HEINZ VON FOERSTER'S CONSTRUCTIVISM
Do we humans actually
discover reality, or do we just dream it up? Are our burgeoning stores of new
knowledge merely our own creations? Our Enlightened western minds tend to
think that the question is moot. We think we can be “objective” about what we
see, that reality exists “out there,” apart from the observer. But the
constructivist argues that these beliefs hinder the understanding of
ourselves and our relationship to the world.
In this thought-provoking
volume, Lynn Segal describes the ideas of Heinz von Foerster, who has posed
useful questions about our comfortable notions of what is real. Von Foerster. a
radical constructivist, is a cybernetician. mathematician, physicist, and
philosopher who has had a profound impact on the scientific conception of
“objectivity.”
Beginning with the idea
that we must know how we think before we “know” the rest of the world, this
book closely examines the theory of objectivity from semantic, philosophical,
and neurological perspectives. A chapter details how language structures our
logical devices and therefore how we create the “things” we think we are
discovering. Humberto Maturana’s system for handling the problem of
objectivity is then introduced. The final four chapters integrate several concepts—computation,
biocomputation, the nervous system’s structure and functioning, and
closure—which attempt to account for cognition. Finally, an interview with Von Foerster is
included as an appendix.
Those who are interested in
the general question of what it means to know, as well as those who are
interested in brain functioning, constructivism, computer science, psychology
and psychotherapy—particularly systems theory and psychoanalysis— will
welcome this clear exposition of constructivism. Lynn Segal is a research
associate of the Mental Research
Institute in Palo Alto, California. He is the co-author (with Fisch and
Weakland) of The Tactics of Change: Doing Therapy Briefly).
About Heinz von Foerster
Heinz von Foerster was
born 1911 in Vienna. After completion of his studies (M.S.. Physics,
Institute of Technology. Vienna; Ph.D. Physics, University of Breslau) he
worked in various industrial research laboratories in Germany and Austria. In
1949 he moved with his family to the United States and joined the staff of
the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Illinois,
Urbana, Illinois, and, at the same time, became secretary of the Cybernetics
Conference Program of the Josiah H. Macy, Jr., Foundation in New York. In
this connection he edited five volumes of the proceedings of these conferences:
"Cybernetics: Circular Causal and Feedback Mechanisms in Biological and
Social Systems.”
With colleagues of the
department of physics, he established the Department of Biophysics and
Physiology in 1957, and in 1958 the Biological Computer Laboratory, an
international and interdisciplinary research laboratory for the study of the
physiology, theory, technology, and epistemology of cognitive processes.
Professor von Foerster was
a Guggenheim Fellow (1956/1957 and in 1963/1964), President of the
Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research (1963-1965), President
of the Society for General Systems Research (1976/1977), is a Fellow of the
American Association for the Advancement of Science (since 1980), and
directed the Biological Computer Laboratory from 1958 until his retirement in
1976. The list of his publications has approximately 100 entries.
Heinz von Foerster is now
Professor Emeritus of the Departments of Electrical Engineering and of
Biophysics and Physiology of the University of Illinois and lives in
California.
Preface by Paul Watzlawick, MRI, Palo Alto Ca
Lynn Segal has taken upon
himself the exceedingly difficult task of presenting the life work of a
famous scientist, translated into a readable non-technical language, in a
relatively slim volume, The difficulty is compounded by the fact that Heinz von
Foerster defies any simple categorization, as he transcends the traditional
academic boundaries of scientific disciplines. Like a belated renaissance man
or — if one prefers— the forerunner of an era
in which natural and humanistic sciences will begin to converge, he
fascinates his listeners and his readers by his encyclopedic knowledge,
coupled with the ease with which he establishes totally new connections, and
thereby forces us to question our traditional ways of conceptualizing the
world. This is the process that Arthur Koestler called biosociation and
credited with man’s creative power.
Heinz von Foerster is one
of the leading members of that incredibly gifted group of scientists who in
1949 got together under the auspices of the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation for the
purpose of studying “circular causal feedback mechanisms in biological and
social systems.” It was Warren McCulloch, the chairman of these meetings, who
invited Heinz von Foerster to present a theory of memory which he had
developed when still in Vienna, and which was, without his knowing it at the
time, built on what are now called cybernetic principles. What thus
began as the study of dynamic processes of a general nature soon revealed its
specific importance for the understanding of man and his social
interactions.
The realization that the observer, the observed phenomenon and
the process of observation itself form a totality, which can be
decomposed into its elements only on pain of absurd reifications, has
far-reaching implications for our understanding of man and his problems in which he literally
“constructs” his reality, then reacts to it as if it existed independently of
him “out there,” and eventually may arrive at the startling awareness that his reactions are the effect and the cause
of his reality construction. This “curved space” of human experience of the
world and of himself, this closure— as Heinz von Foerster calls it — finds its symbolic
expression in the Ouroboros, the snake that bites its own tail, or its poetic
expression in the words of T. S. Eliot, for whom “the end of all our
exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first
time".
Lynn Segal has succeeded
in making this also the structure of this book whose last chapter “curves back” on the first and introduces
the reader into what he has just read as if it were for the first time.