Heinz von Foerster Research Papers (original) (raw)

In vielerlei Hinsicht weist das Werk von Friedemann Schulz von Thun konstruktivistische Züge auf. Er selbst negierte das. Diese Bachelorarbeit jedoch zeigt den Mittelweg zwischen Realismus und Radikalem Konstruktivismus auf – und konstatiert, dass Schulz von Thuns Denken eine Dialektik aus beiden Erkenntnistheorien verfolgt, die ferner von der Humanistischen Psychologie und der Systemtheorie durchdrungen ist.

- by
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- Systemtheorie, Humberto Maturana, Heinz von Foerster, Ernst von Glasersfeld

An essay on the effects of media on humanity and its future

- by Lucas Pawlik
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- Technology, Media Studies, Narrative, Storytelling
- by Tim Stott
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- Recursion Theory, Contemporary Art, Performance Art, Second-Order Cybernetics

This column is a journey that considers both the failure of second-order cybernetics (SOC), radical constructivism (RC), and the biology of cognition (BoC) to achieve wide acceptance, particularly in science, and the opportunities for... more

Josef Mitterer behauptet in seinem Vorwort zur Neuauflage des Buchs " Geschichten und Diskurse " vom Haupt-Proponenten des Konstruktivismus in Deutschland, von Siegfried J. Schmidt, dass sich der (Radikale) Konstruktivismus in der akademischen Philosophie nicht durchgesetzt habe, weil diese immer Neuem gegenüber Vorbehalte zeige (vgl. Mitterer 2017, S. 2 ff.). Hier soll eine andere Auffassung vertreten werden: Der Konstruktivismus, insbesondere der Radikale Konstruktivismus, ist so stark von Widersprüchen durchzogen, dass es wohl eher ein Gebot der akademischen Höflichkeit war, von einer ernsthaften Auseinandersetzung bislang abzusehen. Aus ‚pragmatischem' Grund entschied sich die akademische Philosophie für Schweigen. Die Widersprüche sollen in diesem Paper anhand von vier Beispielen herausgearbeitet werden.

- by Stefan Weber
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- Constructivism, Radical Constructivism, Autopoiesis, Second-Order Cybernetics

Die Arbeit diskutiert die Frage, was das ökonomische Feld, und speziell die "Managementlehre", aus Überlegungen der Postmoderne und vor allem der Soziologie Niklas Luhmanns ziehen kann.
"Summa cum laude"-bewertete Dissertation der Hochschule St. Gallen für Wirtschafts-, Rechts- und Sozialwissenschaften vom Juni 1994.
Referent: Prof. Dr. Armin Wildermuth, Ordinarius für Philosophie der Hochschule St. Gallen. Co-Referent: Prof. Dr. Emil Walter-Busch, Professor für Sozialpsychologie und angewandte Sozialforschung, Hochschule St. Gallen.

- by Jan Lentge
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- Management, Friedrich Nietzsche, Postmodernism, Social Systems Theory

aus Lucas Pawlik Wissenschaftspoesie 2009

- by Lucas Pawlik
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- Second-Order Cybernetics, Norbert Wiener, Wissenschaftstheorie, Heinz von Foerster

Context • In this empirical and conceptual paper on the historical, philosophical, and epistemological backgrounds of second-order cybernetics, the emergence of a significant pedagogical component to Heinz von Foerster’s work during the last years of the Biological Computer Laboratory is placed against the backdrop of social and intellectual movements on the American landscape. > Problem • Previous discussion in this regard has focused largely on the student
radicalism of the later 1960s. A wider-angled view of the American intellectual counterculture is needed. However, this historical nexus is complicated and more often dismissed than brought into clear focus. > Method • This essay assembles a historical sequence of archival materials for critical analysis, linked to a conceptual argument eliciting from those materials the second-order cybernetic concepts of observation, recursion, and paradox. > Results • In this period, von Foerster found the “positive of the negative” in the social and intellectual unrest of that moment and cultivated those insights for the broader constitution of a new cognitive orientation. > Implications • As a successful student of his own continuing course on heuristics, von Foerster left the academic mainstream to ally his constructivist epistemology with the systems counterculture. > Key words • Heinz von Foerster, American counterculture, Biological Computer Laboratory, heuristics, pedagogy, cognition.

