CYBERNETICS & HUMAN KNOWING

Volume 6 No. 1, 1999

Søren Brier: Foreword

Marie Larochelle: Radical Constructivism at Work in Education — An Aperçu

Ernst von Glasersfeld: How Do We Mean? A Constructivist Sketch of Semantics

Leslie P. Steffe: Individual Constructive Activity: An Experimental Analysis

Jacques Désaultels and Wolff-Michael Roth:
Demystifying Epistemological Practice

Angela Calabrese Barton and Margery D. Osborne:
Re-examining Lived Experiences: Radical Constructivism and Gender

Praxis
Joy Murray: Reading the Teacher: Teacher as Multimedia Text in the Classroom Communication Milieu

Columns
Ranulph Glanville: A (Cybernetic) Musing: Encyclopaedias and the Form of Knowing.  full text

Louis H. Kauffman:
Virtual Logic — The Flagg Resolution  full text
 

The artist of this issue is Lone Frydendal
 
 

C&HK Homepage

Subscriptions

Index, forewords and abstracts to back volumes

As we were planning the present (sixth) volume of Cybernetics & Human Knowing news of the sad death of Niklas Luhmann reached us. It is a great loss for the journal to lose such a prominent editor, contributor and colleague. 

In the beginning of the 1990’s I was working with Fred Steier (who was, at that time, president for the American Society for Cybernetics), on the creation of what became Cybernetics and Human Knowing. Around that time I read some of Luhmann’s work. I was fascinated by the way he brought the concept of autopoiesis into the psychological and socio-communicative realms by lifting the concept out of biology and generalizing it. Living systems with any kind of conscious social communicative means were now seen as composed of (at least) three different autopoietic systems: the biological, the psychological and the socio-communicative. They are each closed to each other and can only know each other through inter-penetration. This way the concept of autopoiesis was developed beyond biological science. Luhmann’s work was a fully-fledged trans-disciplinary theory using the concepts of closure, eigen values and autopoiesis, combined with concepts of information, meaning and selection plus a more developed basic philosophy. Here was a unique combination of system theoretical, second order cybernetic and autopoietical thinking in a cultivated mind with an impressive knowledge about the Western philosophical, and philosophy of science, tradition. The only thing I lacked was the sense for biology that you found in Bateson, von Foerster, Maturana and Varela. But you cannot have it all! Later, of course, we discussed whether it would be better to use the term organizational closure on the psychological and socio-communicative level, in order not to devaluate the original biological definition of autopoiesis. Nevertheless it was a daring and very inspiring move from Luhmann.

So I wrote to Luhmann, told him how important I considered his work for the research program behind the journal and asked him to support the journal with papers and to put his name on the editorial board. He kindly said yes to both. His name first appears in the editorial board in vol. 1, no. 4. But even before that, in the journal’s first issue, Ole Thyssen had written a paper drawing on Luhmann’s work. So in 1995 with Ole Thyssen as guest editor we produced a special issue on Luhmann with an English translation of one of Luhmann’s papers plus an interview with him as well as an introductory paper by Thyssen himself and also a paper where he developed Luhmann’s theory into the realm of morality in organizations (Vol. 3, no. 2). This has been one of our most widely read issues.

It was a model explaining the limits of language in the psychological realm and why the body still has its secrets for the pscyhe. Finally it led to the use of the concepts of structural couplings and generalized media in theories of social communication.
 

Luhmann was an original thinker, never afraid to be among the first in an area breaking new ground. He willingly supported others who dared follow after him into the new territory he had opened. I met Niklas Luhmann personally at a seminar in Odense (Denmark) some years ago and was surprised at the low key, gentle and kind appearance of this tremendously productive and intellectually provocative writer. At Cybernetics & Human Knowing  we are very sorry to have to take Luhmann’s name off of the editorial board list. But we hope, in 1999, to produce a special issue in his honor. The theme will be on the relationship between second order cybernetics and semiotics. Luhmann has written a most profound article on this subject. It has recently been translated into English. We will publish this paper in his honor and ask a semiotician to discuss its theories seen from ‘the other side of the fence’.

At our request Professor Dirk Becker has kindly stepped in to fill the empty space on the editorial board.

The present issue has a main section on radical constructivism in educational studies of which Marie Larochelle is the guest editor. In addition to that we have a praxis paper also related to education written by Joy Murray, plus our columns by Lou Kauffman and Ranulph Glanville — the book reviews have had to be postponed to a later issue. The artist in this isssue is Lone Frydendal.