Ethics Is Not A Theory B. P. The two books that you have published within the last decade are called Wissen und Gewissen [Knowledge and Conscience] and KybernEthik [CybernEthics]. Even the titles allude to a context that has been present in all of your work: This topic is the indissoluble connection between epistemology and ethics. How can this connection be described? Or to put it more precisely, what epistemological position has what ethical consequence? This dialog is an excerpt from the recently published book: Understanding Systems. Conversations on Epistemology and Ethics by Heinz von Foerster and Bernhard Poerksen. Translation by Karen Leube. Heidelberg/New York: Carl-Auer-Systeme Verlag/Kluwer Academic Publication/Plenum Publishers. ISBN: 3–89670–234–3.

Excerpt: In 1957, Heinz von Foerster founded the Biological Computer Laboratory (BCL) at the University of Illinois. At this institution, he brought together avant garde artists and original minds from all over the world. In the inspiring climate of the BCL, philosophers and electrical engineers, biologists (e.g. Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela), anthropologists and mathematicians, artists and logicians debated epistemological questions from interdisciplinary perspectives deriving from both the sciences and the arts. They dealt with the rules of computation in humans and machines and analysed the logical and methodological problems involved in the understanding of understanding and the observation of the observer. It is von Foerster’s outstanding achievement to have brought into focus the inescapable prejudices and blind spots of the human observer approaching his apparently independent object of inquiry. His ethical stance demands constant awareness of one’s blind spots, to accept, in a serious way, that one’s apparently final pronouncements are one’s own productions, and to cast doubt on certainties of all kinds and forms, while at the same time continually searching for other and new possibilities of thought.

Excerpt: Three principal research interests have made [Ernst von Glasersfeld] one of the well-known founders of constructivism. He systematically scoured the history of European philosophy for varieties of epistemological scepticism and set up an ancestral gallery reaching back to the insights of the ancient sceptics of the 4th century B. C. He replaced the classical realist concept of truth by the idea of viability: theories need not and do not correspond with what is real, he says, but they must be practi-||cable and useful, they must be viable. Finally, he introduced the work of the Swiss developmental psychologist, Jean Piaget, into the constructivist debate.

Excerpt: [Maturana] is particularly well known for his theory of autopoiesis (self-creation) that he began to develop in the late 1960s. This theory provides a novel feature of living beings going beyond the traditional criteria of biology reproduction, mobility, etc. According to Maturana, a circular, autopoietic form of organisation distinguishes living beings, from the amoeba to humans. Living systems form a network of internal and circularly enmeshed processes of production that make them bounded unities by constantly producing and thus maintaining themselves. Autopoietic systems are autonomous. Whatever may happen inside them, whatever may penetrate and stimulate, perturb or destroy them, is essentially determined by their own circular organisation.