The authors point out the difference between the theory of constructivism and its practical application, and they argue that the consequences of implementing constructivism in the classroom will be considerably more challenging than might be anticipated from the simple slogans that advocates repeat.

The paper recalls some skeptical comments Norbert Wiener made regarding the potential use of cybernetics in social sciences. A few social scientists were seduced by cybernetics from the beginning, but cybernetics never really caught on in sociology. The paper argues that one reason for this may lie in the mathematical theory of communication entertained by early cybernetics. This theory which maintains that there are probability distributions of possible communication is at odds with the sociological theory’s idea of a communication driven by improbable understanding. Yet the move from first-order cybernetics to second-order cybernetics, by re-entering the observer into the very systems she observes, provides for a bridge between cybernetics and sociology.

Key words: Communication, culture, cybernetics, double closure, observer, sociology, technology, understanding

Diverse forms of constructivism can be found in the literature today. They exhibit a commonality regarding certain classical positions that they oppose – a unity in their negative identities – but a sometimes wild multiplicity and incompatibility regarding the positive proposals that they put forward. In particular, some constructivisms propose an epistemological idealism, with a concomitant relativism, while others are explicitly opposed to such positions, and move in multifarious different directions. This is a potentially confusing situation, and has resulted in some critics branding all constructivisms with the charge of relativism, and throwing out the baby with the bath water. In addition, since the epistemological foundations of even non-relativist constructivisms are not as familiar as the classical positions, there is a risk of mis-interpretation of constructivisms and their consequences, even by some who endorse them, not to mention those who criticize. Because I urge that some version of constructivism is an epistemological necessity, this situation strikes me as seriously unfortunate for philosophy, and potentially dangerous for the practice of education.

Key words: realism, idealism, empiricism, innatism, constructivism, relativism, representation, epistemology, scaffolding.

A problem of action selection emerges in complex and even not so complex interactive agents: what to do next? The problem of action selection occurs equally for natural and for artificial agents for any embodied agent. The obvious solution to this problem constitutes a form of representation, interactive representation, that is arguably the fundamental form of representation. More carefully, interactive representation satisfies a criterion for representation that no other model of representation in the literature can satisfy or even attempts to address: the possibility of systemdetectable representational error. It also resolves and avoids myriad other problematics of representation and integrates or opens the door to many additional mental processes and phenomena, such as motivation.

Constructivist family therapy offers a model for the application of Maturana’s theories to practice. This paper describes key concepts of a constructivist approach and draws on family therapy to provide guidelines for applying them in an organizational setting. It offers a view of the organization as a network of conversations in which change occurs through the coconstruction of new conversations which widen or change the rational domain in which a problem occurs.

Key words: systemic therapy, family therapy, constructivism, autopoiesis, organization, problem solving, human service organizations, management, resistance to change, systems methodology.

This article offers an introduction to Niklas Luhmann’s theory of social systems as it pertains to public administration and policy, as a first step towards both a critique and its empirical application to empirical reality. It reconstructs Luhmann’s early writings on bureaucracy and policy-making and shows how this early, more empirical work grounded his abtract theory of social systems in general and the political system in particular. The article also introduces some central concepts of Luhmann’ s more recent work on the autopoietic nature of social systems and considers the latter’s consequences for bureaucratic adaptiveness and governmental steering in the welfare state. One of the main benefits of applying Luhmann’s theory to public administration, the article concludes, is that it conceptualizes the central concerns of public administration within a complex picture of society as a whole, in which both the agency that issues decisions and the realm affected by these decisions are included.

The subject of the article is what the paradigmatic framework for a universal information science or informatics should be and what kind of science we can expect it to be. The mechanistic and rationalistic information processing paradigm of cognitive science is the dominating research program in this research area which is heavily dominated by computer science and informatics. It is pointed out that this logical and mechanistic approach is unable to give an understanding of human signification and its basis in the connotations of biological and social relationships. The paper then discusses – on the basis of previous work – the ontological and epistemological problems of the idea of “information science” and constructs an alternative non‐mechanistic view based on the idea of autopoiesis of second order cybernetics and Peirce’s concept of chaos and evolution. These ideas are related to the cybersemiotic framework for transdisciplinary research of information and communication which the author has developed in other papers. Cybersemiotics is an integration of second order cybernetics, Peirce’s triadic semiosis and Wittgenstein’s theory of language game to a non‐Cartesian cognitive science.

Key words: cognitive science, second order cybernetics, semiotics, information science, ontological foundation, biosemiotics, cybersemiotics, epistemology, chaos, autopoiesis, semiosphere.