- by Bruce Clarke
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- Information Theory, Cognition, Second-Order Cybernetics, Heinz von Foerster

Design thinking is not thinking about design, but rather a re-focus on the way we think, about the world in general, and in this cybernetic process the real self can be brought into being. Gramma/topology is the social structuration of a theory-as-ontology framework with the ability to function as a design educational model that could enrich the teaching and learning of design in all its diverse applications. To paraphrase and deconstruct Derrida, I shall call this model gramma/topology; since such a peculiar field-of-knowing does not exist, in any particular form, before the model is used, no one can say with certainty what the outcome would be, but it has a right to existence, a place staked out in advance for both designer-Dasein and design-Dasein.

- by Johann van der Merwe
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- Communication, Self and Identity, Design education, Sociology of Knowledge

The creation of a process ontology for biology is one of the most ambitious and important projects of current philosophy of biology. Process ontology is usually seen as opposing mechanistic ontology which currently dominates biology. However, the terms 'process' and 'mechanistic' are not always clearly defined in current debates. In this paper I provide a new definition of 'mechanism' and 'mechanistic ontology' based on the most abstract definition of 'machine'—von Foerster's 'non-trivial machine' that is related to Turing machine. I argue that the main methods of modeling used in systems biology rest upon the implicit assumption that organisms abide by the non-trivial or Turing machine logic. By showing that organisms and machines obey two incompatible logics of causality I demonstrate the limits of this assumption. The paper concludes by introducing an organism centered concept of process and arguing that Whitehead's process metaphysics offers a way of understanding organisms as exemplifications of a specific category of process.

My commentary has three aims. Firstly, to provide additional support to Konrad Werner’s correct insight that radical constructivism is based on a radical distinction between experienced reality and ontological reality. This is a strong metaphysical statement. Secondly, that radical constructivism is implicitly rooted in Cartesian ontological dualism. Thirdly, that Whitehead’s process ontology provides a fruitful foundation for Werner’s thesis that perceptions are metaphysically significant.

“Heinz von Foerster’s Demons: The Emergence of Second-Order Systems Theory” examines some of the prehistory of neocybernetics by reading von Foerster’s key 1959 paper on self-organization through the hindsight of his early-1970s work that launched second-order cybernetics proper. Not one but two Maxell’s Demons bind thermodynamic to informatic self-organization in the 1959 paper, and his own creation, the Man with the Bowler Hat, links that earlier paper with “On Constructing a Reality” of 1973, by way of contrasting the singularity of metaphysical solipsism with the multiplicities of epistemological constructivism. Not only does it take multiple Demons to conceptualize negentropy in informational systems; it also takes the co-construction of at least two operationally-closed observers to produce a reality: “reality appears as a consistent reference frame for at least two observers.” The concluding section of the essay unfolds this powerful statement from the 1959 paper as a prefiguration of the neocybernetic concept of reentry, by which the systems/environment dyad recurs upon and ramifies within the system itself. In Luhmann’s theory, the dyad of mutually closed psychic and social systems is capable of interpenetration and meaningful resonance just because they share this same paradigmatic operation, becoming “two observers” that construct out of their coupled autonomies the world as a reference frame for psychic and social realities.

- by Bruce Clarke
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- Constructivism, Cybernetics, Systems Theory, Niklas Luhmann
- by Philippe Gagnon
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- Raymond Ruyer, Doctrine of Creation, Chance, Heinz von Foerster

I set out a possible framework for a designerly theory of knowing, called gramma/topology, a framework that is simultaneously a framing action in real time; it is a means towards an end. However, this model-of-knowing-and-exploring, projected onto the world, becomes a unique construction that may look the same (to an observer), but differs in use from person to person like fingerprints. The main part deals with the theoretical and philosophical inputs that provide the core of what can become gramma/topology, an argumentative theory in search of both epistemological and ontological ways of knowing. After a short summation, and as an example of my own gramma/topological reasoning I discuss the structure of a cybernetic design conversation, including Heidegger’s notion of the ontology of equipment, and end with Aristotle’s defense of arguing to first principles.

