# Literature/1990/Foerster

Authors :
* A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z &
* /criticism; http://www.stanford.edu/group/SHR/4-2/text/foerster.html
* Origninally, "Opening address for the International Conference, Systems and Family Therapy: Ethics, Epistemology, New Methods, held in Paris, France, October 4th, 1990, subsequently published (in translation) in Yveline Rey and Bernard Prieur, eds., Systemes, ethiques: Perspectives en therapie familiale (Paris: ESF Editeur, 1991) 41-54. Reprinted with permission from the original unpublished English version."

## Authors
### Heinz von Foerster

* He ... worked at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he was a professor of electrical engineering from 1951 to 1975. From 1962 to 1975 he also was professor of biophysics and 1958–75 director of the Biological Computer Laboratory.

## Excerpts

... something strange evolved among the philosophers, the epistemologists and the theoreticians: they began to see themselves more and more as being themselves included in a larger circularity, maybe within the circularity of their family, or that of their society and culture, or being included in a circularity of even cosmic proportions.
What appears to us today most natural to see and to think, was then not only hard to see, it was even not allowed to think!
Why?
Because it would violate the basic principle of scientific discourse which demands the separation of the observer from the observed. It is the principle of objectivity: the properties of the observer shall not enter the description of his observations.

## Wikimedia

| w: Second-order cybernetics | w: Heinz von Foerster |

## Chronology

* Bruner, Jerome (1990). Acts of Meaning (The Jerusalem-Harvard Lectures). Harvard University Press. $^{[^]}$
* Foerster, Heinz von (1990). "Ethics and Second-Order Cybernetics," SEHR, volume 4, issue 2 (1995) Constructions of the Mind $^{[^]}$
* Umpleby, Stuart A. (1990). "The Science of Cybernetics and the Cybernetics of Science," Cybernetics and Systems, vol. 21, no. 1, pp. 109-121. $^{[^]}$
* Winograd, Terry and Flores, Fernando (1986). Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design. Ablex Publishing Corp. $^{[^]}$
* David Bohm (1980). Wholeness and the Implicate Order. London: Routledge. $^{[^]}$
* Lakoff, George & Mark Johnson (1980). Metaphors We Live By. University of Chicago Press. $^{[^]}$
* Maturana, Humberto and Francisco Varela (1980). Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living. Boston: Reidel. $^{[^]}$
* James S. Albus (1979). "Mechanisms of Planning and Problem Solving in the Brain". Mathematical Biosciences 45: 247-293. $^{[^]}$
   The reader should understand ... that any model of neuronal mechanisms of the higher cognitive processes must of necessity involve speculation and metaphorical language. It should also be understood that a multidisciplinary approach to such a large and complex subject cannot avoid a mixing of jargon and an oversimplification of many difficult issues.
* Foerster, Heinz von (1979). "Cybernetics of Cybernetics," in: Klaus Krippendorff, ed., Communication and Control in Society. New York: Gordon and Breach. $^{[^]}$
* Lyotard, Jean-François (1979). The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. University of Minnesota Press, 1984. $^{[^]}$
* McCorduck, Pamela (1979). Machines Who Think. 25th anniversary edition, Natick, MA: A K Peters, Ltd., 2004. $^{[^]}$
   Q: What so-called smart computers do -- is that really thinking? A: No, if you insist that thinking can only take place inside the human cranium. But yes, if you believe that making difficult judgments, the kind usually left to experts, choosing among plausible alternatives, and acting on those choices, is thinking. That's what artificial intelligences do right now. Along with most people in AI, I consider what artificial intelligences do as a form of thinking, though I agree that these programs don't think just like human beings do, for the most part. I'm not sure that's even desirable. Why would we want AIs if all we want is human-level intelligence? There are plenty of humans on the planet. The field's big project is to make intelligences that exceed our own. As these programs come into our lives in more ways, we'll need programs that can explain their reasoning to us before we accept their decisions.
   — From http://www.pamelamc.com/html/machines_who_think.html
* Ortony, Andrew, ed. (1979). Metaphor and Thought, Cambridge University Press. 2nd. ed. 1993. $^{[^]}$
* Rorty, Richard (1979). Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton University Press. $^{[^]}$
* Literature/1979/Umpleby $^{[^]}$
* Literature/1979/Varela $^{[^]}$
* Pool, Ithiel de Sola & Manfred Kochen (1978). "Contacts and Influence." Social Networks, 1, pp. 1-51. $^{[^]}$
* Sacks, Sheldon, ed. (1978). Critical Inquiry, vol. 5, no. 1 (Special Issue: On Metaphor), University of Chicago. $^{[^]}$
* Literature/1977/Dworkin $^{[^]}$
* Gibson, Jame J. (1977). "The Theory of Affordances," pp. 67-82. In: Robert Shaw & John Bransford, eds. Perceiving, Acting, and Knowing: Toward an Ecological Psychology. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. $^{[^]}$
* Literature/1977/Schumacher $^{[^]}$
* Bateson, Gregory & Mead, Margaret (1976). "For God's Sake, Margaret: Conversation with Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead." CoEvolutionary Quarterly (Summer 1976) no. 10, pp. 22-44. $^{[^]}$
* Chisholm, Roderick (1976). Person and Object: A Metaphysical Study. London: G. Allen & Unwin. $^{[^]}$
* Fillmore, Charles J. (1976). "Frame Semantics and the Nature of Language," in: Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences: Conference on the Origin and Development of Language and Speech. Volume 280: 20-32. $^{[^]}$
* Pask, Gordon (1976). Conversation Theory: Applications in Education and Epistemology. New York: Elsevier. $^{[^]}$
* Bobrow, Daniel G. & Allan M. Collins eds. (1975). Representation and Understanding: Studies in Cognitive Science (Language, Thought, and Culture). New York, NY: Academic Press. $^{[^]}$
* Literature/1975/Capra $^{[^]}$
* Douglas, Mary (1975). Implicit Meanings: Essays in Anthropology. Routledge. $^{[^]}$
* Feyerabend, Paul (1975). Against Method: Outline of an Anarchist Theory of Knowledge. New Left Books. $^{[^]}$
* Fodor, Jerry (1975). The Language of Thought. Harvard University Press. $^{[^]}$
* Grice, Paul (1975). "Logic and Conversation," pp. 41-58, in: Cole, Peter & Jerry L. Morgan eds. (1975). Syntax and Semantics, Vol. 3: Speech Act. New York: Academic Press. $^{[^]}$
* Hacking, Ian (1975). Why Does Language Matter to Philosophy? Cambridge University Press. $^{[^]}$
* Kochen, Manfred, ed. (1975). Information for Action: from Knowledge to Wisdom. New York: Academic Press. $^{[^]}$
* Pask, Gordon (1975). Conversation, Cognition and Learning. Elsevier. $^{[^]}$
* Percy, Walker (1975). The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do with the Other. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $^{[^]}$
* Polanyi, Michael & Harry Prosch (1975). Meaning. University of Chicago Press. $^{[^]}$
* Putnam, Hilary (1975). Mind, Language and Reality, Philosophical Papers Vol. 2, Cambridge University Press. $^{[^]}$
* Ricoeur, Paul (1975). The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies in the Creation of Meaning in Language. Robert Czerny, Kathleen McLaughlin & John Costello, trans., London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978. $^{[^]}$
* Schank, Roger C. (1975). "The Structure of Episodes in Memory," in: Literature/1975/Bobrow pp. 237-272. $^{[^]}$
* Searle, John (1975). "Indirect Speech Acts," pp. 59-82, in: Cole, Peter & Jerry L. Morgan, eds. (1975). Syntax and Semantics, Vol. 3: Speech Act. New York: Academic Press. $^{[^]}$
* Sperber, Dan (1975). Rethinking Symbolism. Cambridge University Press. $^{[^]}$
* Wilson, Edward (1975). Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Harvard University Press. $^{[^]}$
* Winston, Patrick, ed. (1975). The Psychology of Computer Vision. New York: McGraw-Hill. $^{[^]}$
* Abramovitz, Robert and Heinz von Foerster (1974). Cybernetics of Cybernetics or the Control of Control and the Communication of Communication (result of a course, fall semester 1973, continued through spring semester 1974, sponsored by a grant from the Point Foundation to the Biological Computer Laboratory, University of Illinois), Urbana, Ill.: Biological Computer Laboratory, 1974. $^{[^]}$
* Pirsig, Robert (1974). Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values. William Morrow & Co. $^{[^]}$
* Geertz, Clifford (1973). The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books. $^{[^]}$
* Literature/1973/Schimacher $^{[^]}$
* Literature/1972/Bateson $^{[^]}$

