Context: I extend the enactive account of loving in romantic relationships that I developed with Hanne De Jaegher to the love of nature. Problem: I challenge a universal conceptualization of love of nature that does not account for the differences that are inherent to nature. As an alternative, I offer a situated account of loving a place as participatory sense-making. However, a question arises: How is it possible to communicate with the other-than-human? Method: I use panpsychist and enactive conceptual tools to better define this situated approach to the love of nature and to reply to the research question. In particular, I focus on Mathews’s “becoming native” and the generative tensions that unfold in a dialectic of encounter when a common language is not shared. Results: The fundamental difference experienced in encountering the other-than-human is generative for building up the human-Earth connection if we let each other be listened to. I describe the ethical dimension that permeates this type of “enactive listening” at the core of a situated account of love of nature. Implications: Love of nature is of paramount importance in our current climate crisis characterized by environmental anxiety, despair, and anger. A situated love of nature emphasizes the importance of community-based local interventions to preserve the Earth. Love, thus understood as a fundamental moral and political power, is a catalyst for environmental activism. Constructivist content: My article links to participatory sense-making as defined by De Jaegher and Di Paolo, and De Jaegher’s loving epistemology. It offers a broader understanding of participatory sense-making that includes the other-than-human. It also introduces the new concept of “enactive listening.”

Key words: Becoming native, enactive listening, enactivism, Freya Mathews, love, nature, place, participatory sense-making, panpsychism, situated affectivity.

Emergence is the process by which new structures and functions come into being. There are two fundamental, but complementary, conceptions of emergence: combinatoric emergence, wherein novelty arises by new combinations of pre-existing elements, and creative emergence, wherein novelty arises by de novo creation of new kinds of elements. Combinatoric emergence is exemplified by new strings constructed from existing alphabetic letters, whereas creative emergence is exemplified by the addition of new kinds of letters to an alphabet. The two conceptions are complementary, providing two modes for describing and understanding change: as the unfolding consequences of a fixed set of rules or as new processes and interactions that come into play over time. Within an observer-centered, operational framework, the two kinds of emergent novelty can be distinguished by what an external observer must do in order to successfully predict the behavior of an evolving system. Combinatoric and creative emergence can be operationally distinguished by changes in apparent effective dimensionality. Whenever a new independent observable is added to a model, its dimensionality increases by one. A system that only recombines requires no new observables, and does not expand in effective dimension. In contrast, a system that creates new primitives requires new observables for its description, such that its apparent dimensionality increases over time. Dimensional analysis can be applied to signaling systems. Signals have two basic functional properties: signal-type (category, variable, type) and signal-value (state, value, token). These properties can be conveyed by a variety of means: by the signal’s physical channel, by the internal form of the signal (waveform, Fourier spectrum), by its time of arrival, and by its magnitude (average power). Neural coding schemes can similarly be based on which neurons fire, which temporal patterns of spikes are produced, when volleys of spikes arrive, or how many spikes are produced. Traditional connectionist networks are discussed in terms of their assumptions about signal-roles and neural codes. For the most part, connectionist networks are conceptualized in terms of new linkage combinations rather than in terms of new types of signals being created. Neural networks that increase their effective dimensionalities can be envisioned. Some kinds of neural codes, such as temporal pattern and time-of-arrival codes, permit encoding and transmission of multidimensional information by the same elements (multiplexing). We outline how synchronous time-division and asynchronous code-division multiplexing might be realized in neural pulse codes. Multidimensional temporal codes permit different kinds of information to be encoded in different time patterns. Broadcast-based coordination strategies that obviate the need for precise, specified point-to-point connections are then made possible. In such systems new signal types arise from temporal interactions between time-coded signals, without necessarily forming new connections. Pitches of complex tones are given as examples of temporally-coded, emergent Gestalts that can be seen either as the sums of constituent micro-patterns (combinatoric emergence) or as the creation of new ones. Within these temporally-coded systems, interacting sets of neural assemblies might ramify existing, circulating signals to construct new kinds of signal primitives in an apparently open-ended manner.

