Von Foerster’s ideas
On our
knowledge of reality and second order cybernetics
Copyright 2017 Graham Berrisford. One of more than 100 papers on
the “System Theory” page at http://avancier.website. Last
updated 30/09/2019
16:32
Thinkers like Ackoff, Beer and von Foerster were wise men with good advice to offer people.
Arguably however, they and other thinkers in 1970s undermined the concept of a system.
Many today refer to ideas found in von Foerster’s second order cybernetics.
The first part this paper argues some are truisms (axiomatic in modern science) yet also misleading.
The second part argues other ideas are questionable or mistaken.
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Contents
PART
ONE: Axiomatic ideas - related to knowledge and truth
Knowledge
is a biological phenomenon
Each
individual constructs his or her own model of reality
On
subjectivity and objectivity
The
hermeneutic principle of communication?
Do
we need a theory of the observer?
System theory - recap
Here, the word “entity” means “an observable or conceivable part of the world”.
It could be a planet, a hurricane, a group of people, or a performance of a symphony.
In his work on cybernetics, Ashby urged us not confuse an entity with any abstract system that the entity realises.
“At this point we must
be clear about how a "system" is to be defined.
Our first impulse is to point at [some
real-world entity] and to say "the system is that thing there".
This method, however, has a fundamental
disadvantage: every material object contains no less than an infinity of
variables and therefore of possible systems.
Any suggestion that we should study
"all" the facts is unrealistic, and actually the attempt is never
made.
What is necessary is that we should pick
out and study the facts that are relevant to some main interest that is already
given.” (Ashby 1956)
Ashby, Ackoff, Checkland and other systems thinkers emphasise
that a system is a perspective of a reality.
They distinguish abstract and concrete systems.
|
The
basis of system theory |
|
Abstract systems (descriptions) <create
and use>
<represent> System
thinkers <observe and envisage > Concrete systems (realities) |
A concrete system
(in reality) is any entity that conforms well enough to an abstract system (in
description).
An abstract system is a description or model of how some entity behaves, or should behave.
An abstract system does not have to be a perfect model of the entity described; it only has to be accurate enough to be useful.
General system theory is general in the sense of being cross science.
Systems thinking can and should be an application of the scientific method.
An abstract system is a theory.
We can and should test that a real-world entity empirically exemplifies that theory - to the degree of accuracy we need for practical use.
And steer people away from the anti-science “relativism” that many social systems thinkers fall into.
Classical cybernetics -
recap
Cybernetics is the science of how a system (be it biological or mechanical) can be controlled.
It addresses how a
control system (via an input-output feedback loop) can control at least some
activities in a target system.
Information is encoded in flows or
messages that pass between systems.
A control system:
·
receives
messages that describe the state of a target system
·
responds
by sending messages to direct activities in the target system.
Information feedback loops are found
in both organic and mechanical systems:
·
A
missile guidance system senses spatial information, and sends messages to
direct the missile.
·
A
brain holds a model of things in its environment, which an organism uses to
manipulate those things.
·
A
business database holds a model of business entities and events, which people
use to monitor and direct those entities and events.
·
A
software system holds a model of entities and events that it monitors and
directs in its environment.
For more on cybernetics, read Ashby’s
ideas.
Second order
cybernetics
“Second-order cybernetics” was developed around 1970.
It was developed and pursued by thinkers including Heinz von Foerster, Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead.
It is said to be the circular or recursive application of cybernetics to itself.
It shifts attention from observed systems to the observers of systems.
It is often applied to human societies or businesses.
In those contexts, a system’s actors can also be system thinkers, who study and reorganise the system they play roles in.
Unfortunately, second order cybernetics tends to lead people away from classical cybernetics.
A common issue in discussion of systems is the one Ashby warned us of – the confusion of real-world entities with systems.
In much systems thinking discussion there is little or no recognition that:
· one entity can realise several (possibly conflicting) systems at the same time
· there is a need to verify an entity behaves in accord with a system description
Seeing the world as a duality of systems and observers is naive.
Classical cybernetics gives us a more sophisticated triangular view.
A concrete entity is a system only when and in so far as it realises a testable system description.
The observer(s) of a real word entity may abstract countless different (possibly conflicting) systems from its behaviour.
Referring to every entity, every social network, as a system, is naïve.
Observers may well discuss an entity (it properties, problems and possibilities) without reference to any system.
Moreover, discussion of system change often confuses two kinds of change or adaptation.
In classical cybernetics, a system responds
in a regular way to changes in its environment or another (coupled) system.
The term adaptation usually means system state change - changing state variable values in response to events.
The trajectory of a system’s state change (be
it oscillating, linear, curved or jagged) is an inexorable result
of the system’s rules.