- by Johann van der Merwe
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- Communication, Self and Identity, Design education, Aristotle

I launch our day-long workshop on artist and impresario György Kepes, in particular his Vision + Values Series, with the terms " cybernetics " and a " cybernetics of cybernetics. " I explore how these ideas unfold in various places within Kepes's publishing exploits, both within and beyond the V+V Series. I do so not foremost according to objects, artworks or artefacts, arguing that the publishing endeavors of Kepes might be construed as cybernetic because of, say, the interactive and kinetic nature of work by George Rickey and Naum Gabo, or, say, the ecological processes inherent in the work of Robert Smithson or PULSA. While possible, as all figures elicited contributed to Kepes's books, I will not pursue definitions in this way. Rather, I define said terms according to the words published in Kepes's anthologies – by way of the writers in his collective stable of thinkers, their style of writing, and the language they used. Thus, what follows is an argument for the cybernetics of Kepes's work based on a close reading of the text as artefact. If cybernetics is the science of observed systems, second-order cybernetics is the science of observing systems: which is to say, first-order cybernetics is based on the logic of watching, creating, and organizing systems from a stable locus outside of the system while second-order cybernetics is based on the observer located within the dynamic system, affected by and affecting the system through the act of observation. The latter, the subject/observer of second-order cybernetics, is thus molding, molded by, and participating within the self-organization of a given system.

- by Charissa Terranova
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- Art and Science, Second-Order Cybernetics, Gyorgy Kepes, Heinz von Foerster
- by Lucas Pawlik
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- Neuroscience, Narrative, Cybernetics, Storytelling

Wissenschaftlicher Erkenntnis wohnt der Nimbus der unantastbaren Unfehlbarkeit inne. Wissenschaftliche Theorie, so wird angenommen, basiert auf objektiv feststellbaren Tatsachen, die mithilfe objektiver Methoden einer ebenfalls objektiv erfassbaren Wirklichkeit abgewonnen werden. Als mutmaßlich neutrale Beobachter sind Wissenschaftler (Subjekt) scheinbar imstande, die in der Realität vorkommenden Phänomene (Objekte) mithilfe einer geschulten Wahrnehmung und einer theoriegeleiteten Argumentationsstruktur zu erklären. Oft wird dabei indes übersehen, dass jeder Prozess des Erkennens an die Instanz des Erkennenden gebunden ist. Objektivität wird Sachverhalten folglich von Seiten eines Subjekts, bspw. dem Wissenschaftler, zugeschrieben, dem wiederum die Fähigkeit unterstellt wird, selbst ein objektives Urteil über den Sachverhalt fällen zu können. Doch ein Subjekt bleibt in seiner Meinung stets subjektiv. Wahrheit ist daher auch im wissenschaftlichen Diskurs eine Mär – diese These ist konstruktivistisch.

- by Marcel S.
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- Karl Popper, Thomas S. Kuhn, Falsifiability, Wissenschaftstheorie

In this thesis I have explored some of the ways in which the contexts of epistemology, ethics and designing architecture are each concerned with undecidable questions (that is, with those questions that have no right answers). Drawing on design research, second‐order cybernetics and radical constructivism, I have understood this undecidability to follow in each case from our being part of the situation in which we are acting. This idea is primarily epistemological (being part of the world we observe, we cannot verify the relationship between our understanding and the world beyond our experience as it is impossible to observe the latter) but can also be interpreted spatially and ethically. From this starting point I have developed connections between questions in architecture, epistemology and ethics in two parallel investigations. In the first, I have proposed a connection between design and ethics where design is understood as an activity in which ethical questioning is implicit. Rather than the usual application of ethical theory to practice, I have instead proposed that design can inform ethical thinking, both in the context of designing architecture and also more generally, through (1) the ways designers approach what Rittel (1972) called “wicked problems” (which, I argue, have the same structure as ethical dilemmas) and (2) the implicit consideration of others in design’s core methodology. In parallel to this I have explored the spatial sense of the idea that we are part of the world through a series of design investigations comprising projects set in everyday situations and other speculative drawings. Through these I have proposed reformulating the architectural theme of place, which is usually associated with phenomenology, in constructivist terms as the spatiality of observing our own observing and so as where the self‐reference of epistemology (that we cannot experience the world beyond our experience) becomes manifest.

