CYBERNETICS & HUMAN KNOWING

Volume 6 No. 3, 1999

Søren Brier: Foreword Full Text

Dirk Baecker: Gypsy Reason: Niklas Luhmann’s Sociological Enlightenment Abstract

Niklas Luhmann: Sign as Form  Abstract

Nina Ort and Markus Peter: Niklas Luhmann: ‘Sign as Form’ — A comment Abstract

Burton Voorhees:
Correlational Analysis of Complex Systems Abstract

Columns
Louis H. Kauffman: Virtual Logic — The Matrix Full Text

Ranulph Glanville, Bob Barbour, Michael Schreiber and Stuart Umpleby: A (Cybernetic) Musing: The Millennium Bug Full Text

Reviews
John P. van Gigch: An Introduction to Epistemology 
 

ASC Pages
Pille Bunnell: An Invitation for Conversation and Reflection Full Text

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Index, forewords and abstracts to back volumes

Abstract: That human orientation to the world uses signs, indeed is bound up with signs, has been known and discussed since antiquity. The concept of the sign was first and foremost supported by a certain familiarity: that signs abound in the world was considered common sense. The word ‘sign’ thus designated something that realizes a certain mode of being — an essence — in Being. More precisely, signs serve to make intelligible what is not in itself observable. This is reflected, for example, in the medical usage of the terms semeion and signum. Therefore, signs could be distinguished from other sorts of things and investigated in their specificity. Rhetoric, for instance, distinguished between verba (words) and res (things). This consequently led to a sub-ontology of sign-using beings and, in this context, to an ontology of language. Both knowing names and giving names was thought to require a certain artistry — in particular, a knowledge of the nature of things. And the same holds for writing.