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Does knowledge rest on construction in the sense that it only functions because the knowing system is operatively closed, therefore: because it can maintain no operative contact with the outside world; and because it therefore remains dependent, for everything that it constructs, on its own distinction between self-reference and allo-reference?

— Niklas Luhmann Luhmann (1991)

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Source, in full

Luhmann (1991) “Wie lassen sich latente Strukturen beobachten?,” in Paul Watzlawick, Peter Krieg (eds.), Das Auge des Betrachters: Beiträge zum Konstruktivismus. Festschrift für Heinz von Foerster, Piper, München-Zürich, p. 71; cited in: Heinz von Foerster (1993) "For Niklas Luhmann: “How Recursive is Communication?” ". Translated by Richard Howe.

More quotes by Niklas Luhmann

The art system operates on its own terms, but an observer of art can choose many different distinctions to indicate what he observes.

Art As a Social System (2000)

The following investigations attempt this transition to a radically anti-humanist, a radically anti-regionalist and a radically constructivist concept of society.

Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft (1999)

Humans cannot communicate; not even their brains can communicate; not even their conscious minds can communicate. Only communication can communicate.

Luhmann (1988)

Whatever we know about society, or indeed about the world in which we live, we know through the mass media. This is true not only of our knowledge of society but also of our knowledge of nature.

The reality of the Mass Media (2000)

The effect if not the function of the mass media seems to lie, therefore, in the reproduction of non- transparency through transparency, in the reproduction of non-transparency of effects through transparency of knowledge.

The reality of the Mass Media (2000)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Niklas Luhmann (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.