Second-order cybernetics is often applied to thinking about social organisations.
Here, the term adaptation often means system mutation or evolution – changing the system’s state variables, roles and rules.
This
changes the very nature of the system; it changes its laws.
The
trouble is that continual adaptation or reorganisation of a system
undermines the general concept of a system – which is regularity.
Consequently, second-order cybernetics tends to undermine more general system theory.
If we don't distinguish an ever-evolving social network from the various modellable systems it may realise, the concept of a system evaporates.
He is widely credited as the originator of
“second-order cybernetics.”
Followers
of this school of systems thinking often refer to the quotes below.
“Knowledge is a biological
phenomenon” (Maturana,
1970).
“Each
individual constructs his or her own reality" (von Foerster, 1973).
"The environment as we
perceive it is our invention." (von Foerster, 2007).
“Knowledge "fits" but does not "match" the world
of experience” (Glasersfeld, 1987).
“All experience is subjective
(Gregory Bateson).
"Objectivity is the delusion that
observations could be made without an observer." (von Foerster).
Do these ideas mean we should endorse relativism
or perspectivism?
Must we say that knowledge and truth exist
only relation to a particular culture, society, historical or bounded context?
This paper explains how system theory
addresses this question - with passing references to Nietzsche and Wittgenstein.
For extensive analysis of the quotes above,
read “The
philosophy of systems”.
In short, all the quotes
are both true and misleading.
Knowledge is not restricted to one biological
entity, since social animals do, successfully, share knowledge of the world.
Sharing and testing the knowledge we acquire
from experience can assure us it is objective to the degree we need.
We can and do verify the knowledge that we
construct - socially, logically and empirically.
The ideas above are neither
unique to, nor a justification of, second order cybernetics.
They
are perfectly compatible with Ashby’s first order cybernetics, and with a
Darwinian analysis of how animal intelligence evolved.
They might be extended thus.
·
Knowledge is a biological phenomenon - there was
no description before life.
·
Knowledge "fits" but does not
"match" the world of experience - a description is a reality, but not
the reality it describes.
·
Each individual constructs his or her own
reality - our mental models are bio-chemically distinct and different.
The trouble is that these quotes can lead
some towards a kind of "relativism" that undermines science.
Other well-known quotes can lead people to
the same conclusion.
"All experience is subjective." Gregory Bateson.
For sure, but readers of this quote may
mistakenly conclude that everything we believe, since it is subjective, is
equally valid.
How do we find food and eat it if we have no
objective-enough knowledge of the world?
For
sure, there could be no observations before observers, and no description
before life.
However,
readers of this quote may mistakenly conclude there can be no objectivity in a
description of reality.
How
many subjective interpretations can different observers make of Newton's f = ma
or Einstein's e = mc2?
Treating
objectivism/subjectivism as a dichotomy is problematic - it hinders more than
it helps.
Science
does not divide views into 100% subjective or 100% objective or true.
Subjective does not mean wrong; it means personal, perhaps influenced
by personal feelings, tastes, or opinions.
Objective does not mean infallible; it means not
restricted to one individual and/or verifiable in some way, at least to a
degree.
By
social, logical and empirical verification we increase the objectivity of what
may start out as a personal or subjective description.
Some
descriptions (e.g. Newton’s laws of motion) have proved so objective – to have
such a high degree of truth – that we trust our lives to them.
Physicists
may describe light as a stream of particles or of waves.
They
do not say either description is “true”, they say only that each model can be
useful.
Evidently,
animals can perceive and know some things with a sufficient degree of
truth for practical uses
This
was the motor for the evolution of animal memory and social communication
To deny that would be to deny the survival and flourishing of
life on earth.
It was also the motor for the evolution of science.
To deny that would be to deny the success of
science in developing the technologies and medicines we rely on.
Von Foerster was something of a dilettante (“I don't know where my expertise is; my expertise is no disciplines”).
He enjoyed thinking about all things circular, recursive and self-referential and enjoyed provoking people with thoughts about them.
"Should one name one central
concept, a first principle, of cybernetics, it would be circularity." ~
Heinz von Foerster
OK, but there very different kinds of circularity, for example:
· the circularity in a feedback loop between two cooperating machines
· the circularity between a machine and its designer, or a system and its observer.
It shifts attention from observed systems to the observers of systems.
It allows systems actors to be system thinkers, who can study and
reorganise the system they play roles in.
But to discuss only observers and the systems they observe is relatively naive.
In a proper discussion of it, classical cybernetics (after Ashby) is more sophisticated.
An observer does not observe a system directly.
The observer observes a real word entity from which countless different, possibly conflicting systems may be abstracted.
Relativism is the idea that knowledge and truth exist only relation to particular culture, society, or historical context.
