"I don't know where my expertise is; my expertise is no disciplines. I would recommend to drop disciplinarity wherever one can. Disciplines are an outgrowth of academia. In academia you appoint somebody and then in order to give him a name he must be a historian, a physicist, a chemist, a biologist, a biophysicist; he has to have a name. Here is a human being: Joe Smith -- he suddenly has a label around the neck: biophysicist. Now he has to live up to that label and push away everything that is not biophysics; otherwise people will doubt that he is a biophysicist. If he's talking to somebody about astronomy, they will say "I don't know, you are not talking about your area of competence, you're talking about astronomy, and there is the department of astronomy, those are the people over there," and things of that sort. Disciplines are an aftereffect of the institutional situation."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Von Foerster (1995) "Interview Heinz von Foerster" S. Franchi, G. Güzeldere, and E. Minch (eds) in: Constructions of the Mind Volume 4, issue 2. 26 June 1995
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Heinz_von_Foerster
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Heinz von Foerster
Heinz von Foerster (November 13 1911 – February 10 2002) was an Austrian-American scientist known for his pioneering research in the field of cybernetics.
15 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Heinz von Foerster →
Related Quotes
"Heinz von Foerster was a physicist and philosopher, who worked extensively in cybernetics, biology and family therapy…"
"Objectivity is a subject's delusion that observing can be done without him. Involving objectivity is abrogating respo…"
"The "second order cyberneticians" claimed that knowledge is a biological phenomenon (Maturana, 1970), that each indiv…"
"Heinz performs the magic trick of convincing us that the familiar objects of our existence can be seen to be nothing …"
"I shall act always so as to increase the total number of choices"
"The world, as we perceive it, is our own invention."
"While in the first quarter of this century physicists and cosmologists were forced to revise the basic notions that go…"
"To remove these one had to account for an “observer” (that is at least for one subject): (i) Observations are not abs…"
"What we need now is the description of the “describer” or, in other words, we need a theory of the observer."
"It seems that cybernetics is many different things to many different people. But this is because of the richness of i…"