We explain autonomy with full-fledged reference to the complementaristic conception of language and its introspective capabilities. This field that we refer to is understood to belong to a wider epistemic category than that of (the received view of) semiotics as well as of systems science. It follows from the linguistic complementarity that autonomies (self-references; independencies) can never be absolutely complete. Rather, we speak of autonomies as partial. By the tension view of the

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... ic complementarity, there are possibilities of realizing high interpretability at the cost of low describability and conversely. Correspondingly, more complete autonomies can be achieved at the price of a lowered describability in the language where the phenomenon of autonomy occurs. The tension aspect is illuminated for various languages.