Observing Society: Meaning, Communication, and Social Systems By ...

shapes the way in which social system theory redefines the most significant sociological concepts, including culture, symbol, meaning, and structure.

This book provides a comprehensive introduction to social system theory and explains how its revolutionary method of observing society as communication is making a major contribution to modern sociology. Because of the fundamental importance of observation in social system theory, we devote our first chapter to clarifying the difference-oriented epistemology Niklas Luhmann developed from his reading of Spencer Brown. Each of the following chapters will return to the basic premise that sociology observes observers of society drawing cultured distinctions and using them to produce and reproduce slices of the social world in ways that can be anticipated.

Distinctions, Symbols, and Observers

Distinctions

Social system theory develops its underlying epistemology by combining Spencer Brown's methodology of observation with constructivism, an approach emphasizing the experiential origin and problem-solving nature of knowledge, as developed by Heinz von Foerster, Ernst von Glazersfeld, Fritz Heider, and others. In the discussion below, we relate the theories of observation and constructivism to similar concepts developed by a number of influential thinkers, including Ludwig Wittgenstein and Alfred North Whitehead, whose work on self-reference, symbols, and meaning preceded social system theory.

We asserted previously that the consequences of every thoughtful inquiry depend on an observer's “first cut,” on the initial decision that opens up a contingent universe of potential connections by drawing boundaries that did not necessarily have to be drawn. Conscious thought is always intentional, as the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl maintained (1982), and every intention requires a distinction to mark it against an overwhelming surplus of alternative possibilities. Niklas Luhmann,