Author S. Gupta

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?).