Closure has been used in various ways. I propose a classification based on the specification hierarchy formalism, wherein ideas are represented as subclasses, or restrictions, of other ideas, beginning with the most generally applicable concept and working inward to more particular applications. This exercise is part of a revival of nineteenth century natural philosophy. The classification also represents a self-referential developmental system in which the classification itself emerges from the evolutionary process it describes. Since one form of closure builds upon a previously attained form, development traces a loss of evolutionary potential even as each closure gives access into a new, emergent, realm.

Currently there are two movements emerging within systems theory in connection with biology: self-organization and hierarchy theory. They are treated together here because they represent polar oppositional perspectives. Self-organization is concerned with change viewed as from within a changing system; whereas hierarchy theory, in the form familiar to most systems workers, is an externalist descriptive framework for dealing with constraints bearing on a system from multiple scalar levels. Hierarchy theory also deals externally, in another form (the specification hierarchy), with integrative levels as developmental stages within an ontogenetic trajectory. In this article we conclude that, although self-organization and hierarchies are incommensurable discourses, they could be taken to be complementary, each supplying what the other lacks in understanding systems.

Biosemiotics and cybernetics are closely related, yet they are separated by the boundary between life and non-life: biosemiotics is focused on living organisms, whereas cybernetics is applied mostly to non-living artificial devices. However, both classes of systems are agents that perform functions necessary for reaching their goals. I propose to shift the focus of biosemiotics from living organisms to agents in general, which all belong to a pragmasphere or functional universe. Agents should be considered in the context of their hierarchy and origin because their semiosis can be inherited or induced by higher-level agents. To preserve and disseminate their functions, agents use functional information – a set of signs that encode and control their functions. It includes stable memory signs, transient messengers, and natural signs. The origin and evolution of functional information is discussed in terms of transitions between vegetative, animal, and social levels of semiosis, defined by Kull. Vegetative semiosis differs substantially from higher levels of semiosis, because signs are recognized and interpreted via direct code-based matching and are not associated with ideal representations of objects. Thus, I consider a separate classification of signs at the vegetative level that includes proto-icons, proto-indexes, and proto-symbols. Animal and social semiosis are based on classification and modeling of objects, which represent the knowledge of agents about their body (Innenwelt) and environment (Umwelt). Relevance: The paper suggests an agency-based approach to biosemiotics. This approach is related to the interactivism of Mark Bickhard.

Elaborating a model first presented in Uryu, Steffensen, and Kramsch (2014), the article discusses two conceptualizations of time and time scales in human interaction. One takes a starting point in a scalar hierarchy of tiered time scales and the other starts from a specification hierarchy of temporal ranges. While the time scales of the former by definition are observer-dependent, those of the latter relate the temporal dynamics of complex dialogical systems (Steffensen, 2012) to a series of causal frames, including physical, biological, social, cognitive and interactional constraints. Being the outcome of an evolutionary trajectory towards growing complexity, these constraints are the enabling conditions of human interaction, and as such they give rise to multistable dialogical systems. While this article focuses on the presentation of an ecological model of temporal ranges and time scales, its methodological implications and interpretive potentials are explored in Pedersen and Steffensen (2014).

Key words: time scales, temporal ranges, temporal dynamics, interactivity, interaction, dialogical system, multistability

Context: The relationship between design and science has shifted over recent decades. One bridge between the two is cybernetics, which offers perspectives on both in terms of their practice. From around 1980 onwards, drawing on ideas from cybernetics, Glanville has suggested that rather than apply science to design, it makes more sense to understand science as a form of design activity, reversing the more usual hierarchy between the two. I return to review this argument here, in the context of recent discussions in this journal regarding second-order science (SOS). Problem: Despite numerous connections to practice, second-order cybernetics (SOC) has tended to be associated with theory. As a result, SOC is perceived as separate to the more tangible aspects of earlier cybernetics in a way that obscures both the continuity between the two and also current opportunities for developing the field. Method: I review Glanville’s understanding of design, and particularly his account of scientific research as a design-like activity, placing this within the context of the shifting relation between science and design during the development of SOC, with reference to the work of Rittel and Feyerabend. Through this, I summarise significant parallels and overlaps between SOC and the contemporary concerns of design research. Results: I suggest that we can see design research not just as a field influenced by cybernetics but as a form of SOC practice even where cybernetics is not explicitly referenced. Implications: Given this, design research offers much to cybernetics as an important example of SOC that is both outward looking and practice based. As such, it bridges the gap between SOC and the more tangible legacy of earlier cybernetics, while also suggesting connections to contemporary concerns in this journal with SOS in terms of researching research. Constructivist content: By suggesting that we see design research as an example of SOC, I develop connections between constructivism and practice.

