The Beginning of Heaven and Earth Has No Name

Seven Days with Second-Order Cybernetics

Heinz von Foerster, Albert Müller, Karl H. Müller, Elinor Rooks, Michael Kasenbacher

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780823255627
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Science History
• Index: History

Heinz von Foerster was the inventor of second-order cybernetics, which recognizes the investigator as part of the system he is investigating. The Beginning of Heaven and Earth Has No Name provides an accessible, nonmathematical, and comprehensive overview of von Foerster's cybernetic ideas and of the philosophy latent within them. It distills concepts scattered across the lifework of this scientific polymath and influential interdisciplinarian. At the same time, as a book-length interview, it does justice to von Foerster's élan as a speaker and improviser, his skill as a raconteur.Developed from a week-long conversation between the editors and von Foerster near the end of his life, this work playfully engages von Foerster in developing the difference his notion of second-order cybernetics makes for topics ranging from emergence, life, order, and thermodynamics to observation, recursion, cognition, perception, memory, and communication.The book gives an English-speaking audience a new ease of access to the rich thought and generous spirit of this remarkable and protean thinker.

FIFTH DAY

Communicating, Talking, Thinking, Falling

The interaction becomes communicative if, and only if, each of the two sees himself through the eyes of the other.

—HEINZ VON FOERSTER, “Epistemology of Communication”

I want to regard man here as an animal; as a primitive being to which one grants instinct but not ratiocination. As a creature in a primitive state. Any logic good enough for a primitive means of communication needs no apology from us. Language did not emerge from some kind of ratiocination.

—LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN, On Certainty

And God said, Let the waters bring foorth aboundantly the mouing creature that hath life, and foule that may flie aboue the earth in the open firmament of heauen. And God created great whales, and euery liuing creature that moueth, which the waters brought forth aboundantly after their kinde.… And the euening and the morning were the fift day.

—GENESIS 1:20–23

On the program for today, we have the creation of the great sea creatures and all living beings, which, according to your congenial British colleague Gregory Bateson, can also be characterized by their ability to speak and communicate.1

For me, the first thing is that language distinguishes itself from a general idea of communication. Communication happens as soon as any creature waves some body part about so that another creature interprets this waving about, puts it into a definite relation with something and acts accordingly—for example, by getting “hopping mad.” One can see this in mating rituals, combat rituals, and in the many other games of life that have been so exhaustively studied. From these communicative aspects and methods that one sees in animals—because they move these movements can be used to gain a “key” or “signs” from the environment—from this, I would like to distinguish language. Language is a special system of communication that can talk about itself.

That means that if one talks about bee language, then I would say that bees have—according to my definition—no language. Bees can certainly dance to one another: Buzz, the flower such-and-such is three hundred feet east–east–west—a fabulous medium of communication. But if the bee comes back, then it can’t say to the waiting bee, “You said that very nicely, and it was all correct, but your pronunciation is catastrophic,” or “Next time without the Texas accent,” and so on. Bees can’t do that—I don’t think so, anyway. They also can’t speak about their vocabulary, they can’t talk about their grammar, their communication system itself is not communicable through their communication repertoire. Language begins, for me, when communication develops a concept of communication and becomes reflexive.

In another work, Bateson has also addressed the problem of communicative reflexivity. Bateson refers to the example of monkeys, who can signal to each other: “Listen, this isn’t serious, just a game,” or “Watch out, that’s not funny anymore!” Through such rituals, Bateson claims, reflexivity enters communication.2

One can interpret it that way, but I would, however, say that Bateson’s position is hard to maintain. That a certain interpretation is indicated through signs is not the same as talking about the signs themselves. If I use a certain gesture that says, “I’m not being serious now, I’m not going to beat you up,” and if I use another gesture that shows that I am actually becoming aggressive, then my gestures aren’t remarks on blows and aggression, but rather a modification of my next behavior, so maybe a behavioral reflection but not a communicative reflection—and thus also: not language. But my opinion is that the definition-question is unimportant—I’m not a definitions guy who runs around after definitions, and I don’t want to quarrel about this matter at length. Distinctions like the one between communication and language serve me as guidelines, so that I only like to use the word “language” if the language talks about itself, if the language has the word “language,” the word “word,” the words “noun,” “verb,” “adjective,” “grammar,” and so on.