- by Ben Sweeting
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- Ethics, Epistemology, Design, Architecture
- by Bruna Valotta
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- Ethics, Cybernetics, Edgar Morin, Gregory Bateson

This paper explores a potential relation between architecture and ethics intrinsic to design processes when understood in terms of dialogue or conversation. We draw on separate but related research interests: one focused on the design process, especially the significance of drawing, and the other on the ethics of designing for the public realm, with reference to Bakhtinian dialogism. Our investigation concentrates on two aspects of the design process both of which can be thought of in terms of conversation – first, the relation between architect and Other, and second, the act of drawing. Through this, we support the idea that in design the ethical and the aesthetic cannot be meaningfully separated from one another. Instead, their relation must be understood as a dialogue in and of itself, as well as part of the dialogue between all participants in the design process.

- by Ben Sweeting and +1
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- Ethics, Design, Architecture, Cybernetics
- by Helena Knyazeva
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- Epistemology, Constructivism, Cybernetics, Radical Constructivism

Starting from Carl Rogers hypothesis, that if therapy can activate coping capacities of the clients, same methods could improve in generell teaching-learning situations, the author defines requirements for scientific grounded... more

- by Arnd-Christian Kulow
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- Bertrand Russell, Willard Van Orman Quine, Gottlob Frege, Alfred Tarski

Introduction and Prologue on why 2nd Order social Cybernetics has gone down the wrong rabbit hole for 40 years. To advance and actually accomplish Heinz von Foerster's stated objective of a 2nd order therapeutic Cybernetics to overcome 2nd order pathologies of society requires that we move beyond academic in fighting and post-modern deconstructionism. The observer/observed distinction is non trivial but the framing and language around it is trivial, inconsequential and destructive. The paper proposes three unique methodological portals to enter the world of observer dependent phenomenon, bypassing the linguistic trap of trying to introduce an observer into the domain of "observer independent" science. Experience is the breach in the fabric of command and control and the scientific paradigm. There is a bread crumb trail starting with understanding experience as seen by John Dewey, leading to education with Jerome Bruner , which lead to epistemology and knowledge of Kenneth Boulding and his ideas of a new science of the image, on wards to the works of Gregory Bateson detailing ecology and evolution. Riding the line of argument of the five "E's" Experience, Education, Epistemology, Ecology and Evolution we can leave the rabbit hole of second order cybernetics. Based on 35 years of large scale social Cybernetic experiments, the author proposes three avenues of continued research with the goal of improving the 1) ability to critique current human made and natural systems beyond post modern deconstructionism or reversion to Marxian/Freudian models, 2) provide the thinking and therapeutic tools to redefine who system problems and 3) ability to discern virtuous interactions from vicious cycles in order to build better worlds.

- by Lowell Christy
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- Cybernetics, Human-machine Systems, Cybercultures, Heinz von Foerster
- by Lucas Pawlik
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- Philosophy of Science, Psychotherapy and Counseling, Systems Thinking, Ecology

Von Foerster's concept of Eigenbehavior can be recognized against the broader context of enactivism as it has been advocated by Varela, Thompson and Rosch, by Noë and recently by Hutto and Myin, among others. This flourishing constellation of ideas is on its way to becoming the new paradigm of cognitive science. However, in my reading, enactivism, putting stress on the constitutive role of action when it comes to mind and perception, faces a serious philosophical challenge when attempting to account for the way we actually perceive our environments, most importantly for the fact that we perceive things or objects. Von Foester's Eigenbehavior is understood here as a concept supposed to take on this challenge.

