Søren Brier
Cybernetics and Human Knowing is an international multi- and interdisciplinary journal on cybernetics: the understanding of the self-organization and communication of knowledge in human, artificial, and natural systems, and the understanding of understanding, and its relation and relevance to other interdisciplinary approaches such as semiotics.
This approach is often called the cybernetics of cybernetics or second order cybernetics. The concept is coined by Heinz von Foerster. Here is one of the quotations from: "Observing Systems", 1984 (originally from 1972) in which he formulates the shift from first to second order cybernetics:
"While in the first quarter of this century physicists and cosmologists were forced to revise the basic notions that govern the natural sciences, in the last quarter of this century biologists will force a revision of the basic notions that govern science itself. After that "first revolution" it was clear that the classical concept of an "ultimate science" that is an objective description of the world in which there are no subjects (a "subjectless universe"), contains contradictions.
To remove these one had to account for an "observer" (that is at least for one subject):....
After this we are now in the possession of the truism that a description (of the universe) implies one who describes (observes it). What we need now is the description of the " describer" or, in other words, we need a theory of the observer. Since it is only living organisms which would qualify as being observers, it appears that this task falls to the biologist. But he himself is a living being, which means that in his theory he has not only to account for himself, but also for his writing this theory.
(von Foerster 1984, p.258)
This makes it clear why the works of the biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela on autopoiesis as an understanding of the living, cognition, and languaging has been so important to the development of second order cybernetics, and why Stafford Beer has been so fascinated by biological metaphors in his work on management. Varela sums up the movement from first order cybernetics to second order cybernetics in one of von Foerster's aphorisms:
"First order cybernetics: The cybernetics of observed systems.
Second order cybernetics: The cybernetics of observing systems."
(Varela in von Foerster 1984 p. xviii)
The general notion of observing systems awakens the notions of language, culture, and communication. Second-order cybernetics is a non-disciplinary approach which through the concept of self-reference wants to re-explore the meaning of cognition and communication within the sciences, the social sciences, the humanities, information and library science, and in social practices such as design, education, organization, therapy, art, management, and politics.
One of the major obstacles for practical interdisciplinary thinking today is overspecialization. By this I mean a specialization which has made its own world of knowledge, and has lost interest in how its knowledge can interact in a fruitful way with the other areas of knowledge and related practices. The result is that we see different kinds of knowledge in society fighting about who should have the greatest authority.
A fruitful point of departure seems to be the attitude that none of these knowledge systems in general should be in a position of authority where it does not need to answer critique from the others. It is dangerous and unfruitful to claim that one of them can give all the necessary information. Let me give some examples of how this has been done in several periods in history:
In the classical period of Greece general philosophy tried to dominate empirical science. Most of the philosophers were very sceptical about the value of empirical knowledge and development of technology.
In the Middle Ages the Catholic scholastics had the same position as Islam has today in Iran. The revealed knowledge was the true knowledge and determined the limits and influence of other kinds of knowledge.
In the Soviet Union up until the 1970's dialectical materialism had the same position, with the Lysenko affair as a warning example.
Right now the major problem in our culture seems to be that a certain kind of mechanistic science for a long period has had the major authority and has reduced the influence of the other areas of knowledge. Ethical and aesthetical knowledge, for example, have been reduced to subjective emotional opinions to which no general value can be ascribed.
I believe that - in collaboration with common greed - the nearly absolute dominance and authority of the reductionistic scientistic view of nature and knowledge is one of the reasons for our environmental problems and for our problem of understanding what life, intelligence, and consciousness are. This is a major hindrance for a true ecological thinking.
I think it is important to find a genuinly non-reductionistic interdisciplinary view of knowledge which allows these different kinds of knowledge to interact in a non-ideological way. It is very difficult to change the way we think of the world, of our society and of our own lives. But as Bateson has pointed out, it is the major key to change.
The focus is, as it will be in this journal, on the call for changes in the basic concepts of ourselves, our cultures, world views, values, and understanding of what "genuine" knowledge is, and on the call for a new kind of exchange between theoreticians and practitioners. It is an attempt to bring forth a new integrative and non-reductionistic perspective on the seeming paradoxes of human knowing and to celebrate the self-referential processes that bring such paradoxes about.
