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 linguistic 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 ...