WHAT COMES AFTER SECOND ORDER CYBERNETICS? Stuart A. Umpleby Research Program in Social and Organizational Learning The George Washington University 2033 K Street NW, Suite 230 Washington, DC 20052 umpleby@gwu.edu January 31, 2001 Prepared as an editorial for Cybernetics and Human Knowing at the request of Pille Bunnell, president of the American Society for Cybernetics WHAT COMES AFTER SECOND ORDER CYBERNETICS? By Stuart A. Umpleby In recent years the field of cybernetics has been described as consisting of two bodies of work created in two time periods: first order cybernetics from the late 1940s until about 1975, and second order cybernetics from the mid 1970s to the present. Each period lasted about 25 years. What comes next? I shall describe here what I think comes next and how the new point of view emerged, at least in my own thinking. I have been a member of the group of people who worked to develop the ideas of second order cybernetics and to arouse interest in these ideas among academics in a variety of disciplines. In the language of Thomas S. Kuhn we were attempting to make a scientific revolution. A scientific revolution is marked by the emergence of “incommensurable definitions.” Consequently the differences between first and second order cybernetics were repeatedly stated. The way others and I defined the differences are summarized in Table 1. Table 1 DEFINITIONS OF FIRST AND SECOND ORDER CYBERNETICS First Order Second Order Author Cybernetics Cybernetics Von Foerster the cybernetics of the cybernetics of observed systems observing systems