Key words: combinatoric and creative emergence, dimensionality, observables, signaling systems, temporal coding, neural assemblies.

Critical criminology and radical constructivism are frequently regarded as an impossible pair – or, at least, as a rather schizophrenic one. This is so, notably, because radical constructivism rests on the (paradoxical) abandonment of what Jean-Francois Lyotard named meta-recits. It rests on the refusal to distinguish between the phenomenal and the symbolic, and thus implies the complete vanishing of the classical difference between ontology and epistemology. This would consequently deprive criminology (or, more generally, the social sciences) of any anchoring point enabling a critical utterance. The present contribution’s thesis is that, on the contrary, radical constructivism can catalyze critical criminology. Among the possible contributions of a radically constructivist sociology of criminalization, this paper focuses on: its call for a reworking of the concept of social control, which avoids problems related to its contemporary usage; its focus on power and force, in a way which avoids Foucaultian perspectives’ aporetic elements, and problematizes every instance of legitimized authoritarian practices.

Open peer commentary on the article “Audience and Eigenform: Cybersemiotic Epistemology and the “Truth of the Human Spirit” in Performance” by Tom Scholte. Upshot: Scholte’s counterintuitive use of the arts as laboratories of perceptual inquiry investigates meaning, language and formation of perceptual systems. Theory of Logical Types offers one way of understanding the power of theatre as a tool revealing the contextual organizing structures of perception.

“Gaming the Trace” builds up the power of narrative structures from a consideration, first, of the trace – the event of minimal inscription – and next, of what is latent in the reception – that is, the construction – of the trace. I coin a word to capture this combination of grammatological event and observing process, semiolepsis, and relate these dynamics to an allegory of narrative reception. Metempsychosis, or the tale of the transmission of the soul from one body to another, comes forward as an allegory of the reception of the trace. From here the essay moves to an interrogation of the movie Avatar’s mise en scène of the avatar system – its telling, its design specs, and its phantasmagoric realizations of technological metempsychoses. It turns out that an actual media technology exterior to that frame feeds another digital “transmission of soul” back into the physiological metamorphoses of the storyworld. Relevance: The essay expounds as well as applies a broadly Luhmannian framework of systems differentiations. Its methodology throughout is an application of epistemological constructivism and second-order systems theory.

In the field of education we usually find a wide range of differing proposals and approaches under the label of “constructivism.” The author’s thesis is that these differences have two origins. Firstly, the psychological theories these proposals and approaches are based on; and secondly, the particular use of the psychological theories in order to study, understand and explain the teaching learning processes at school. Three common ways or approaching the relationships between psychological knowledge and educational theory and practice are reviewed. All three deserve to be qualified as constructivist and have demonstrated their power in producing extremely useful and valuable implications and applications for schooling. However, two of them only offer a list of explanatory concepts and principles extracted from the developmental and learning theories used. The third, in addition, aims to provide a genuine constructivist explanation of teaching and learning processes at school, through the inclusion of the aforesaid principles and concepts in a whole logical scheme and through their reinterpretation on the basis of nature, functions and characteristics of schooling.

Key words: constructivism, constructivist approaches in education, constructivist theories of development, constructivist theories of learning, constructivist approach to teaching and learning processes

It is generally agreed that organisms are Complex Adaptive Systems. Since the rise of Cybernetics in the middle of the last century ideas from information theory and control theory have been applied to the adaptations of biological organisms in order to explain how they work. This does not, however, explain functionality, which is widely but not universally attributed to biological systems. There are two approaches to functionality, one based on etiology (what a trait was selected for), and the other based in autonomy. I argue that the etiological approach, as understood in terms of control theory, suffers from a problem of symmetry, by which function can equally well be placed in the environment as in the organism. Focusing on the autonomy view, I note that it can be understood to some degree in terms of control theory in its version called second order cybernetics. I present an approach to second order cybernetics that seems plausible for organisms with limited computational power, due to Hooker, Penfold and Evans. They hold that this approach gives something like concepts, certainly abstractions from specific situations, a trait required for functionality in its system adaptive form (i.e., control of the system by itself). Using this cue, I argue that biosemiotics provides the methodology to incorporate these quasi concepts into an account of functionality.

