Literature/1990/Foerster


 * /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 Reprinted with permission from the original unpublished English version."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

 * Second-order cybernetics


 * Heinz von Foerster

Chronology






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.

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?