Second-order cybernetics

Second-order cybernetics is cybernetics applied to itself. Where first-order cybernetics studies systems as if from the outside, second-order cybernetics starts from the recognition that every description is made by an observer, who is also a system and part of what is being described.

Origins

Margaret Mead’s 1967 address “The Cybernetics of Cybernetics” asked whether cybernetic ideas could be applied to the cybernetics community and the society using them. Heinz von Foerster adopted the phrase, and in the 1970s distinguished the cybernetics of observed systems (first order) from the cybernetics of observing systems (second order). Humberto Maturana’s “everything said is said by an observer” and his work with Francisco Varela on autopoiesis gave the turn a biological foundation.

Key ideas

• The observer is part of the system. There is no view from nowhere; objectivity is a property of agreements between observers, not of the world itself.
• Responsibility. If what we see depends on how we look, we are responsible for our descriptions and their consequences. Von Foerster’s ethical imperative: “Act always so as to increase the number of choices.”
• Circularity and self-reference are treated as fundamental, not as paradoxes to avoid.
• Conversation. Knowledge is built between participants (Gordon Pask, Ranulph Glanville).

Influence

Second-order cybernetics shaped radical constructivism in education, family therapy (Milan school, Paul Watzlawick), Niklas Luhmann’s social systems theory, design theory and parts of management. Critics have called it too philosophical, and its rise coincided with the decline of cybernetics in engineering, but it remains the core of the American Society for Cybernetics and much present-day cybernetic practice.

Further reading

• Heinz von Foerster, Understanding Understanding (2003)
• Ranulph Glanville, “Second Order Cybernetics”, Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (2002)