In the reception of Josef Mitterer’s writings up to now, there are two predominant types of motifs: the radical constructivist background of his philosophy and the ontological and epistemological foundations and consequences of non-dualism. The critics are focused rather on some problematic consequences of non-dualism, ranging from the problem of infinite regress up to the thesis assuming that Mitterer’s philosophy presupposes a world reduced to descriptions. However, these two types of readings are founded on dualizing assumptions which are not coherent with non-dualism. \\Thus, in the present paper I interpret non-dualism in the frame of non-dual-ism, based on non-dualizing assumptions. I argue that non-dualism is a rhetorical project resulting in far-reaching consequences in the field of academic and scientific debates, poetics and practice of negotiations and deliberations, as well as in ordinary discourse. Non-dualism fulfills Richard Rorty’s dream of culture as a never-ending conversation in which the argument of power is successfully replaced by the power of argument. Mitterer makes transparent the rhetorical techniques performed in the dualizing discourse (not only in situations of conflict) in order to present an alternative – the non-dualizing mode of discourse. Mitterer’s philosophy – reread in the context of Rorty’s pragmatism, Foucault’s conception of discourses, Perelman’s new rhetoric – offers the new vocabulary (in Rorty’s meaning) which may change the practice of speaking

Key words: non-dualizing mode of speaking, description “so far” / “from now on, ” constructivism, rhetoric, discourse.

Problem: The question of the moral and social effects of non-dualism has not yet been clarified to the necessary extent. The relation of truth claims, power and violence has been simplified; critical questions of non-dualist practises have not yet been addressed. Approach: By discussing relevant philosophy and political theory, this paper draws the attention of non-realists towards the issues of power, conflict and discourse rules and asks to rethink the issue of the pragmatic justification of non-realist epistemology. Findings: (1) Constructivists, as well as the non-dualist Josef Mitterer, are critical of the discursive effects of truth claims. Yet, neither constructivism nor non-dualism solve the power issues that are ascribed to realism by constructivists and dualism by Mitterer. Even if participants abstained from truth claims in discourses, many of the power issues would still be prevalent. (2) The question arises of whether a practical difference between non-dualism and dualism exists. (3) There is a tendency in constructivist and non-dualist theory to regard any form of influence on others as illegitimate. This tendency is not sound. Instead, the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate power is necessary in non-dualism as well. Implications: Constructivist and non-dualist theory need to scrutinise statements about the moral implications of the respective theories and to emphasise power issues not solely by extrapolating from epistemology, but by acknowledging the social dynamics of discourses and conflicts. Non-dualist social scientists could contribute to the discussion through empirical analyses of the effects of the use and the debunking of truth claims.

Key words: hegemony, power, moral, strategic essentialism, relativism, tolerance

Constructivism is a theory that carries on the ancient epistemological debate about skepticism, which denies the possibility of attaining objective knowledge. Constructivism poses basic questions about scientific inquiry. Social constructivism has become a transdisciplinary endeavor that encompasses all social sciences. Various arguments for and against constructivism are brought forth, with the most important debates revolving around the issue of relativism regarding both morality and science. Constructivist theories differ considerably from each other as well, especially regarding the need to rethink methodology and constructivism’s impetus of social change via the exposing of truth claims. Constructivism has shaped the understanding of the political, broadened the subject of political communication, and redefined power as a category of analysis. It challenges realist positions in a recognizable pattern across different fields. Different takes on framing theory exemplify disputes between realism and constructivism in political communication and beyond.