Thinking and spirituality each evoke many interpretations. Constructivist thinking focusses on a systemic and rational approach that includes an analysis of meaning in terms of constituent operations. Central features of religious thinking depend on an absence of agreed mechanisms to establish consensus. Insight, novelty and humour however, depend on flexibility in making meaning. Zen provides a perspective facilitating a flexible orientation to cognitive categories allowing access to systemic properties of the person-experience interface.

Key words: Zen, constructivism, systemic thinking, religion, cognition

In this paper, I will discuss the application of Maturana and Varela’s theories of autopoiesis, cognition and language to the notions of worldview, worldview change and curriculum design. The context for this discussion is the education of systems concepts, thinking and practice. It has been argued that systemic thinking requires the adoption of particular assumptions into the worldview of the student, independent of the systems concepts under study. This raises the question of how best to structure a curriculum to meet this end. It will be argued that autopoietic theory, when applied to systems education has significant implications for curriculum design.

Key words: Autopoietic theory, systems education, worldview change, curriculum design, systems practice

Abstract: The commentaries on my target article encompass a large and diverse variety of interesting topics, ranging from fundamental notions relevant to systemic thinking, to the planetary crisis. The reading of these commentaries has revealed to me that the main weakness of my article consists in my failure to provide more rigorous and explicit definitions or explications of my use of the main epistemological and biological notions that sustain my position. Through my response, I intend to present these basic notions in a more explicit manner, while at the same time addressing what I consider to be the nuclear aspects of each of the commentaries.

Epistemology of Systems Thinking (ST) has undergone important changes throughout the twentieth century and has gradually gained ground in scientific investigations and interventions in different contexts. Understanding its epistemological principles has been a challenge in undergraduate and graduate courses of different areas, and it is sine qua non for the implementation of systemic research and interventions. Thus, this article aims to present the historical and epistemological development of ST in the twentieth century and the contributions of Humberto Maturana for the advancement of postmodern science, with Biology of Cognition and Cultural Biology. It describes the paradigm shift from traditional science to postmodern science, as well as the basic assumptions that characterize them. We used a historical and epistemological spiral, along with the concept of recursion, to facilitate the understanding of the interconnections between researchers and theories that have contributed to the development of ST. The main concepts of the systemic theories that are recognized and well-known in the scientific community were presented, namely, the General Systems Theory, Cybernetics, the Communication Theory. Our conclusion is that the epistemology of ST has provided significant advances to science, because it integrates the epistemological assumptions of complexity, instability and inter-subjectivity in phenomena analysis, in research and interventions in different contexts.

Key words: epistemology, cybernetics, systemic thinking.

Excerpt: Shortly after his arrival in the USA, Watzlawick started to work as a research associate of the Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto – an Institute whose members had implemented, both in their therapeutic work and in its systematic investigation, the general insights of Gregory Bateson and Don D. Jackson concerning the essential character of insane and pathological behaviour. In 1967 Watzlawick began to teach at Stanford University, was active as therapist and communication scientist, advised companies and concerns, and in his books described paradoxes and snares in communication. These publications demonstrate, in particular, the practical consequences of constructivist and systemic thinking: one realises how conceptions arise that lead to suffering, how they become rigid, and how they may be – owing to successful intervention – liquefied and dissolved again.

Situation and problem: a course‐writing team needs to converge rapidly to what it regards as: an agreed topic structure, which is keyed to agreed learning objectives, which specify relevant assessment questions in a natural learning sequence. Only then can the team members go away individually to write, knowing that everything that they write will fit together. In normal practice, this convergence is only partial: the topic structure harbors gaps, ambiguities and contradictions; the learning objectives are not keyed explicitly to the concepts in the topic structure; and questions for assessment of learners’ understanding do not directly exemplify conceptually keyed learning objectives. The result is courseware which does not help people to learn as well as it otherwise could, and which has been created with more effort than otherwise would have been needed. This paper shows how systemic methods inspired by Gordon Pask can be used to complete the necessary convergence with ease.

Key words: learning, objectives, assessment, systemic thinking.