Thursday 25 November 2010

Why responsible? EvG 2002

In 2002 Ernst von Glasersfeld wrote in his obituary for Heinz von Förster:
  • Heinz put the new view into a nutshell: «Objectivity is the delusion that observations could be made without an observer.» Instead of worrying about an inaccessible external reality he focused attention on the world we build in the course of interactions with others in the domain of our experience. 
  • Though this experiential world is a social construction, it is also individual because each constructs it according to his or her own experience. And because there is always more than one way of constructing, we are all responsible for the world in which we live.
  • In Memoriam H.v.F., http://www.oikos.org/foerster.htm

How do we know? EvG 1996

In 1996 Ernst von Glasersfeld wrote:
  • The concept of knowledge is thus actually changing. Traditional philosophy was forever searching for timeless truths that would be independent of the thinking subject. With the spreading of the Kantian insight that what we rationally grasp is always what human reason builds up according to its own rules, interest has been growing in how this building-up proceeds. And this is the area in which we celebrate Heinz von Foerster as a pioneer. 
  • There can be no final answers in this area but only models that, for the time being, satisfy our demands. Hence he reminds us that the responsibility for the world we conceptually construct and enact rests with us.
  • Farewell to objectivity (Revised and expanded English version of 136) [pdf]. Systems Research 13(3): 279–286.