For sure, people
perceive the world a little differently from each other.
And people see the world somewhat differently from how birds, bats and bees see it.
But more importantly, their conceptualisations can be and are shaped by testing them against reality.
Historical figures including Protagoras, Nietzsche and von Foerster have subscribed to a kind of relativism or perspectivism that can be misleading.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 to 1900) was a philosopher whose metaphysical ideas influenced many Western intellectuals.
“Nietzsche claimed the death of God would eventually lead to the loss of any universal perspective on things, along with any coherent sense of objective truth.
Nietzsche rejected the idea of objective reality, arguing that knowledge is contingent and conditional, relative to various fluid perspectives or interests.
This leads to constant reassessment of rules (i.e., those of philosophy, the scientific method, etc.) according to the circumstances of individual perspectives.
This view has acquired the name perspectivism.” Wikipedia December 2018
Protagoras, Nietzsche and von Foerster have a lot to answer for, as discussed in Postmodern Attacks on Science and Reality.
Some Marxists and postmodernists interpret perspectivism as meaning all descriptions of the world are subjective, and perhaps, therefore, equally valid.
At the extreme, this leads to the view that the “dialectic” is more important than evidence.
That any persuasively argued or widely believed assertion carries the same weight as science.
Or even that any personal opinion is as true as the facts the world’s best scientists agree.
Scientists are aware that our sensory tools, perceptions,
memories and communications are subjective and imperfect.
That doesn’t mean science is unreliable and should be
discarded; the reverse is the case.
The scientific method is the best tool we have to transcend
limitations as individual observers.
It involves testing of results against predictions, logical
analysis and peer group review.
That is how we incrementally improve our confidence that a model or theory is valid.
“Information” is a relative concept that assumes meaning only when related to the cognitive structure of the observer of this utterance (the “recipient”). Von Foerster (1981).
Here, von Foerster
endorsed what some call the hermeneutic principle of communication.
The Hermeneutic
principle: "The hearer, not the speaker, determines the meaning of a
message."
This is misleading
A message has a meaning when related to the cognitive
structure of its sender - as well as its recipient.
The principle makes innocent speakers guilty of causing offence where none was intended.
The intention of a speaker does matter, practically, logically and morally.
Ashby emphasised that the meaning of a message depends on what the recipient knows of the sender.
E.g. In his example, two soldiers are taken prisoner by countries A and B.
Their wives each receive the same brief message “I am well”.
However, the same message (or signal) conveys different meanings to each.
Because country A allows the prisoner a choice of three messages: I am well, I am slightly ill and I am seriously ill,
Whereas country B allows the prisoner only one message: I am well (meaning no more than “I am alive”).
(Aside: every
business depends on information/data processing systems in which it is assumed
that data transmission is perfect.
And that message
senders and receivers use the same language to encode and decode messages.
So, in enterprise
architecture and IT, the terms information and data are usually
interchangeable.
And a so-called
“information model” is a somewhat informal and abstract “data model”.)
… the classical concept of an “ultimate science”… contains contradictions.
To remove these one had to account for an
“observer” (that is at least for one subject):
(i)
Observations are not absolute but
relative to an observer’s point of view (i.e., his coordinate system: Einstein);
(ii)
Observations affect the observed so as to
obliterate the observer’s hope for prediction (i.e., his uncertainty is
absolute: Heisenberg)
After this, we are now in the possession
of the truism that a description (of the universe) implies one who describes it
(observes it).
What we need now is the description of
the “describer” or, in other words, we need a theory of the observer.” von
Foerster (1981).
It is indeed a
truism that a description is a product of a describer.
But we can
understand a description of an observed thing with no knowledge of the
describer.
All we need is to
know is the language they used to form the description.
E.g. To understand
and apply the laws of motion, we need no knowledge of Newton.
To watch a tennis
match and understand the score board, we need no knowledge of the umpire
And in observing how pricing affects supply and demand,
the economist Hayek did not need to exclude himself as a buyer or seller in the
market.
It is not true that
a describer necessarily affects what they describe.
Von Foerster’s
reference to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle applies to observations of
micro-scale sub-atomic particles.
It is not generally
applicable to macro-scale objects and social phenomena.
It is true that
observers can become involved in, and affect, the social phenomena they observe
and describe.
This is rightly a
concern to sociologists (e.g. Mead) in studying the behaviours of tribal
societies.
And the actors who
play roles in a system may observe and redefine the roles and rules of that
system
But no “theory of
the observer” is needed if we distinguish actors from roles they play.
We can and should
separate the actor’s role in a system from the same actor’s role as an observer
of the same system.
"First-order
cybernetics is the science of observed systems” von Foerster
This is a curious starting point for discussion, since classical cybernetics is also about observed systems.