As soon as a communications process allows a reflection about the gestures that occur in such a communications process, then I’d say, “Now we’re talking about language.” If the communication’s vocabulary has no word or no symbol for “communication” or “gesture,” then according to my distinction I would not speak of language but of communication.

If I draw these distinctions, what advantage does it give me? For me, it’s always an advantage if I can clearly distinguish between two areas and if I don’t constantly slip from one into the other and from the other into the one. That means that if I’m interested in the language problem, as I see it, then recursivity and circularity will be moved into another area, namely into my own speech, my own life. In other cases we have circularity between two elements; that’s called communicative circularity. If, however, I can say how I circulate, then I put this inside myself, then I have to deal with the organization of my nervous system or with the entire sensory-motor system before I myself can speak about language. That means that the structures I have to deal with will be shaped differently in the case of language than in a treatment of communication. But that’s just pure Foerster methodology, which is what I use to juggle my ideas if I’m going to juggle them at all.

Thus, if anyone tells me about distinctions, then I always immediately try to clarify and operationalize the distinctions, so that I’ll say, “If this category is set up, how many of these elements are there, how many of this kind of elements belong to it, and so forth.” One might say I test the quality of a distinction through a quantitative analysis.

In the long-term development, communicative couplings had to develop first, and in humans, language formed in addition to communicative couplings—as communicative couplings of communicative couplings.

Yes, sure, of course, one could hardly explain this development otherwise.

But this recursive formalism is applicable—albeit with different usages—for both forms, communication and language.

In both cases recursions are set in motion. In one case I’m referring to the organism itself, in the other to the interactions of two organisms. Of course, the interaction of two organisms is hardly an exceptional event—it depends, however, on the epistemology that one wants to invent in order to explain the one out of the other. I have absolutely no idea how language developed out of communication. After all, there are people who claim, “In the beginning was the word and the man, the ape is a degenerated man, the crocodile represents a degenerated ape and the turtle a degenerated crocodile, they have ‘forgotten’ more and more—till eventually we get to the single-celled organisms from whom all communicative competency has vanished.” This form of devolution also contains a wonderful process, although it’s not upward but downward. I still know of—I can still “remember,” it happened long enough ago—when I was young, there was a philosopher who claimed, “Man is the beginning of all things.” There’s a joke that fits very well with that, in which the son asks his dad, “Hey, Dad, did people descend from apes?” And the father answers, “You did, but I didn’t.”

Now back to your hypothesis, that one can only speak of language if one has a concept of language or if the language has a concept of itself …

I wouldn’t want to call that a hypothesis but a definition. It’s not a theory that I can prove or disprove. I’m just saying that if a communicative system can express itself about communication, then I would call this communicative system “language.” If a communicative system does not contain or cannot contain this reflexivity about communication, then it remains simply a “language-incapable” communicative system.

The counterquestion comes at once, however: “Heinz, why are you carrying on with this ridiculous splitting of hairs, calling one ‘language’ and the other ‘communication’?” Because I want to get out of the metaphor of language, so as not to carry the metaphor of language to bees or transfer it to jellyfish, because otherwise I’m dealing with the emotional life of jellyfish and am almost forced to claim, “This jellyfish really fancies a poem, but his wife doesn’t allow that.” It gets me into a question structure that is, in my opinion, tempting but that I don’t enjoy. Maybe the perspective is charming to others, looking at poems about the love lives of jellyfish, how a jellyfish waves to another jellyfish, “I can’t even tell you how much I love you.” “See there, Heinz, there we have it again, this central element of language—‘I can’t even tell you.…’ ” And my answer to that? “Good, how lovely for you, very animal-loving and fair to jellyfish, but for me this nondistinction goes too far.” It could be that other people also see an advantage in this differentiation. For me anyway there is certainly a clear advantage concerning logical structures and relations. And with it I can orientate myself.

