For Niklas Luhmann:* “How Recursive is Communication?” - Understanding Understanding: Essays on Cybernetics and Cognition - page 308

So now I'd like to turn these three presents over to Niklas Luhmann! Of
course that requires a bouquet!”*
Now I come to a theme that is not my own but rather was proposed to
me by the Center for Interdisciplinary Research. I always like it when one
proposes a theme for me, for if I then come with this theme, I optimally
fulfill the wishes of my hosts! The assignment that was posed for me for
today consists of the question “How recursive is communication?” I didn't
know how I was supposed to read that. How recursive is communication?
Or: how recursive is communication? Or, how recursive is communication?
Unfortunately I'm not an ontologist, i.e., I don't know what is . I've never
been able to do anything but consider what would be— if . So I've posed the
question to myself as how would it be if we conceived of communication
as recursion. And so here is my Proposal No. 00.
00. Proposal: “Communication is recursion.”
You could understand that as if it had to do with an entry in a dictionary.
If you don't know what communication is, you look it up in the dictionary
under C . There it says, “Communication is recursion.” Aha, you say, good!
What is recursion? Then of course you go back to the dictionary again and
find, this time under R : “Recursion is communication.” So it is with every
dictionary. If you busy yourself a bit with them, you will find that the dic-
tionary is always self-referential: From A you are sent to B , from B to C ,
and from C back again to A . That's the dictionary game. You could of course
also conceive of my proposal as a simple tautology: “communication is
recursion.” Indeed, but, as the philosophers assert, tautologies don't say
anything. Nevertheless, tautologies do say something about the one who
utters them. At the end of my lecture you may not know anything about
recursion or communication, but you will certainly know something about
me! My program, therefore, is the proposal: “communication is recursion,”
and what it looks like.
I'd like to present my program in three chapters, whereby I'd like to use
the first chapter essentially to recall to your memories a terminology whose
central concept is a fictitious “machine” that executes well defined opera-
tions on numbers, expressions, operations, etc. This chapter starts out by
recapitulating some concepts that are already current among you. As you
will later see, I'm using this terminology in order to make the decisive point
in my lecture palatable to you, namely, insight into the unsolvability, in
principle, of the “analytical problem.” In other sciences this problem goes
under other names: it's called “the decision problem” in logic, the “halting
problem” in computer science, etc.
* Editor's note: Heinz von Foerster hands Niklas Luhmann copies of the three arti-
cles, specially bound for this occasion; as he does so, a bouquet of flowers appears
magically out of thin air and Niklas Luhmann thanks him.