A NOTE ON COMPOSITION

It is characteristic of Heinz von Foerster's approach to the cyberneti cs of cybernetics that it combines a sense of tight reasoning with the acknowledgment of fundamental ignorance. The article attempts to unco ver an epistemological relationship between the reasoning and the igno rance. The relationship is provided for by a razor which reads: what c an be described in relation to its composition, is described in vain i n relation to its substance. The razor asks for second-order terms ins tead of first-order terms, or for ontogenetics instead of ontology.