- by Konrad Werner
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- Metaphysics, Ontology, Constructivism, Enactivism
- by Alberto Cevolini
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- Cultural Studies, Information Retrieval, Archival Studies, Library Science

Abstract: This paper introduces stories as a link between culture and evolution. It elaborates how the decline of interhuman communication leads to a loss of perception, capability for cooperation, and human intelligence and contributes to the current ecocide. It shows how cybernetics hacked the relationship between evolution and machine development, which brought forth the outlines of man’s current digital transformation and future. It suggests that Lucas Pawlik is still working on a possible sustainable future for humanity that Heinz von Foerster tried to initiate.

- by Lucas Pawlik
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- Education, Storytelling, Second-Order Cybernetics, Digital Education

At first, it was by no means easy to write the "Forget the observer" experiment. Heinz von Foerster was the person who had answered most of the questions that had moved me from my early childhood on: the meaning of numbers and language, the role of intentionality in observation, and many other issues. He had tackled the questions of identity and understood living systems and self-organization mostly by means of western thinking into which he playfully integrated Taoist thoughts which again were closest to my heart. At the time he asked me to write about self-reference and the meaning of language I had also realized that he was struggling with death-which put me into the extremely awkward situation of having to say goodbye to someone I had just met, but to whom I felt a connection as if I had known him for all my life, a kindred. I can still remember when I told him about my discovery of the second order of spontaneity. Thinking in second-order terms, a person is not bound by Watzlawick's "Be spontaneous!" paradox as "spontaneity" is a label given to people whose behavior varies unpredictably. In other words, there is a box for all the behavior that cannot be put in a box and that is "spontaneity."

- by Lucas Pawlik
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- Daoism, Cybernetics, Heinz von Foerster

The purpose of this paper is to show cybernetic dynamics in traditional eastern philosophy and the richness and interconnectedness of their cybernetic metaphors. The focus will be laid on the works of Lao Tse and Chuang Tzu whose intention, as I will present, lies in clarifying the relation of form and formlessness in the way the appreciation of the composition process itself, its beauty 妙(miào; excellent, beautiful), is maintained. The result of this will be an adequate way of dealing with knowledge and definitions which does not rely on any particular form or definition, a way of handling these matters without depending on any particular something.

- by Lucas Pawlik
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- Future Studies, Epistemology, Logic, Daoism

Literature exztract from:
F. Heylighen: Principles of Systems and Cybernetics: -an evolutionary perspective
A set of fundamental principles for the cybernetics domain is sketched, based on the spontaneous
emergence of systems through variation and selection. The (mostly self-evident) principles are:
selective retention, autocatalytic growth, asymmetric transitions, blind variation, recursive systems
construction, selective variety, requisite knowledge and inclomplete knowledge. Existing systems
principles, such as self-organization, "the whole is more than the sum of its parts", and other from
noise can be reduced to implications of these more primitive laws. Others, such as the law of
requisiete variety, the 2nd law of thermodynamics, and the law of maximum entropy production are
clarified, or restricted in their scope.
Unfortunateley, the few generally used principles, such as the law of requisite variety, or the principle
that the whole is more than the sum of its parts, are typically ambiguous or controversial, and lack
coherence with each other.
The present work purports to start a general examination of principles of cybernetics and systems,
within the framework of the Principia Cybernetica Project. The Principia Cybernetica philosophy is
evolutionary: systems and their cybernetical organization are constructed through the selforganizing
process of blind variation and natural selection. This process functions as a skeleton interconnecting
all principles.
The study will on the one hand critically assess existing principles, clarifying their meaning, on the
other hand try to formulate new principles which may generalize or interconnect known laws. The
ultimate goal is to arrive at a network of concepts and principles similar to a formal system, with
"axioms" implicitly defining primitive concepts, definition of higher order concepts, and "theorems",
derived from the more primitive axioms and definitions. The fundamental principles, like all good
axioms, are supposed to be self-evident, if not tautologous. Their implications, like the most
theorems, on the other hand, may be far from trivial, and sometimes even counter-intuitive.

