Excerpt: In 1955 George Kelly published his major two-volume opus entitled “The Psychology of Personal Constructs.” This was the culmination of more than twenty years pioneering work in psychology and is the synthesis of Kelly’s own experiences, not only in the practice of clinical psychology but also in his wide-ranging educational background, receiving degrees in physics, mathematics, educational sociology, education and psychology.

Excerpt: If one considers sciences such as biology, psychology or sociology from the distance of an uninvolved observer one might conclude that biology has to do with life, psychology with the soul or consciousness, and sociology with society. A closer look makes it apparent, however, that these disciplines have characteristic difficulties with concepts intended to designate the unity of their object. The concept of autopoiesis is addressed directly to this problem. It was originally introduced by Humberto Maturana with respect to life, but it may well be applicable to consciousness and to society. It is, however, a concept which plays almost no role in the daily business of these disciplines, so that we are left with the question, why is there this particular problem of designating the unity of the object of these disciplines by a scientific concept.

The aim of this article is to show how sociocybernetics can clarify and bring order to two key concepts in the social sciences: ‘observation’ and ‘reflexivity’. The article provides an introduction and conceptual overview of second order cybernetics, placing it in the larger context of cybernetics and systems sciences studies. Since its inception, in cybernetics the role of the observer has been paramount. It is the observer who distinguishes systems of interest. It is the observer who communicates her observations and theoretical interpretations to the wider community of other observers. Critically, as Heinz von Foerster emphasises, with second order cybernetics the observer, since she is herself an observing system, should ‘enter the domain of her own descriptions’. With her second order studies, she is explaining herself to herself. Reflexively, she is obliged to engage in self-observation. The article sets out some of the theoretical and methodological implications of these propositions.

Key words: conversation theory, observation, reflexivity, second order cybernetics, sociocybernetics

This paper examines a fundamental philosophical difference between two radical postcognitivist theories that are usually assumed to offer (more or less) the same view of cognition; namely the autopoietic theory (AT) and the enactive approach. The ways these two theories understand cognition, it is argued, are not compatible nor incompatible but rather incommensurable. The reason, so it is argued, is that while enactivism, following the traditional stance held by most of the cognitive theories, understands cognitive systems as constituting a (sort of) natural kind, the autopoietic theory understands them as constituting only a conventional kind. Additionally, the paper shows that AT’s conventionalist stance about cognition, far from being an undesirable or useless position, offers some methodological virtues that might be timely and welcome in the agitated and revolutionary climate of current cognitive science.

Key words: autopoietic theory, enactivism, the mark of the cognitive, conventional kind, pluralism, strict naturalism.

O’Regan and Noë’s sensorimotor approach rejects the old-fashioned view that perceptual experience in humans depends solely on the activation of internal representations. Reflecting a wealth of empirical work, for example active vision, the approach suggests that perceiving is, instead, a matter of bodily exploration of the outside environment. To this end, the approach says the perceiver must deploy knowledge of sensorimotor contingencies, the ways sense input changes with movement by the perceiver or object perceived. Clark has observed that the approach faces a challenge accounting for the experience of temporal duration, since event-like properties cannot be characterised by reference to the sensory consequences of possible movements. This paper argues that the account can best be shored up by emphasising, more than Noë does, the dependence of perceptual experience, in general, on temporally extended, organismic interaction with the outside environment. The paper argues, moreover, that an ‘extensionalist’ account of temporal experience could help make sense of object experience, which is itself, plausibly, an experience of temporal duration.

