Self-Aware Science Creation

"Sin is believing the lie that you are self-created, self-dependent and self-sustained."

—Saint Augustine

"Objectivity is the delusion that observations could be made without an observer."

—Heinz von Foerster

New Horizons for Second-Order Cybernetics is a collection of essays from an eclectic set of thinkers. Many of these essays comment directly on other parts of the text as often as they comment more generally on the state of the field of second-order cybernetics (SOC). In part II, Ronald R. Kline points out that proponents of a new science "often write histories of their field in order to do what sociologists call 'boundary work,'" a reference to part I. Kline is correct to suggest that this is a substantial function of the text. However, the editors and framers of the book have architected it in such a way as to go beyond a simple top-down dictation of a history of SOC. The editors employ a recursive approach, beginning with a prompt (or framing notion) and iterating outward, from commentaries on the prompt to commentaries on those commentaries, in an escalating cycle of reconsideration. At the high end of this recursion the work invites the reader to participate in the ongoing communal processing of the meaning of the SOC revolution. Relatedly, this recursive architecture allows the text to demonstrate and perform on itself the meta-leap to endo-mode science that some contributors describe as characteristic of SOC.

The text consists of two prologue chapters, a part I, a part II, and one epilogue chapter. Part I consists of a series of target articles about the theory of SOC, such as Louis H. Kauffman's formalization of eigenforms, and the practice, such as Ben Sweeting's exploration of the mutual interaction between SOC and design. Each target article is followed by several commentaries on the piece from other second-order cybernetic thinkers and a closing response to the commentaries by the target article's author. The second prologue chapter sets the stage for the exercise of part I and offers a categorization of and reflection on the ideas presented by the authors of part I. The second prologue chapter and all of Part I are noted to have been published previously in 2016 in the journal Constructivist Foundations volume 11, number 3. Part II consists of reflections from another set of thinkers on the contents and conclusions from the originally published set. The first prologue chapter and the epilogue integrate the critiques of part II.

A similar process of soliciting and then synthesizing experiences is used to create each level of the text described above. This process is a function that takes a base idea (prompt) and returns a more refined set of ideas. The function is applied to some unknown prompt (probably generated from many recursive applications of the function to an even more primal prompt idea, at least in an informal way) to generate the target articles of part 1. The same function is then applied to each of the target articles, generating the response commentaries. Together these function applications produce part I and the second prologue chapter, which constitute an organized, if rough, overview of the state of the field of SOC. The function is then applied once more, taking this overview as a prompt to produce the more refined and self-aware picture of SOC that is the entire text. The editors have highlighted this generative function by structuring the text around the prompt and response method, so recursion both generates and structures the text.

This structure fits very nicely with Kauffman's focus on eigenforms, thought objects that remain consistent as the domain around them evolves by acting upon itself. Michael R. Lissack elegantly connects eigenform and "distinction" via the idea of stability. Eigenforms provide the stability required to make general distinctions, posit a theory or tell a story in a complex, evolving, self-acting environment. Scientific theories are...