Organizing Institutions:
Heinz von Foerster Gesellschaft / Wien
ASC – American Society for Cybernetics
WISDOM – Wiener Institut für
  sozialwissenschaftliche Dokumentation und Methodik
Institut für Zeitgeschichte | Universität Wien
AINS – Austrian Institute for Nonlinear Studies

Bernard Scott

Heinz von Foerster: Contributions to Psychology

Senior Research Fellow,
Center for Sociocybernetics Studies,
Bonn
Bernard.Scott@sociocybernetics.eu

Although psychology was not his primary discipline, Heinz von Foerster made many valuable contributions to psychology that are still being assimilated. In this paper, I briefly review those contributions and set them in context. I then comment more generally on both how cybernetics has influenced psychology in the past and how it may be hoped and expected to do so in the future. For expository purposes, I see his contributions as being usefully sorted under several headings, as follows:

• foundations
• epistemology and ethics
• the human being as a self-organising system
• cognitive architecture
• the human being as a learner
• the dynamics of self-observation
• communication

I review each area in turn and end with some concluding comments.