Excerpt: This final chapter of applications will look at two related areas: computer-based information systems (IS), and cognitive science and artificial intelligence. Within IS, autopoietic ideas have so far had only a limited influence, largely through the work of Winograd and Flores, who have produced a critique of both information systems design and artificial intelligence. This is covered in Section 11.2. More significantly, Varela has concentrated, in recent years, on cognitive science and has developed a new framework, the enactive approach, based partly on earlier cognitive theories and the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty. This is the subject of Section 11.3.

Excerpt: In this chapter, I highlight the study of subjectivity, an analytic category that foregrounds felt human experience and frames it as being at once socioculturally constituted and singular.

Betrachtet man die aktuelle Debatte um den Konstruktivismus in der Kommunikationswissenschaft, stehen immer wieder drei Fragen im Vordergrund: Wie genau konkretisiert sich konstruktivistisches Denken in der Kommunikations- und Medienforschung? Welche Grundlagen liefert es für eine empirische Forschung? Und inwieweit verschieben sich hierbei bisherige Blickwinkel und Ansätze? Diese Fragen aufgreifend führt die Einleitung in das Themenheft „Konstruktivismus in der Kommunikationswissenschaft“ ein. Hierbei wird zuerst diskutiert, warum die Debatte um Konstruktivismus jetzt (erneut) geführt werden sollte. Ausgehend davon werden die Linien des Konstruktivismus in der deutschsprachigen Kommunikationswissenschaft über die letzten fünf Jahrzehnte rekonstruiert und die verschiedenen Beiträge dieses Themenhefts in diese Diskussion eingeordnet. Schließlich werden Überlegungen zu einer konstruktivistischen Kritik angestellt, wie sie im Hinblick auf den fundamentalen und tiefgreifenden Charakter des Medien- und Kommunikationswandels notwendig erscheint.

Key words: konstruktivismus, medienwandel, kommunikationswandel, kritik, empirische medien- und kommunikationsforschung, mediatisierung

In recent years, the social interaction involved in the construction of the mathematics of children has been brought into the foreground in order to sptcify its constructive aspects (Bauersfeld, 1988; Yackel, etc., 1990). One of the basic goals in our current teaching experiment is to analyse such social interaction in the context of children working on fractions in computer microworlds. In our analyses, however, we have found that social interaction does not provide a full account of children’s mathematical interaction. Children’s mathematical interaction also includes enactment or potential enactment of their operative mathematical schc:mes. Therefore, we conduct our analyses of children’s social interaction in the context of their mathematical interaction in our computer microworlds. We interpret and contrast the children’s mathematical interaction from the points of view of radical constructivism and of Soviet activity theory. We challenge what we believe is a common interpretation of learning in radical constructivism by those who approach learning from a social-cultural point of view. Renshaw (1992), for example, states that ‘In promulgating an active. constructive and creative view of learning,… the constructivists painted the learner in close-up as a solo-pia yer, a lone scientist, a solitary observer, a me:ming maker in a vacuum.’ In Renshaw’s interpretation, learning is viewed as being synonymous with construction in the absence of social interaction with other human beings. To those in mathematics education who use the teaching experiment methodology, this view of learning has always seemed strange because we emphasize social interaction as a primary means of engendering learning and of building models of children’s mathematical knowledge (Cobb and Steffe, 1983; Steffe, 1993).

Excerpt: The central problem is that the autopoietic definition specifies the production of the components constituting the entity and the production of a boundary separating the entity from its environment. The definition does not specify that these must be physical components, but if they are not, then what precisely is their domain of existence? This chapter is structured by different responses to this central question.

Excerpt: In this chapter, I argue for the position that active perception is actually best accounted for by a representational theory of perception. Along the way, this will require a relatively novel conception of what to count as representations. In particular, I flesh out a novel account of action-oriented representations: representations that include in their contents commands for certain behaviors.