Excerpt: In this chapter we show how ‘language as action’ and ‘language as interpretation’ can be reconciled. In doing this we will move back and forth between two fundamental questions: “How does an utterance have meaning?” and “What kinds of actions do we perform in language?” The juxtaposition of these questions leads us to a new grounding for our understanding of language and the nature of human existence as language.

Excerpt: The rationalistic orientation of our prior training in science and technology made the foundations of hermeneutics and phenomenology nearly inaccessible to us. Before we could become open to their relevance and importance we needed to take a preliminary step towards unconcealing the tradition in which we lived, recognizing that it was in fact open to serious question. For us, this first step came through the work of Humberto Maturana, a biologist who has been concerned with understanding how biological processes can give rise to the phenomena of cognition and language.

Excerpt: Questions concerning the future uses of computers are often intertwined with questions about whether they will be intelligent. The existence of a field called ‘artificial intelligence’ implies that possibility and, as we pointed out in our introduction, there have been many speculations on the social impact of such developments. The theoretical principles developed in the earlier chapters lead us to the conclusion that one cannot program computers to be intelligent and that we need to look in different directions for the design of powerful computer technology Our goal in this chapter is to ground that conclusion in an analysis and critique of claims about artificial intelligence. We begin by examining the background in which the question of machine intelligence has been raised.

Excerpt: We are not much concerned with who has it right and who has it wrong, nor with the sorts of contortions necessary to embrace two or more variations. Rather, we find it much more instructive to read across versions and interpretations and to highlight common elements as well as points of disjuncture. This is our project in the first section of this essay, and we use it to explore a possible shared intuition, one that actually points to the impossibility of bringing together different theoretical offerings. This examination is followed by a discussion of the manners in which constructivist vocabularies have been assimilated into the discourses of professional practice, curriculum development, and related projects. The main intention here is not to critique but to develop the assertion that, at the level of practical action, most constructivist discourses were not originally conceived as educational discourses. Oriented by this point, in the third section of the essay we speculate on the sorts of revisions and accommodations that might help to frame relevant constructivist insights in terms that are useful and appropriate to discussions of teaching and schooling. We look to several cross-disciplinary discourses in this section, both as means to read across different versions of constructivism and as sources of advice on a new vocabulary.

Excerpt: Although I do not agree with the author’s claim that the schema mechanism corresponds to Piaget’s constructivist theory, I nonetheless consider Drescher’s approach as a kind of Constructivism and his research as a pioneering contribution to the application of Constructivism in AI tasks.

The viability of enactivist philosophy in providing descriptions of biological phenomena (bioenactivism) across the phylogenetic spectrum relies in large part on the scalability of its central concepts, i.e. whether they remain operative at varying levels of biological complexity. In this paper, I will examine the possibility of scaling two deeply intertwined concepts: cognition and surrounding world (Umwelt). Contra some indications from Varela and others, I will argue that the concept of embodied cognition can be scaled down below the level of the organism. I will draw upon the “cognitive biology” espoused by Kováč (2000, 2006) and Monod’s (1971) studies of protein behaviour to make this case. The downscaling of embodied cognition below the level of the organism has ramifications for how we understand the concept of surrounding world (Umwelt). Reconfiguring the relation between these two central bioenactive concepts has further consequences for what ontological commitments bioenactive thinking leads to, and what paths of investigation it points us toward.

Key words: Bioenactivism, biological complexity, embodied cognition

Excerpt: Current thinking about computers and their impact on society has been shaped by a rationalistic tradition that needs to be re-examined and challenged as a source of understanding, As a first step we will characterize the tradition of rationalism and logical empiricism that can be traced back at least to Plato. This tradition has been the mainspring of Western science and technology, and has demonstrated its effectiveness most clearly in the ‘hard sciences’ – those that explain the operation of deterministic mechanisms whose principles can be captured in formal systems. The tradition finds its highest expression in mathematics and logic, and has greatly influenced the development of linguistics and cognitive psychology. We will make no attempt to provide a full historical account of this tradition, or to situate it on some kind of intellectual map Instead, we have chosen to concentrate on understanding its effects on current discourse and practice, especially in relation to the development and impact of computers. The purpose of this chapter is to outline its major points and illustrate their embodiment in current theories of language, mind, and action.

This article consists of three parts. In the first part we describe a short history of cybernetics and an effort, which has been undertaken by a group of scientists in the United States and Europe in recent years, to expand the conception of science so that it more successfully encompasses the social sciences. The intent is to aid communication among disciplines and improve our ability to manage social systems. The second part of the article presents an effort in Russia to develop reflexivity theory into a general theory of purposeful, self-developing systems, thus improving our understanding and management of social systems. Understanding Western and Eastern approaches to cybernetics can be difficult because of the very different histories and intellectual traditions of cybernetics in the United States and Russia. The article ends with a comparison of the two approaches to cybernetics, comparing their features side by side. The differences suggest a great potential for ideas from Russian and Western scientists to enrich the further development of cybernetics and science in East and West.

Key words: cybernetics, expanding science, intellectual traditions, second-order cybernetics, social systems, third-order cybernetics.

Against the background of the emerging holistic view of language based on physicalism (the embodiment of mind) and an understanding that language is a biological phenomenon rooted in semiosis as the experience of life, it is argued that a new philosophical framework for cognition and language is currently taking shape. This philosophy is best characterized as a synthesis of ideas developed in cognitive linguistics, semiotics and biology. These ideas bear directly on autopoiesis as the theory of the living which possesses a greater explanatory power as it assumes the experiential nature of language. Autopoiesis allows for deeper insights into the essence of language which is viewed as a kind of adaptive behavior of an organism involving a meaning system constituted by signs of signs, thus making unification of (humanistic) science an attainable goal.

Key words: cognition, semiotics, biology, experience, meaning, life.

While constructivism enjoys considerable popularity in higher education, both in Australia and internationally, it nonetheless takes a variety of forms. These different interpretations make it difficult to draw strong conclusions about constructivism as a whole. In this essay, we therefore take a psycho-philosophical approach: reviewing and assessing three major versions of constructivism (radical, psychological and social), from both pedagogic and epistemic standpoints. We find no damaging psychological evidence against moderate pedagogic interpretations of constructivism that encourage a focus on how students learn, noting only that these must still be grounded empirically. We find several convincing philosophical arguments against particular epistemic interpretations, however, and against strong pedagogical interpretations that eschew all teacher direction. We conclude by encouraging Australian higher educators to discard the problematic epistemic and psychological versions of constructivism. To expose students to genuine disciplinary inquiry within the academy, we must retain only those versions of constructivism that are philosophically and pedagogically defensible.

Key words: constructivism, epistemology, pedagogy, student-centred, relativism, higher education.