Dr. Karl H. Müller (1953) was head of the Departments of Political Science and Sociology at the Institute for Advanced Studies (IHS) in Vienna (1997 – 2001) of the Wiener Institute for Social Science Documentation and Methodology (WISDOM), Austria’s centre for research infrastructures in the social sciences and of the Heinz von Foerster Society (2000 – 2015). Currently he is Director of the Steinbeis Transfer Centre New Cybernetics and senior researcher at the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Ljubljana. His main research interests range from problems of complex modeling and from the potential of complex data visualization in the social sciences to the frontiers of second order cybernetics, of radical constructivism and of contemporary RISC-societies.
His recent publications reflect these various interests, namely, (with Lucka Kajfež-Bogataj, Ivan Svetlik, Niko Toš (eds.)), Modern RISC-Societies: Towards a New Paradigm of Societal Evolution (Wien:edition echoraum, 2010), The New Science of Cybernetics. Towards the Evolution of Living Research Designs. Vol. II. Theory (Wien:edition echoraum, 2011), The New Science of Cybernetics. The Evolution of Living Research Designs, vol. III: Research and Design Rules (Wien:edition echoraum, 2012), (together with Niko Toš). Towards a New Kind of Social Science. Social Research in the Context of Science II and RISC-Societies (Wien:edition echoraum, 2012), New Cybernetics. The Structure of a Scientific Revolution (Wien:edition echoraum, 2015, to be published); (with Brina Malnar), Surveys and Self-Reflexivity. A Second-Order Study of the European Social Survey (ESS) (Wien:edition echoraum, 2015, to be published)
Under the heading of “Second-order Science and New Cybernetics” a book will be published which presents a new architecture for the science system and offers new roles and functions for cybernetics which differ wildly from old cybernetics as it was developed between the 1940s and the 1960s or even from second-order cybernetics as propagated by Heinz von Foerster, Ranulph Glanville, Gordon Pask, Louis H. Kauffman, Klaus Krippendorff, Bernard Scott, Stuart A. Umpleby and many others since the late 1960s and 1970s. The lecture will be divided into three main parts
The first part lays out the new environments of second-order science and new cybernetics and emphasizes the new configuration of first-order science as we know it and the two new levels of zero-order science with its concentration of research infrastructures and second-order science which operates on the building blocks like models, theories, test results, theoretical concepts or functions from first-order science.
The second part focuses on significant major contemporary inversions within the science system which, in combination, constitute a new Copernican revolution. It will be shown that this new Copernican revolution can be characterized as a complexity and as a reflexivity revolution of the overall science system.
Finally, second-order science and new cybernetics can be institutionalized as research programs and as curricula in a variety of ways and the lecture will offer several examples for new research and teaching programs in this field.
Literature:
Riegler, A., Müller, K.H. (2014)(eds.), Special Issue of
Constructivist Foundations on ‚Second-Order Science‘. No. 1, Vol. 10
Müller, K.H., Riegler, A. (2014b), “Second-Order Science: A Vast and Largely Unexplored Science Frontier”, in:
Constructivist Foundations, vol. 10, no. 1, 7 – 15