A basic feature of this work is the attempt to integrate scientific thinking with ethical and aesthetic perspectives in both theory and practice in an attempt to bridge what C.P. Snow called "The Two Cultures." The scientific endeavour in the post-modern age is becoming increasingly complex and trans-disciplinary. Researchers and practitioners within the fields of the arts and natural, medical, and social sciences are forced together by the new developments in communication and knowledge technologies which have broken the traditional limits of professional knowledge and by the problems arising from the nature of the kind of knowledge itself which we have cherished so far.
The shortcoming of traditional information and communication analysis based on data or information flow theories are raising fundamental problems with respect to the construction and organization of knowledge systems. New concepts of communication which can help us understand and develop social systems such as self-organizing and self-producing networks are needed and so is a deeper understanding of the ethics and aesthetics which are foundational for the existence of these new systems. Instead of communication of information we might talk of jointly actualized meaning.
Work in this direction has been going on for some time in both the American Society for Cybernetics (ASC) and the Danish Academy for Practical Philosophy (DAPP). Both of these organizations have supported the start of the journal in different ways - ASC with funding - and contributed with editors. The journal as such is an autonomous self-organizing knowledge and communication system.
Because of the interdisciplinary character of the journal, articles will generally be written in such a way that readers from other domains can understand them. Authors from a wide range of interests, whose common ground is a passion for interdisciplinary, cybernetic, and semiotic description and explanation, will write with a sensitivity for language which will make their ideas clear and their subject fascinating. Now and then, though, space will be given to more technical papers. Finally we will also try to have a paper on practice or from a practitioner in every issue.
It is our hope that this strategy will make the journal interesting and readable also for those in government and industry, education, therapeutic fields, the different fields of knowledge industry, and information and communication science and practice - in short those who really need this new development of knowing.
The journal will thus be a meeting place for those developing cybernetic and semiotic theory with those doing cybernetics and systemic work.
Every issue will be laid out and illustrated by an artist, whose contributions will be an integral part of the journal. Within this new frame, embodying the creative with the (multi) disciplinary, the journal will have a high scientific standard and integrity - following Gregory Bateson's model of rigor AND imagination. Scientific papers will of course be peer reviewed. Papers by practitioners will be reviewed by their standards. In many issues at least some of the papers will be devoted to a theme.
In this first issue the new president of the ASC, Rodney Donaldson, offers his reflections on the field and on this, its most recent journal. We have further asked people with a long standing within cybernetics and the American Society for Cybernetics to write "elementary introductions on a high level" to second order cybernetics from their own personal views. This brings forth in a spontaneous manner the theme of ethics and second order cybernetics in the articles. In this issue Heinz von Foerster, Ernst von Glasersfeld and Stafford Beer have submitted slightly revised versions of talks they have given on this issue. The former president of DAPP, Ole Thyssen, to write about his work on ethics as second order morality and ethical accounting. In his paper on ethics and accounting, he shows a concrete example of how one can integrate humanistic and cybernetic thought into a tool for leadership. So the main theme of this issue is: "Second order Cybernetics: Ethics and praxis". Finally we have chosen to bring an example of cybernetic discussion of art, cognition, science and our concepis of reality with Pehr Sälströms paper.
In the next three issues of the first volume we will focus on themes of the cybernetic aspects of teaching, the contribution of the study of musical notation to the understanding of cognition and technological developments, and finally a theme on the social construction of meaning.
As Cybernetics & Human Knowing in the spirit of second order cybernetics is a self-organized knowledge and communication system, a lot of people have contributed to bring it forth. Thanks to all the editors that contributed to the process. I hope they will enjoy and participate in the communication system that has emerged. Special thanks to the former president of the ASC Fred Steier for his support and determined work with all aspects of the project including this foreword which bears his touch, to Ernst von Glasersfeld, Heinz von Foerster, and Stafford Beer for so willingly putting their trust, names, and papers behind the project, to Hugh Gash who paid the first subscription, and last but not least to personnel at The Royal School of Librarianship and its director Ole Harbo, who supported me in the difficult times of the birth of a new project which very few believed would ever manifest as a self-organized system.
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