From logic to self-organization-learning about complexity

Abstract

This article traces how Second-Order cybernetics came into being. It emphasizes the objections raised against first-order cybernetics and, in doing so, describes the process whereby a new type of epistemology-an epistemology of the observer-appeared in the United States at the end of the 1940s. At the same time it explains the implications of this epistemology.© 2006 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.