Back again to your suggested definition: Language can be spoken of, and communication can be talked about as well—but communication does not allow itself to be communicated.

I would suggest and strongly recommend that language be conceived of as a second-order concept, namely, as a communicative system that can communicate about itself. For that reason the capacity for language also has a logical structure that has to be represented, realized, or manifested organically. If problems in their logical structures prove to be separable, then maybe I can think about how the manifestation of such logical structures occurs.

Perhaps we can work out some of these logical differences between forms of communication and language systems. What would be some further essential differences, apart from the principal difference, which is that one side can speak about itself and the other can’t. What operations are available in the case of languages that don’t appear in communicative systems?

Once one can talk about what one uses to communicate, one has the possibility of modifying how one says something. I can now suggest, “Let’s use this gesture—tapping the forehead with a finger—to mean ‘congratulations’ and not to call someone a ‘loon’ and to say that they’re stupid and simple.” I can’t put forward this kind of modification as long as gestures are explicitly loaded with singular meanings—and I can’t communicate about the gestures themselves. If I’m now able to gesticulate about the gesture itself, if language emerges as a second-order phenomenon, new possibilities immediately open up: First of all I’m becoming clearer about the logical structure of what I’m doing because I’m able to reflect on my doing. As long as I cannot (and therefore also) don’t want to reflect, as long as I can’t willfully influence the modifications of my doings, they arise by themselves.

If a lion roars, “Wwhrrhauauuu,” he’s in a bad mood. If, on the other hand, one hears “Wwriieiihhnn,” the lion’s in a good mood. Thus far lions can understand each other. What communication of this kind cannot express, however, is roar sequences of the type, “Now I’ve been especially friendly, haven’t I?” A lion can only give a cheerful “Wwriieiiihhnn.” I could also say—and this assumption seems very justified to me: If a lion could talk, the other lions wouldn’t understand it.3 These sequences of roars and grunts could naturally change over the course of hundreds of years. But if they change, then they change and modify themselves principally because circumstances or environmental factors change, leading to such modulations.

But as soon as I can say, “Now that was a friendly grunt,” or “Don’t hiss so mean,” then the sequences of grunts and hisses themselves can be talked about. Because I can talk about the grunts and hisses themselves, the sequences of grunts and hisses can be changed, modified or diversified into French, German, or Turkish. We get an enormous extension of richness in our capacity for relations. If Bateson’s observation holds true—that in animal communication/gesture, relations are created—then this phenomenon is all the more so in that human, all too human, area, that is, the area of language.

If I can talk about language itself, that opens up the possibility for reflections on references and relations, on the weaving of linguistic relations, that means that I can modify references to references, and therein lies a very interesting possibility that multiplies the richness of possible references. I can for example say how much I want to be together with this one and how little I want to have to do with the other—and this not at all explicit, but rather implicit in the stream of my speech, in the stream of my dialogs. The importance of both cases, the case of communicative gestures and the case of linguistic expression, lies in interplay, however. They require each other to get this game going and to set it in motion.

With his concept of structural couplings,4 I think that Maturana presented an amusing and wide-reaching idea. I’m not completely happy with the expression, but in this way the concept of autopoiesis5 finds its natural extension. An organism A requires for the maintenance of its self-(re)production an organism B, which again needs organism A for the maintenance of its own self-(re)production. In this way structural couplings are established between A and B. Both mutually maintai...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Announcement Page
• Frontispiece
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• A Foreword by the Series Editor
• An Author’s Forewords
• Forewords with Two Editors
• Foretaste of an Author with Two Editors
• Notes on the Translation
• Preface to the American Edition
• List of Abbreviations
• Half Title
• First Day: Building Blocks, Observers, Emergence, Trivial Machines
• Second Day: Innovation, Life, Order, Thermodynamics
• Third Day: Movement, Species, Recursion, Selectivity
• Fourth Day: Cognition, Perception, Memory, Symbols
• Fifth Day: Communicating, Talking, Thinking, Falling
• Sixth Day: Experiences, Heuristics, Plans, Futures
• Seventh Day: Rest, Rest, Rest, Rest
• Epilogue in Heaven
• Notes
• Index