Contents:
Volume 6 No. 4, 1999 Søren Brier: Foreword Full Text Wolff-Michael Roth: The Evolution of Umwelt and Communication Abstract John Mingers:Information, Meaning, and Communication:An Autopoietic Approach to Linking the Social and the Individual Abstract Robin Robertson: Some-thing from No-thing: G.Spencer-Brown’s Laws of Form Abstract Yair Neuman: A Difference that makes a Difference: Reflections on Artifact-Mediated-Consciousness Abstract Columns
Louis
H. Kauffman:Virtual Logic — The MetaGame Paradox
Full Text
ASC Pages
Reviews
Birgitta
Bergvall-Kåreborn: Review of Peter Checkland & Sue Holwell, Information,
Sytems, and Information Systems Full
Text
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Information and Communication by Soren Brier The present volume is dominated by three articles that each go deep into some of the core issues of this journal. Wolff-Michael Roth writes about "The evolution of Umwelt and Communication" in the educational context of teaching physics. He fruitfully combines second order cybernetic approaches with language game theory, Umweltslehre and cybersemiotics in a new way. He focuses on the co-evolution of ontologies and language games in the learning process. It is experimentally based on observation of problem oriented group work around certain teaching experiments in physics that have been video monitored. In particular he concentrates on the creation of a common language (game) in the learning process within specific cultural constraints such as teachers, text books, and the experiment and the other students. John Mingers writes an article about "Information, Meaning, and Communica- tion: an Autopoietic Approach to Linking the Social and the Individual" that is a constructive critique of Luhmann’s approach to the concepts of information and communication. Mingers attempts to re-conceptualize the relation between information and meaning, combining autopoietic terms with Habermas’ theory of communication and Dretske’s theory of information and knowledge. This is a new approach he has worked on through several articles, culminating in the present article with a elaborate schema of various levels of organizational closure in different systems. He synthesizes Kenneth Boulding’s work with theories of autopoietic systems and his own further elaborations. This brings forth new important distinctions and considerations in socio-communicative theories. Robin Robertson writes about "Some-thing from No-thing: G.Spencer-Brown’s Laws of Form" explaining how Spencer-Brown created his algebra that satisfies all two-valued systems, including Bool’s algebra, in a very clear way. He then goes on to show how self-reference appears through re-entry in the system in the form of time developed from the primary distinction that made space. Through the work of Varela and Kauffman he then shows how Spencer-Brown’s system, taking the self-reference feedback process in time series, can be evolved into a three-valued system. He rightly points out that this new insight has been overlooked. In the previous issue Ort and Peter pointed out that the limitation of Luhmann’s work in relation to Peirce’s semiotics is its two-valued logical basis. As I have pointed out in previous articles, I see the three-valued logic developed by Varela and Kauffman as a mean to reconcile the opposition between second order cybernetics and semiotics (in Peirce’s evolutionary pragmaticistic triadic form) and integrate them into a bigger whole: cybersemiotics. The last paper of the issue by Yair Neumann reflects on "A Difference that makes a Difference: Reflections on Artifact-Mediated-Consciousness". His point is that not only is consciousness a social phenomenon, it is also a co-genetic phenomenon that may include one or more artifacts. The computer and other artifacts that expand human perception, thinking, calculating and communication also shape our consciousness considerably. I would like to point out that one can look at language as a socially created artifact that penetrates our consciousness and gives it certain forms, limits it in certain ways, but expands it in others. Again we bring columns by Ranulph Glanville musing about art and cybernetics joining efforts and thus finding new inventive ways in "Thinking the new Millennium", relating also to the art-editorial politics of this journal. Louis Kaufmann writes about "The Meta Game paradox" a relative of Russell’s paradox and related to the "Well-founded Set Paradox". The ASC-column delivers a recent interview with Heinz von Foerster, "Invitation to Dance" by Christina Waters, summing up the essence of a life’s work. As promised in the previous foreword, we bring a review of Allan Comb’s book The radiance of Being by Stuart Sovatsky. Finally Birgitta Bergvall-Kåreborn reviews Checkland and Holwell’s Information, Systems, and Informatiom Systems. We thank the artist of this issue, who is Frode Gundorf Nielsen and
to Lawren Bale for the poems.
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