Mechanistic explanations in biology have continually confronted the challenge that they are insufficient to account for biological phenomena. This challenge is often justified as accounts of biological mechanisms frequently fail to consider the modes of organization required to explain the phenomena of life. This, however, can be remedied by developing analyses of the modes of organization found in biological systems. In this paper I examine Tibor Gánti’s account of a chemoton, which he offers as the simplest chemical system that exhibits characteristics of life, and build from it an account of autonomous systems, characterized following Moreno as active systems that develop and maintain themselves by recruiting energy and raw materials from their environment and deploying it in building and repairing themselves. Although some theorists would construe such self-organizing and self-repairing systems as beyond the mechanistic perspective, I maintain that they can be accommodated within the framework of mechanistic explanation properly construed.

All organisms behave, but, as far as we know, only humans also explain behavior. Organisms routinely destroy other organisms for various reasons, but only humans ask why. One answer is “hatred.” Clearly it is not necessary to hate another organism in order to destroy it, but the idea is commonly invoked as an explanation for human violence. Has this always been the case with us humans? Or is “hate” (and other explanations of behavior) some kind of evolutionary adaptation? If so, what kind of evolution is involved in the development of explanations, and how might they serve to support individual and/or species survival? In other words, what are some of the epistemological roots of “hate” and what are some of the ontological’ consequences of constructing such an explanation?

A survey of the history of science shows that very similar conceptions have been developed independently in various branches of science. At present, for example, holistic interpretations are prevalent in all fields whereas in the past atomistic explanations were common. Such considerations lead to the postulation of General System Theory which is a logico-mathematical discipline applicable to all sciences concerned with systems. The fact that certain principles have general applicability to systems explains the occurrence of isomorphic laws in different scientific fields. Just as Aristotelian logic was a fundamental organon for the classificatory sciences of antiquity, so may General System Theory define the general principles of dynamic interaction which appears as the central problem of modern science.

We need to realize that a paradigm based on the view of the universe that makes irreversible time and evolution fundamental forces us to view man as a product of evolution and therefore an observer from inside the universe. The theories of the phenomenological life world and the hermeneutics of communication and understanding seem to defy classical scientific explanations. The humanities therefore send another insight the opposite way down the evolutionary ladder, with questions like: What is the role of consciousness, signs and meaning in evolution? These are matters that the exact sciences are not constructed to answer in their present state. Phenomenology and hermeneutics point out to the sciences that they have prerequisite conditions in embodied living as a conscious being imbued with meaningful language and a culture. One can see the world view that emerges from the work of the sciences as a reconstruction back into time of our present ecological and evolutionary self-understanding as semiotic intersubjective conscious cultural historical creatures, but unable to handle the aspects of meaning and conscious awareness. How can we integrate these two directions of explanatory efforts? The problem is that the scientific one is without concepts of qualia and meaning, and the phenomenological-hermeneutic “sciences of meaning” do not have a foundation in material evolution. Relevance: A modern interpretation of C.S. Peirce’s pragmaticistic evolutionary and phaneroscopic semiosis in the form of a biosemiotics is used and integrated with N. Luhmann’s evolutionary autopoietic system theory of social communication. This framework, which integrates cybernetics and semiotics, is called Cybersemiotics.

This paper seeks to juxtapose the work of Sir Geoffrey Vickers and Humberto Maturana with a view to thinking more about the theoretical underpinnings of Peter Checkland’s soft systems methodology (SSM) and of soft systems and soft operational research more generally. The paper argues that Maturana’s ‘Theory of the Observer’ can usefully complement Vickers by specifying more precisely the nature of the cognitive structures that underpin people’s descriptions of situations, by clarifying the relationship between cognitive creativity and the historical and relational constraints that bear upon people’s descriptions and explanations, and by providing a more complete description of the dynamics that underpin individual and social learning.

