Excerpt

For most of its history a founding principle of Western natural science has been the clear demarcation between the observer and the observed. We observed and measured natural phenomena as distinct from us and organized these observations into formal theories that allowed us to make predictions and ideally also provided a causal explanation of these phenomena. These epistemological values contributed to the remarkable successes of several scientific disciplines.

But this ideal of demarcation was questioned over the last century beginning with Einstein’s theory of relativity, which challenged the immutable Cartesian coordinate system and introduced the vantage point of the observer and soon thereafter with the recognition of the fundamental limitation in our ability to determine all properties of particles, expressed by Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle (Einstein 1924; Wilczek 2022).

These scientific breakthroughs led to an epistemological crisis first described in detail by the philosopher and polymath Ernst Cassirer (1922, 1950). Following Cassirer’s initial diagnosis of epistemological uncertainty, we see several attempts to address these challenges by philosophers, mathematicians, psychologists, and biologists. Heinz von Foerster’s contributions addressing this problem are among the deepest, but unfortunately still largely unknown, set of ideas.

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