The notion that 'man is the measure of all things' dates back to Protagoras in the 5th century BC. Descartes established the modern problematic of soul versus body and specified one's own mentation as the ground for philosophizing. Soon thereafter, Locke formulated our modern notion of 'ideas' as meaningful constructs populating a mysteriously non-spatial mental space. In 1710, Giambattista Vico declared the only knowledge one can have is what one construes - an event commonly cited as the original constructivist manifesto. By the 1790's Kant had established the distinction between external phenomena and internal noumena as the foundation of modern epistemological debate.

Another relevant stream of work concerned the mechanisms by which the observer accreted and exploited a constructed set of personal 'knowledge'. This stream can be characterized mainly in terms of linguistics and semiotics. Charles Sanders Peirce's work on 'phaneroscopy' (study of that which can be present to the mind) and signs provided foundations for addressing personal epistemological elements which are only now being explored and exploited. Saussure's early formulation of semiotics (published in 1916) established another framework for analyzing the mind's 'content'. By the early 1930's, Alfred Korbzyski was outlining how the richness of language derived from the essentially circular character of language - specifically the way in which meanings and utterances build on earlier ones. Benjamin Whorf seminal theses that language and culture are intimately interwoven and that language structures thought were published in the early 1940's, on the eve of the first cybernetics meetings.

By the same token, it would be reasonable and fair to claim that cybernetics was born with an intrinsic openness (if not predisposition) toward a relativistic epistemology - at least to the extent of circumscribing (e.g.) 'knowledge' accretion and 'knowledge exploitation' with respect to a specific subject system. The seminal work of Wiener and McCulloch (along with their respective colleagues) had fostered an appreciation for the manner in which a system's ascribed or operant 'knowledge' is qualified with respect to that system's particular form, dynamics, and constraints. In the case of Wiener's group this qualification surfaced in engineering control functions for anti-aircraft guns based on incoming radar data. In the case of McCulloch and Pitts this qualification was effectively their primary focus, because they were analyzing the extent to which a specific class of systems (artificial neurons) could capture and act upon inputs. In a similar sense, Mead's and Bateson's anthropological research had come to focus on the manner in which cultural 'meanings' arose and persisted among a society's participants in the course of their lives.

Combined with the systemic perspective, this theme led to addressing extra-systemic entities (e.g., elements of the environment) not in terms of their objective 'knowability' but in terms of how the focal system 'knows' or otherwise interacts with them. Such an approach or motif would become much more prominent decades later with the formulation of second-order cybernetics and its emphasis on an 'observer'. However, this was more than merely implicit at the outset, as is well illustrated by the fact that McCulloch characterized his neural modeling research as 'experimental epistemology'.