Open peer commentary on the article “Examining the Role of Re-Presentation in Mathematical Problem Solving: An Application of Ernst von Glasersfeld’s Conceptual Analysis” by Victor V. Cifarelli & Volkan Sevim. Upshot: In this commentary, I address the viability of conducting constructivist teaching experiments to develop models of students’ conceptualizations. I also discuss how this research tradition has been adapted by researchers to conduct classroom teaching experiments. In my concluding remarks, I address the need for researchers to develop models for teacher learning.

As the results of man-engineered experiments with social design, social “revolution”, socialist “architectures”, and other feats of “social engineering”, are crumbling down, they are causing large-scale human suffering through their failures. There is a renewed awareness that self-organizing and spontaneous properties of complex social systems are much too powerful (and much too vulnerable at the same lime) to respond or be exposed to the endless, reductionistic “tinkering” of policy “makers”, “scientists” of the artificial, and “engineers of human souls”. The mankind is again ready to learn how to “trigger”, “catalyze”, “sustain” and “lead-manage” a spontaneous process of social self-organization; it is becoming less inclined to design another “central super-controller”, “information-processing command system”, or “World Brain”. The purpose of this paper is to show: (1) that theories dealing with “spontaneous social orders” have deep historical roots and (2) that systems sciences are in a good position (better than economics, engineering or sociology) to build upon these roots and expand the theories into useful, practical methodologies. For example, modern theories of autopoiesis and order through fluctuations, especially their rich, computer-based simulation experiments, provide a good and solid point of departure.

Key words: Self-organization, self-production, autopoiesis, spontaneous social orders, social autopoiesis.

The objective of this work concerns the design and the implementation of a zoomable interface implying the haptic modality. The initial postulate is that the zoom experience is not a natural, a direct experience, but supposes instrumentation and learning. In other words, the zoom experience is built by the appropriation of a technical substitution which makes it possible to modify the properties of the space-time flow; these properties which bind the subject to his (real or virtual) world are relational. To conceive this new interface, directly inspired from technologies known as of sensory substitution, we carried out a set of experiments allowing to define and to qualify the technical conditions and of use which favour the emergence of a perceptive experience of the zoom type. More generally, it concerns the proposition of more intuitive or immediate modes of instrumental interaction engaging explicitly the body in action.

Open peer commentary on the article “The Circular Conditions of Second-order Science Sporadically Illustrated with Agent-based Experiments at the Roots of Observation” by Manfred Füllsack. Upshot: I follow the general tenor of Füllsack’s target article but I have some basic reservations as to the utilization of the thermodynamics involved.