Design-based research studies are conducted as iterative implementation-analysis-modification cycles, in which emerging theoretical models and pedagogically plausible activities are reciprocally tuned toward each other as a means of investigating conjectures pertaining to mechanisms underlying content teaching and learning. Yet this approach, even when resulting in empirically effective educational products, remains under-conceptualized as long as researchers cannot be explicit about their craft and specifically how data analyses inform design decisions. Consequentially, design decisions may appear arbitrary, design methodology is insufficiently documented for broad dissemination, and design practice is inadequately conversant with learning-sciences perspectives. One reason for this apparent under-theorizing, I propose, is that designers do not have appropriate constructs to formulate and reflect on their own intuitive responses to students’ observed interactions with the media under development. Recent socio-cultural explication of epistemic artifacts as semiotic means for mathematical learners to objectify presymbolic notions (e.g., Radford, Mathematical Thinking and Learning 5(1): 37–70, 2003) may offer design-based researchers intellectual perspectives and analytic tools for theorizing design improvements as responses to participants’ compromised attempts to build and communicate meaning with available media. By explaining these media as potential semiotic means for students to objectify their emerging understandings of mathematical ideas, designers, reciprocally, create semiotic means to objectify their own intuitive design decisions, as they build and improve these media. Examining three case studies of undergraduate students reasoning about a simple probability situation (binomial), I demonstrate how the semiotic approach illuminates the process and content of student reasoning and, so doing, explicates and possibly enhances design-based research methodology.

Philosophical interest in situated cognition has been focused most intensely on the claim that human cognitive processes extend from the brain into the tools humans use. As we see it, this radical hypothesis is sustained by two kinds of mistakes, confusing coupling relations with constitutive relations and an inattention to the mark of the cognitive. Here we wish to draw attention to these mistakes and show just how pervasive they are. That is, for all that the radical philosophers have said, the mind is still in the head.

The aim of this paper is to question the way one conceives the use of a specific theoretical approach (i.e., theories associated with the concept of complexity) in order to promote changes in educational practices and theories. The position I am adopting translates the conviction that any reform of thought has to be conceived in conjunction with a reflection about the idea of reform itself (Morin, 1999). It is therefore assumed that the use of the notion of complexity, to be critical and to bring significant changes, supposes not only to use a specific theoretical vocabulary, but also and above all to change the way scientific activity itself is conceived in order to bring about such a transformation. Following Edgar Morin’s constructivist and non-dualistic contribution, this paper discusses concepts such as program, strategy, prescription, interpretation, monoreferentiality and multireferentiality, in order to discuss researchers’ implication and the way they manage the relationships between the conditions of production of scientific discourses and the ″realities″ to which they are referring.

Analyzing the outline of the endless literature on consciousness, the separation between science and philosophy rather than being overcome, seems to come back in different shapes. According to this point of view, the hard problem seems to be how to study consciousness while avoiding a slip back to the old dualism. This article outlines the advantages of the phenomenological method. This method, more than getting over the mind-body separation, anticipates it through an open gaze, able to bring back the human presence as something structurally “ambiguous.” Reintroducing Husserl’s scientific project in a complete way, Francisco Varela opened up a research area yet to be explored, which promises to be fertile for neuroscience, provided that we accept that radicalism essential to phenomenology.

Key words: Ambiguity, consciousness, dualism, Husserl, phenomenological method, Varela

This article considers W. Ross Ashby’s ideas on the nature of embodied minds, as articulated in the last five years of his career. In particular, it attempts to connect his ideas to later work by others in robotics, perception and consciousness. While it is difficult to measure his direct influence on this work, the conceptual links are deep. Moreover, Ashby provides a comprehensive view of the embodied mind, which connects these areas. It concludes that the contemporary fields of situated robotics, ecological perception, and the neural mechanisms of consciousness might all benefit from a reconsideration of Ashby’s later writings.

Key words: representation, embodiment, cognition, information theory, requisite variety

Minimalism is a useful element in the constructivist arsenal against objectivism. By reducing actions and sensory feedback to a bare minimum, it becomes possible to obtain a complete description of the sensory-motor dynamics; and this in turn reveals that the object of perception does not pre-exist in itself, but is actually constituted during the process of observation. In this paper, this minimalist approach is deployed for the case of the recognition of “the Other.” It is shown that the perception of another intentional subject is based on properties that are intrinsic to the joint perceptual activity itself.

Key words: sensory-motor, dynamics, perception, minimalism

The author compares the development of constructivist approaches in two national communities of communication researches, France and Germany. Radical approches are nearly unvisible in the French community, here social constructivism relies mainly on action and speach theory.

Excerpt: We would argue that an autopoietic theory of organization is in fact also a theory of innovation. Without the possibility of novelty, autopoietic organization is hardly possible. A second argument we make in this chapter is that, contrary to much of the literature on organization and innovation, an autopoietic view does not consider the degree to which innovation takes place. Instead it considers how the nature of communication shapes expectations, thus influencing the search for novelty. If we assume that different functions within an organization operate according to different modes of communication, we may come to a different understanding of how the organization engages with novelty. Key to this understanding is that different organizational functions operate with different degrees of redundancy in their communication.

Excerpt: Can autopoietic systems not be creative and innovative? Or does the biological roots of the concept and notions such as “structural determinism” and “structural states” make it impossible to capture “the new” in the system’s dynamics’? The aim of the following discussion is to outline the theory of autopoietic systems, as it pertains to action theory and the understanding of the phenomenon of innovation. This will be elucidated by examining how systems theory combines concepts of (1) the old and the new, (2) the real and the possible, and (3) the redundant and the variable.

The concept of agency is of crucial importance in cognitive science and artificial intelligence, and it is often used as an intuitive and rather uncontroversial term, in contrast to more abstract and theoretically heavily weighted terms such as intentionality, rationality, or mind. However, most of the available definitions of agency are too loose or unspecific to allow for a progressive scientific research program. They implicitly and unproblematically assume the features that characterize agents, thus obscuring the full potential and challenge of modeling agency. We identify three conditions that a system must meet in order to be considered as a genuine agent: (a) a system must define its own individuality, (b) it must be the active source of activity in its environment (interactional asymmetry), and (c) it must regulate this activity in relation to certain norms (normativity). We find that even minimal forms of proto-cellular systems can already provide a paradigmatic example of genuine agency. By abstracting away some specific details of minimal models of living agency we define the kind of organization that is capable of meeting the required conditions for agency (which is not restricted to living organisms). On this basis, we define agency as an autonomous organization that adaptively regulates its coupling with its environment and contributes to sustaining itself as a consequence. We find that spatiality and temporality are the two fundamental domains in which agency spans at different scales. We conclude by giving an outlook for the road that lies ahead in the pursuit of understanding, modeling, and synthesizing agents.

Key words: agency, individuality, interactional asymmetry, normativity, spatiality, temporality