Key words: Science, design research, second-order cybernetics, second-order science, practice, Ranulph Glanville

Globalization processes imply the self-deconstruction of the hierarchy of legal norms. Thus, legal pluralism is no longer only an issue for legal sociology, but becomes a challenge for legal practice itself. Traditionally, rule making by `private regimes’ has been subjugated under the hierarchical frame of the national constitution. When this frame breaks, then the new frame of legal institutions can only be heterarchical. The origin of global non-state law as a sequence of recursive legal operations is an `as if’, not only a founding myth as a self-observation of law, rather the legal fiction of concrete past operations. This fiction, however, depends on social conditions outside legal institutions, on a historical configuration in which it is sufficiently plausible to assume that in earlier times, too, legal rules were applied.

Key words: frames, globalization, legal autopoiesis, lex mercatoria.

Cybernetics has evolved far beyond the problems of servomechanics and simple models of purposive behavior into a substantial body of theory with potential for resolving long-standing controversies surrounding the role of teleological concepts and reductionism in scientific explanation. The diverse research contributing to modern cybernetics views natural adaptation, goal-directed behavior, and conscious purpose as varying expressions of circular causal, recursive, and system/environment relationships along a continuum of organized complexity. This mode of analysis suggests that hierarchy in the sciences springs from a hierarchy of causal circuits in the structure of teleological phenomena, for which the dual, part/whole nature at any particular level forces a bifurcation of discourse into distinct “logical types” according to the observer’s focus. The cybernetic paradigm may thus provide connecting tissue by which the full spectrum of explanation, from physicochemical to teleological, is joined in a coherent scientific framework constituting “reduction in principle” of living systems, even while truly meaningful translation of one science into another is precluded by the disparate logics of their subject matter.

A newly emerging organizational mode shifts our thinking from the traditional vertical hierarchy of command to horizontal patterns of market-oriented networks of autonomous agents. This organizational mode is characterized by self-management, autonomy and self-sustainability, the trio of prerequisites for a successful and self-sustainable enterprise. Self-sustainable systems must be autopoietic, i.e., self-producing. They must be capable of producing themselves, not only of producing something else. Employees, managers and community stakeholders are striving to create a self-sustaining organizational milieu by pursuing decisional autonomy, self-management and shared participatory ownership. Like biological “amoebas,” they should adapt to the ever changing circumstances in terms of size, shape, function and interaction. Relevance: This paper builds on the theory of autopoietic systems based on the work of Maturana, Varela and Uribe.

Departing from the theoretical framework of the semiotic hierarchy (Zlatev, 2009), realizing a form of cognitive semiotics based on ‘integrating methods and theories developed in the disciplines of cognitive science with methods and theories developed in semiotics and the humanities’i (cf. www.cognitivesemiotics.com) the paper analyzes the concepts of embodiment and communication along an evolutionary progression of four levels: biological, phenomenological, significational (sign-based) and extended/normative. Examples of human and animal communication are provided in order to clarify these distinct levels. Further, the concept of bodily mimesis and the model of the mimesis hierarchy (Zlatev, 2008, Zlatev & Andrén, 2009) that is predicated upon it are offered as conceptual and empirical tools in order to help explain the transitions leading to the two highest meaning levels: to sign use proper (from pre-sign meanings), and from this to normative, and eventually body-independent, objectified sign systems such as those of writing and mathematics. The leitmotif of the paper is the risk of either exaggerating or down playing the bodily bases of meaning and communication.