Key words: enactivism, temporal experience, sensorimotor theory, sensorimotor contingencies, perception

Excerpt: This special issue contains a selection of the papers presented at the international symposium entitled ‘Foundations of Enactive Cognitive Science’, which was held in Windsor, UK, in February 2012. In organizing this symposium, our explicit goal was to create the space for researchers attracted to the concept of enaction to discuss the research agenda(s) for what could be described as an alternative or an extension to the orthodox paradigm(s) in cognitive science. About 70 researchers represented the five continents, and a dozen of academic disciplines. More extensive proceedings of the event can be found at

Both autonomy and agency play central roles in the emerging enactive vocabulary. Although some treat these concepts as practically synonymous, others have sought to be more explicit about the conditions required for agency over and above autonomy. I attempt to be self-conscious about the role of the ob-server (or scientist) in such discussions, and emphasise that the concept of agency, in particular, is deeply entwined with the nature of the observer and the framing of the observation. This is probably well known to enactivists, but runs the risk of being badly misunderstood if it is not made explicit. A height-ened awareness of the role of the observer in the attribution of agency may allow us to make advances in questions in which progress is hindered by as-suming a single split between subject and object. I argue that human experi-ence is characterized by our embedding in webs of meaning arising from our participation in systems of many sorts, and that this richness demands a cor-responding lightness of touch with respect to the identification of agentive subjects.

Key words: agency, autonomy, enactivism, cognition, mind.

We analyze the conditions for agency in natural and artificial systems. In the case of basic (natural) autonomous systems, self-construction and activity in the environment are two aspects of the same organization, the distinction between which is entirely conceptual: their sensorimotor activities are metabolic, realized according to the same principles and through the same material transformations as those typical of internal processes (such as energy transduction). The two aspects begin to be distinguishable in a particular evolutionary trend, related to the size increase of some groups of organisms whose adaptive abilities depend on motility. Here a specialized system develops, which, in the sensorimotor aspect, is decoupled from the metabolic basis, although it remains dependent on it in the self-constructive aspect. This decoupling reveals a complexification of the organization. In the last section of the article this approach to natural agency is used to analyze artificial systems by posing two problems: whether it is possible to artificially build an organization similar to the natural, and whether this notion of agency can be grounded on different organizing principles.

Historically, immunology emerged as a biomedical science, concerned with host defense and production of anti-infectious vaccines. In the late 50s, selective theories were proposed and from then on, immunology has been based in a close association with the neo-Darwinian principles, such as random generation of variants (lymphocyte clones), selection by extrinsic factors (antigens) – and, more generally, on genetic determinism and functionalism. This association has had major consequences: (1) immunological jargon is full of “cognitive” metaphors, founded in the idea of “foreignness”; (2) the immune system is described with a random clonal origin, coupled to selection by random encounters; and (3) physiological events are virtually absent from immunological descriptions. In the present manuscript, we apply systemic notions to bring forth an explanation including systemic mechanisms able to generate immunological phenomena. We replace “randomness plus selection” and the notion of foreignness by a history of structural changes which are determined by the coherences of the system internal architecture at any given moment. The importance of this systemic way of seeing is that it explicitly attends to the organization that defines the immune system, within which it is possible to describe the conservative physiology of the immune system. Understanding immune physiology in a systemic way of seeing also suggests mechanisms underlying the origin of immunopathogeny and therefore suggests new insights to therapeutic approaches. However, if seriously acknowledged, this systemic/historic approach to immunology goes along with a global conceptual change which modifies virtually everything in the domain of biology, as suggested by Maturana.

Key words: immune system, organization, structural determinism, autopoiesis, maturana.

The word perception is usually heard as connoting an operation of grasping an external reality through the process of receiving information from it. This, however, is constitutively impossible because living systems are dynamic structure determined systems, and everything happens in them determined at every instant by their structure. This means that the medium cannot specify what happens in a living system, and that it can only trigger in it structural changes determined in its structure. As a result a living system constitutively always operates in structural congruence with the medium, and exists as such only as long as this structural congruence (adaptation) is conserved; otherwise it desintegrates. In these circumstances, the phenomenon connoted by the word perception consists in the association, by the observer, of the behavioral regularities that he or she distinguishes in the observed organism with the conditions of the medium that he or she sees triggering them. The observer uses such behavioral regularities to characterize perceptual objects. This applies to all living systems including the observer. The explanation of perception in the context of the structural determinism of living systems invalidates any attempt to account for the phenomenon of cognition (including language) with notions that entail the denotation or connotation of a domain of reality independent of the distinctions of the observer.