Although Enactivism and cultural anthropology share many core principles, a satisfactory Enactivist approach to culture has not yet been articulated. While the Enactivist embraces the cultural anthropologist’s skepticism with respect to a pregiven world described through objective truths, one of its stumbling blocks has been its difficulty in accounting for the normative background of interpersonal interaction, or what Wolfgang Wagner has referred to as “Social Representations.” This article argues that in order for the Enactivist to provide the conceptual tools necessary for this analysis, she must make use of what Varela and others refer to as “third-order unities.” The same principles that the Enactivist uses to explain the emergent properties of cells and organisms – autopiesis and identity-production – must be applied at the level of a society in order to understand how cultural meanings emerge and how they influence individual behavior. By applying these concepts at the supra-individual level, we get a more lucid picture of the fundamental features of an Enactivist account of culture, and can better understand the fundamental principles that Enactivism claims underlie all living systems both simple and complex.

Key words: enactivism, culture, identity, social representations, shared meanings

While presenting principles of The World Cafe as a collaborative way of meeting, strong possibilities for recognizing The World Cafe as a generative and highly participatory research methodology for knowledge generation are discussed. At its core, The World Cafe as research methodology embodies and extends principles of radical constructivism, including a shift from methodologies as “discovering” to a methodology as “harvesting” knowledge.

This article is based on a strong theoretical definition of a truly social domain, which is always defined by a set of structural norms; moreover, these social structures are not only a set of constraints, but actually constitute the possibility of enacting worlds that would just not exist without them. This view emphasizes the heteronomy of individuals who abide by norms that are impersonal, culturally inherited and to a large extent independent of the individuals. Human beings are socialized through and through; consequently, all human cognition is social cognition. Finally, it appears that fully blown autonomy actually requires heteronomy. It is the acceptance of the constraints of social structures that enables individuals to enter new realms of common meaningfulness. The emergence of social life marks a crucial step in the evolution of cognition; so that at some evolutionary point human cognition cannot but be social cognition.

The rise of scientific specializations and disciplines depends on the formation of specialized scientific communities. The establishment of specialized scholarly journals facilitates the formation of such communities. Publications, especially articles in specialized journals, have become institutionalized as the “ultimate” form of scientific communication. Specialized journals fulfill a key role in the scientific disciplines. This paper provides an analysis of these communication practices within the discipline of sociology, and sketches how these communication practices influence scientific research.

Open peer commentary on the target article “From Objects to Processes: A Proposal to Rewrite Radical Constructivism” by Siegfried J. Schmidt. Upshot: The aim is to show that, although Schmidt’s thesis must in most respects be warmly welcomed, there is an unexpressed implication concerning the dialogic structure of language that, when drawn out plainly, reveals a further valuable move open to the theory. I offer it therefore as a clarification of his theory with which I hope Schmidt may agree. He has already stressed the differences in understanding between one agent and another; it is because of this that, in order to communicate, agents must play without believing the mutual hypothetical projections of “truth,” “sincerity,” “objectivity,” “reference,” and other ideals of social “reality.” In the language process it is faith upon which this rests rather than blind trust. It is argued that only faith can properly take account of the risks of contingency.