Ashby suggested infinite systems may be abstracted from a concrete entity.
Every abstraction requires an abstracter – the system observer or definer.
“Something strange evolved among the philosophers, the epistemologists and, the theoreticians.
They began to see themselves more and more as being included in a larger circularity; maybe within the circularity of their family;
or that of their society and culture; or even being included in a circularity of cosmic proportions!” von Foerster in "Ethics and Second-Order Cybernetics"
Von Foerster is credited with initiating second-order
cybernetics, said to be the recursive application of cybernetics to itself.
He asked: “Am I a part of the system, or I am apart from the system?”
This is typical of his
playful phrasing of aphorisms and questions.
How would Ashby have
answered the question? Here is a reply based on Ashby’s writings
“Heinz,
cybernetics does not ask
"what is this thing?" but ''what does it do?" It is thus essentially
functional and behaviouristic.
You must distinguish yourself (a concrete entity) from the actions you perform in various systems.
You part you play in any social or socio-technical system is the behavior you contribute to it, rather than you as a person.”
E.g. You are only a “part” of a traffic system in so far as you play a role in it, say as the driver of a motor car.
Being self-aware and having free will, you can ignore or break the rules of that role: jump a red light, or close your eyes for a nap and crash the car.
You have the same freedom of choice in every social or socio-technical system you play a role in.
Moreover, you can both
a play a role in a traffic system, and play a different role as an observer and
legislator who changes the rules of that system.
The need to seek and accept objectivity
Some of the ideas expressed by second order cyberneticians are axiomatic.
They underpin not only Ashby’s classical cybernetics but all modern science.
But to suggest we know nothing of the world is misleading.
That cognitions can represent realities is to essential to how animals, on their own and in social species, deal with things in their world.
To deny that would be to deny the evidence that scientific experiments reveal, or even deny there is a world out there at all.
And to suggest that all theories, being subjective, are equally, would undermine science.
It encourages people towards an anti-science relativism, in which nothing is regarded as true or objective knowledge.
By social, logical and empirical verification we do demonstrably shift our descriptions from the subjective towards what may well be called objective.
State change v
system mutation
Unfortunately, second order cybernetics can mislead systems thinkers about classical cybernetics.
Classical
cybernetics emerged out of thinking about biological and mechanical control
systems.
A system responds in a regular way to changes in its environment or another (coupled) system.
The term adaptation usually means system state change - changing state variable values in response to events.
Second-order cybernetics is often applied to thinking about social organisations.
Here, the term adaptation often means system mutation or evolution – changing the system’s state variables, roles and rules.
This changes the very nature of the
system; it changes its laws.
The trouble is that continual
adaptation or reorganisation of a system undermines the general concept of a
system – which is regularity.
Consequently, second-order cybernetics tends to undermine more general system theory.
If we don't distinguish an ever-evolving social network from the various modellable systems it may realise, the concept of a system evaporates.
Self-organisation
What might be
called self-organisation appears in many different
forms.
There are self-regulating, self-sustaining, and self-stabilising systems.
However, Ashby and Maturana rejected the idea the notion of a “self-organising system”.
It undermines the very idea of a system in classical cybernetics and more general system theory.
For sure, the actors who play
roles in a system may also observe it, and agree to change its variables, roles
or rules.
But whenever actors discuss
and agree such a change, they are (for that time) acting in a higher level or
meta system.
And once the change is made,
the actors (still members of the same social network) now act in new roles in a
new system (or system generation).
See “Self-organising
systems” for further discussion.
von Foerster (1981) "Notes on an epistemology for living things" in Observing Systems, The Systems Inquiry Series, Intersystems. Publications (1981), p. 258-271.
von Foerster (2007) “Understanding
Understanding: Essays on Cybernetics and Cognition”,
p.212, Springer Science & Business Media
von Foerster in "Ethics and Second-Order Cybernetics"
This is one of many companion papers that analyse some systems thinkers’ ideas.
· Read Ashby’s ideas for an introduction to his ideas about cybernetics, mostly integral to general system theory
·
Read Ackoff’s ideas on the application of general system theory (after
von Bertalanffy and others)
to management science.
·
Read Ashby’s
ideas about variety on his measure of complexity
and law of requisite variety.
·
Read Beer’s ideas on the
application of cybernetics (after Ashby and others) to management science.
·
Read Von Foerster’s ideas on ideas attributed to Heinz von Foerster and his second
order cybernetics.
Further reading on the “System Theory” page at http://avancier.website includes:
Boulding’s ideas, Checkland’s ideas, Luhmann’s ideas, Marx and Engels’ ideas, Maturana’s ideas and Snowden’s ideas.