- by Manfred Bundschuh
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- Epistemology, Cybernetics, Systems Theory, Philosophy of Cybernetics

Todo lo que siempre quiso saber sobre Redes neuronales y nunca se atrevió a preguntar. Genealogía de los dispositivos conexionstas. El caso del perceptrón. Todas las clases de redes neuronales, excepto las redes generativas profundas creadas en la segunda década del siglo XXI a caballo de nuevas técnicas de aprendizaje profundo, protagonistas del nuevo boom de la Inteligencia Artificial.

- by Bruna Valotta
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- Cybernetics, Edgar Morin, Heinz von Foerster, Cogito

publiziert in Pawlik 2009 - Wissenschaftspoesie

Vorsätze: Es ist wie das Leben-ein Spiel, dessen Zweck darin besteht, die Regeln herauszufinden, wobei sich die Regeln andauernd verändern und immer unentdeckbar bleiben. 1 Die Prophezeiung lautet nicht, dass der Mensch, wenn er bei der Transformation dieser Regel folgt, das herausbringen wird-sondern, daß er, wenn wir sagen, er folge der Regel, das herausbringen werde. 2 4.1.1. Einläutung der Zukunft Rechtzeitig zum Beginn des neuen Jahrtausends beginnen wir unsere Kräfte erneut zu sammeln, um für eine weitere Periode der Entwicklung von Verfremdungsverfahren den Anstoß zu geben. Ich wähle bewusst einen solchen Beginn, weil ich der Meinung bin, dass es keinen Sinn hat, in einer Zeit wie dieser allzu bescheiden zu sein. Im Gegenteil, in einer Zeit, die von rasanten Veränderungen und gesellschaftlicher Desorientierung geprägt ist, halte ich es für eine Pflicht, Vorschläge zu machen und, wenn man von deren Sinnhaftigkeit überzeugt ist, sich Gehör zu verschaffen, um 1 Bateson (1981) 2Wittgenstein (1989).

- by Lucas Pawlik
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- Epistemology, Bertolt Brecht, Gregory Bateson, Wissenschaftstheorie
- by Lucas Pawlik
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- Philosophy of Science, Performing Arts, Daoism, Narrative

A summary of Lucas Pawlik's Wissenschaftspoesie 2009

- by Lucas Pawlik
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- Epistemology, Systems Thinking, Gregory Bateson, Second-Order Cybernetics

Erkennen Verstehen Verändern Friedrich Fexer, Widerstandsforschung und die Notwendigkeit der Transformation unseres Bildungssystems 1.Erkennen: Wenn junge Menschen unter Einsatz ihres Lebens Flugblätter verteilen, und trotz des gewaltigen Drucks des Hitlerregimes versuchen mit anderen in Dialog zu treten und zu informieren, drückt dies einen Glauben und eine Hingabe an die Notwendigkeit der Bildung aus, den die meisten Menschen bereits verloren haben. Gerade deswegen ist die Einsicht, dass Bildung kein Recht oder Privileg, sondern eine Notwendigkeit ist, selbst eine Notwendigkeit.

- by Lucas Pawlik
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- Bildung, Heinz von Foerster, Zeitgeschichte, Digitalisierung
- by oscar meza
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- Epistemology, Perception, Cybernetics, Autopoiesis

Designing the process of exploring affords a way of improving the process of designing itself. Ranulph Glanville was concerned with change--specifically, change within individuals and groups that comes about through a circular process of conversing and reflecting that leads to new understandings that lead to new ways of experiencing that lead to conversing and reflecting; in other words, a process of acting that requires reflective practice (Schön, 1983).

- by Robert Martin
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- Musical Composition, Design Theory, Heinz von Foerster, Reflexive practice