybernetics and semiotics will then be possible and a bridge between the technical-scientific and the humanistic-social parts of cybernetics can be developed.

From the perspective of second order cybernetics this paper examines in which respects psychology can claim to be a science. It focuses on the limits of mechanistic description in the behavioral sciences. Through the Danish psychologist Iven Reventlow’s works, the article analyzes the use of the Galilean concepts of law in psychology. Reventlow attempts to create basic methods and concepts for a Galilean (law determined) psychology in the tradition of Kurt Lewin through work with animal models in the tradition of ethology. His standard experimental model is the male Stickleback guarding its nest – a small fish in its partly self-created world. Reventlow’s aim is to describe the “behavioral personality” of the organism keeping description and causal analysis and explanation on the behavioural level. To this end he works with a statistical model which do not hide the individuals characteristics by rolling them into an average. In this process, however, he finds that he cannot make a final separation of the organism and the environment. It is not possible to carry through either the mechanistic or the dualistic point of view. This finding is discussed in the light of von Foerster’s and Maturana’s second order cybernetic positions on the observer, observation, autopoiesis and the multiverse. The limitations of these theories carries the analysis further. A realistic, non-reductionistic and constructivistic viewpoint is developed from some of N. Luhmann’s formulations.

This paper discusses how the second order cybernetics of von Foerster, Maturana, Varela and Luhmann, can be fruitfully integrated with Peirce’s semiotics through the bio-semiotics of Hoffmeyer. The conclusion is that what distinguish animals from machines is that they are autopoietic, have code-duality and through their living organization constitutes a biological interpretant. Through this they come to inhabit a new life world: their games of life take place in their own semiotic Umwelt (von Uexküll). It is the biological context and the history of the species and the individual the determine the meaning of signs in the structural couplings that constitutes the channels of communication. Inspired by Wittgenstein’s theory of language games as the context that determines semantic content of the expressions of sentences, we suggest that animals participate in sign games.

This article praises the development of second-order cybernetics by von Foerster, Maturana and Varela as an important step in deepening our understanding of the biopsychological foundation of the dynamics of cognition and communication. Luhmann’s development of the theory into the realm of social communication is seen as a necessary and important move. The differentiation between biological, psychological and socialcommunicative autopoiesis and the introduction of a technical concept of meaning is central. Furthermore, Varela’s development of Spencer Brown’s ‘Laws of Form’ from a dual to a triadic categorical basic structure is considered vital. Finally the paper shows that second-order cybernetics lacks explicit and ontological concepts of emotion, meaning and a concept of signs. C. S. Peirce’s theory is introduced for this purpose. It is then shown that both theories are triadic and second order, and therefore can be fruitfully fused to a cybersemiotics.

Key words: second-order cybernetics, cybersemiotics, philosophy of science, metaphysics, epistemology, ontology, autopoiesis, semiotics, information, cognition, observer

The subject of the article is what the paradigmatic framework for a universal information science or informatics should be and what kind of science we can expect it to be. The mechanistic and rationalistic information processing paradigm of cognitive science is the dominating research program in this research area which is heavily dominated by computer science and informatics. It is pointed out that this logical and mechanistic approach is unable to give an understanding of human signification and its basis in the connotations of biological and social relationships. The paper then discusses – on the basis of previous work – the ontological and epistemological problems of the idea of “information science” and constructs an alternative non‐mechanistic view based on the idea of autopoiesis of second order cybernetics and Peirce’s concept of chaos and evolution. These ideas are related to the cybersemiotic framework for transdisciplinary research of information and communication which the author has developed in other papers. Cybersemiotics is an integration of second order cybernetics, Peirce’s triadic semiosis and Wittgenstein’s theory of language game to a non‐Cartesian cognitive science.

Key words: cognitive science, second order cybernetics, semiotics, information science, ontological foundation, biosemiotics, cybersemiotics, epistemology, chaos, autopoiesis, semiosphere.

This paper summarizes recent attempts by this author to create a transdisciplinary, non-Cartesian and non-reductionistic framework for information studies in natural, social, and technological systems. To confront, in a scientific way, the problems of modern information technology where phenomenological man is dealing with socially constructed texts in algorithmically based digital bit-machines we need a theoretical framework spanning from physics over biology and technological design to phenomenological and social production of signification and meaning. I am working with such pragmatic theories as second order cybernetics (coupled with autopolesis theory), Lakoffs biologically oriented cognitive semantics, Peirce’s triadic semiotics, and Wittgenstein’s pragmatic language game theory. A coherent synthesis of these theories is what the cybersemiotic framework attempts to accomplish.

Key words: cybersemiotics, information science, second order cybernetics, autopoiesis, triadic sign