## Comments

It is a great mystery indeed who on earth among them -- among others than experts of circularity -- was the leader who could convince them of such a revolutionary paradigm shift, often even self-defeating, e.g., March, 1975. When? Suddenly? Why?
It might be around 1975 when the "second-order cybernetics" was coind, and when a great deal of new cognitive theories began to pour out. At the moment, the U.S. for example was perhaps most overcast since 1957 when the Sputnik 1 was launched into the orbit and she was required to spend far more money on advanced research, including computing and AI. The period 1957-1975 must be sunny to the author, either, the 1958-75 director of Biological Computer Laboratory.
Around 1957, meanwhile, George Miller and some others believe the cognitive revolution took place, which looks like the objectivist, positivist, strong AI manifesto (McCarthy, 1955, etc.), aiming to make the dehumanizing, first-order cybernetic "machines that think" as well "as we may think" (Bush, 1945).
While this author and his old student Umpleby (1990) argued for the observer cognitive of the observed, Bruner (1990) scathed the cognitive revolution (since 1956), as claimed by his old Harvard colleague Miller.
   * I want to begin with the Cognitive Revolution as my point of departure. That revolution was intended to bring "mind" back into the human sciences after a long cold winter of objectivism.
   * Some critics ... argue that the new cognitive science, the child of the revolution, has gained its technical successes at the price of dehumanizing the very concept of mind it had sought to reestablish in psychology, and that it has thereby estranged much of psychology from the other human sciences and the humanities.
   * I ... want to turn ... to a preliminary exploration of a renewed cognitive revolution -- a more interpretive approach to cognition concerned with "meaning-making," one that has been proliferating these last several years in anthropology, linguistics, philosophy, literary theory, psychology, and ... wherever one looks these days.
Note "objectivity" Foerster attacked and "objectivism" Bruner did, as done by Pirsig (1974), Polanyi (1975), Gadamer (1976), Schumacher (1977), and many others, in consilience, in concert, in context, around this time, all of a sudden! Why?
* ↑ See the comment above.
* ↑ The observer is the observed. -- Jiddu Krishnamurti (c. 1975), as cited by David Bohm (1980).