Glasersfeld E. von & Stadler M. (2000) Wir machen, was wir sehen. Lockere Einführung in den Konstruktivismus [We make what we see. A casual introduction to constructivism]. In: Heute ist Morgen [Today is tomorrow]. Kunst und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik, Bonn: 137–149. https://cepa.info/1523
Haynes J.-D., Roth G., Schwegler H. & Stadler M. (1998) Die funktionale Rolle des bewußt Erlebten [The functional role of conscious experience]. Gestalt Theory 20: 186–213. https://cepa.info/4806
Kruse P. & Stadler M. (1987) Radikaler Konstruktivismus – psychologische Überlegungen zu einem philosophischen Zweifel. In: Amelang M. (ed.) Bericht über den 35. Kongress der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Psychologie, Volume 2. Hogrefe, Göttingen: 199–210.
Stadler M. & Kruse P. (1990) Cognitive Systems as Self-Organizing Systems. In: Krohn W., Küppers G. & Nowotny H. (eds.) Selforganization. Portrait of a scientific revolution. Kluwer, Dordrecht: 181–193. https://cepa.info/2751
Excerpt: The theory of self-organization is beginning to penetrate into the entire spectrum of scientific disciplines. The initial ideas that led to self-organization theory can be traced back into the historical tradition of the social and natural sciences. The theory of self-organization in a narrower sense, however, is usually said to have begun with the works of Manfred Eigen, Heinz von Foerster, Ernst von Glasersfeld, Hermann Haken, Humberto Maturana and Ilja Prigogine. If one considers these works as the basis, two main conceptual points of reciprocal causal relationship may be distinguished: the emphasis on the purely theoretical, system-related aspect and the emphasis on the epistemological aspect of self-organization. The latter emphasis is necessarily made when the idea of an autonomous creation of order is applied to the area of cognition. Every experienced or reconstructed reality, according to this view, is considered to be the result of a self-referential attribution of meaning and thus constructed in a radical sense. This epistemological consequence reacts upon all approaches of the theory of self-organization in a theoretical recourse. In the following this general epistemological consequence will not be our main focus of interest. Instead, we would like to outline the special significance the idea of autonomous order formation may have for the concrete psychological investigation of the functioning of cognitive systems. Arguing first that self-organization theory is a possible answer to a basic problem of psychology and second that this theoretical approach has a long, well-elaborated but nevertheless nearly forgotten tradition in gestalt psychology, we will point out some methodological consequences of the self-organization concept for psychological experimentation. In the last part of our contribution some already performed experiments will be demonstrated to illustrate the theoretical conclusions.
Stadler M. & Kruse P. (1990) Über Wirklichkeitskriterien. In: Riegas V. & Vetter C. (eds.) Zur Biologie der Kognition. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main: 133–158.
Stadler M. & Kruse P. (1991) Visuelles Gedächtnis für Formen und das Problem der Bedeutungszuweisung in kognitiven Systemen. In: Schmidt S. J. (ed.) Gedächtnis. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main: 250–266.
Stadler M. & Kruse P. (2004) Appearance of structure and emergence of meaning in the visual system. In: Carsetti A. (ed.) Seeing, thinking and knowing. Springer, Dordrecht: 293–306. https://cepa.info/5217