In the article, I will argue that metacognition plays an important role in decision-making not only as direct online monitoring and control of decision-making processes but also by enabling us to influence our decisions and actions – and mental states and processes, related to them – in an offline manner. That is, offline metacognition allows us to observe, refer to and, to a certain degree, exert influence on mental states and processes related to our decisions and actions in the way of being removed, decoupled from the task/decision at hand and present time demands. As such, it enables us to observe, form thoughts and have feelings about mental states and processes directly related to our future decisions, to plan our future decisions, to reflect on our past choices, and to think and have feelings about our broader goals, desires, and personal values that are indirectly related to our decisions. To illustrate the importance of offline metacognition in decision-making, I will firstly review and discuss some experimental findings on implementation intentions (“decisions about the future”) and anticipated emotions (beliefs about future emotional states related to outcomes of our decisions). Secondly, I will argue that our ability to reflect (think and feel) on our broader goals, desires and personal values – that represent a kind of structure into which our specific decisions are embedded – reveals how offline metacognition can exert influence on our decisions also in an indirect way. All in all, I will try to show that our ability to refer to our own minds in an offline way – be it to mental states and processes directly or indirectly related to specific decisions – is essential for us to decide, as we decide, and act, as we act.

Key words: anticipated emotions, decision-making, goals, implementation intentions, offline metacognition

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to put forward a way that ethics may be applied recursively to itself, in the sense that how we speak and reason about ethics is an activity to which ethical considerations and questions apply. Design/methodology/approach – The paper is built on parallels between design and cybernetics, integrating elements of ethical discourse in each field. The way that cybernetics and design can each act as their own meta-disciplines, in the design of design and the cybernetics of cybernetics, is used as a pattern for a similarly recursive approach to ethics. This is explored further by drawing parallels between Heinz von Foerster’s criticism of moral codes and concerns about paternalism in designing architecture. Findings: Designers incorporate implicit ethical questioning as part of the recursive process through which they design their design activity, moving between conversations that pursue the goals of a project and meta-conversations in which they question which goals to pursue and the methods they employ in doing so. Given parallels between designing architecture and setting out an ethics (both of which put forward ways in which others are to live), a similar approach may be taken within ethical discourse, folding ethics within itself as its own meta-discipline. Originality/value – The paper provides a framework in which to address ethical considerations within ethical discourse itself. Recursive ethical questioning of this sort offers a way of coping with the incommensurability of values and goals that is commonplace given the fragmented state of contemporary ethics.

Key words: design, ethics, architecture, second-order cybernetics, recursion.

A current hypothesis among many mathematics educators is that it is helpful, and perhaps necessary, for students to be able to represent mathematical ideas in several equivalent ways. This sentiment is embodied in Dienes’ Multiple Embodiment Principle. From a constructivist perspective, if manipulatives are effective, it is due to the their constraints on students actions and thereby the greater number of occasions where students are prompted to reflect on their understanding in relation to their goals. This study investigated the hypothesis that the more pronounced in students’ experience is the constraining nature of a notational system, the more likely they are to conceive of notational algorithms as deriving from adaptations to the system’s constraints.

An inter-enactive approach to agency holds that the behavior of agents in a social situation unfolds not only according to their individual abilities and goals, but also according to the conditions and constraints imposed by the autonomous dynamics of the interaction process itself. We illustrate this position with examples drawn from phenomenological observations and dynamical systems models. On the basis of these examples we discuss some of the implications of this inter-enactive approach to agency for our understanding of social phenomena in a broader sense, and how the inter-enactive account provided here has to be taken alongside a theory of larger-scale social processes.

While the phenomena of reaching a goal is generally represented in the framework of optimization, the phenomena of becoming of a goal is more similar to a “self-organization and emergent” rather than an “optimization and preexisting” process. In this article we provide a modeling framework for the former alternative by representing goals as emergent autopoietic structures. In order to conceptually situate our approach, we first review some of the most remarkable attempts to formally define emergence, and identify that in most cases such definitions rely on a preexisting system to be observed prior and post emergence, being thus inadequate for a formalization of emergent goals corresponding to the becoming of a systems as such (e.g. emergence of life). Next, we review how an implementation of the reaction networks framework, known as Chemical Organization Theory (COT), can be applied to formalize autopoietic structures, providing a basis to operationalize goals as an emergent process. We next revisit the definitions of emergence under the light of our approach, and demonstrate that recent taxonomies developed to classify different forms of emergence can be naturally deduced from recent work aimed to explain the kinds of changes of the organizational structure of a reaction network.

Key words: chemical organization theory, emergence, goals, autopoiesis, process modelling.

The goals of instruction are usually taken to be fixed, at least in their broad outline. Forexample, in elementary school mathematics, students progress from counting to addition,multiplication, and fractions. Given this state of affairs, the business of educational researchhas been to determine how the fixed instructional aims can best be reached. Educationresearchers have traditionally asked questions such as: What are the typical difficulties thatstudents experience? Which means of instruction – method A or method B – is better forachieving our instructional aims? In contrast, we will describe a line of work in which we have shifted the focus from themeans to the object of learning. We are concerned with how the structure and properties ofknowledge affect its learnability and the power that it affords to individuals and groups. Webriefly review three agent-based restructurations of traditional science content and discuss the consequences for scientific power and learnability.