Key words: Appreciative system, soft systems, theory of the observer

Underlying all theories are philosophical presuppositions that lend themselves to different epistemological approaches, which need to be unfurled when comparing theories and offering alternative explanations. Contrary to Verheggen and Baerveldt’s (2007) promulgation that `enactivism’ may be an adequate alternative for Wagner’s social representation approach, this commentary outlines how this may be a misguided position. Enactivism, following an outward trajectory from nervous systems, to minds, to `(inter)action’, to social enactivism, is incompatible with the dialogical epistemology underpinning social representations theory. Social representations are not reducible to individual minds, and dialogical interaction is not reducible to operationally closed `systems’ in (inter)action. The difference between the two approaches lies in the fundamental paradigmatic distinction between molar and molecular explanatory frameworks. Offering one as an alternative to the other overlooks the epistemological differences between the two and fails to appreciate the discrepancies between different levels of analysis, explanatory frameworks and the very phenomena that theories problematize.

Key words: dialogical epistemology, enactivism, social representation

Open peer commentary on the article “Studying Conceptual Change in Classrooms: Using Association Rule Mining to Detect Changes in Students’ Explanations of the Effects of Urban Planning and Social Policy” by Arthur Hjorth & Uri Wilensky. Abstract: What could be more important than exploring how students construct knowledge? The authors have taken a major step in using constructionist tools to analyze how students change their concepts after interacting with a multiagent model in a course on urban design. I will address what I consider to be several missed opportunities in their presentation.

The constructivist teaching experiment is used in formulating explanations of children’s mathematical behavior. Essentially, a teaching experiment consists of a series of teaching episodes and individual interviews that covers an extended period of time – anywhere from 6 weeks to 2 years. The explanations we formulate consist of models – constellations of theoretical constructs – that represent our understanding of children’s mathematical realities. However, the models must be distinguished from what might go on in children’s heads. They are formulated in the context of intensive interactions with children. Our emphasis on the researcher as teacher stems from our view that children’s construction of mathematical knowledge is greatly influenced by the experience they gain through interaction with their teacher. Although some of the researchers might not teach, all must act as model builders to ensure that the models reflect the teacher’s understanding of the children. Relevance: Constructivist teaching experiment, Model building, Clinical interview. Teaching episode, Counting scheme, Teacher as researcher

Research on social cognition needs to overcome a disciplinary disintegration. On the one hand, in cognitive science and philosophy of mind – even in recent embodied approaches – the explanatory weight is still overly on individual capacities. In social science on the other hand, the investigation of the interaction process and interactional behaviour is not often brought to bear on individual aspects of social cognition. Not bringing these approaches together has unfairly limited the range of possible explanations of social understanding to the postulation of complicated internal mechanisms (contingency detection modules for instance). Starting from the question What is a social interaction? we propose a fresh look at the problem aimed at integrating individual cognition and the interaction process in order to arrive at more parsimonious explanations of social understanding. We show how an enactive framework can provide a way to do this, starting from the notions of autonomy, sense-making and coordination. We propose that not only each individual in a social encounter but also the interaction process itself has autonomy. Examples illustrate that these autonomies evolve throughout an encounter, and that collective as well as individual mechanisms are at play in all social interactions. We also introduce the notion of participatory sense-making in order to connect meaning-generation with coordination. This notion describes a spectrum of degrees of participation from the modulation of individual sense-making by coordination patterns, over orientation, to joint sense-making. Finally, we discuss implications for empirical research on social interaction, especially for studies of social contingency.

Open peer commentary on the article “Perception-Action Mutuality Obviates Mental Construction” by Martin Flament Fultot, Lin Nie & Claudia Carello. Upshot: The aim of my commentary is to complement some of the main points defended in the target article. In particular, I want to explore further the central role of agent-level explanations and of evolution for our understanding of a meaningful environment. I finish by wondering whether an excessive focus on ontological questions could be problematic for a proper defence of ecological psychology.