The present issue is a combination of cybernetic, systems theoretical and semiotic insights and, as such, is close to the core of this journal's interdisciplinary project of finding many ways of combining paradigms, research areas and research methods to more comprehensive models and understandings Dirk Baecker has written the paper "Systems Are Theory" in which he argues that systems are distinguished by observers, scientific or intellectual, as highly complex differentiated dynamic units maintained by a boundary that both separates and connects a unit from the environment distinguished by an observer. A historical view of the notion of systems from Greek, through the scholastic period in the Middle ages, up to its peak in the Enlightenment period, helps us to have deeper understanding of the emergence of the systems concept prior to its envelopment as a sociological phenomenon. In the latter development, researchers like August Comte, Vilfredo Pareto, Talcott Parsons, and Niklas Luhmann integrated the notion of system into modern social research and developed the notions of complexity, observer, and negation into a new epistemological dynamics beyond positivism and radical constructivism, among other things, in its analysis of power.
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