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In his systems’ theory, Luhmann attempts to redefine communication, and associates it with information. For Luhmann, communication is distinct from action (Handeln), and the rationality of the scientific system resides in the notion of Zweck, or in the ends of the sciences towards action. For the first time in the epistemological history of modernity, rationality is understood as a certain scientific purpose of action and not as the critique of scientific truth and validity of reason. The schism that Luhmann brought about between ‘traditional’ epistemology (reconsidered now as novel) and the ‘critical’ theory of science (seen by Luhmann as ‘traditional’) was irredeemable. In the following pages, I maintain that all evidence to the contrary such a divergence was inherent to modernity.Drawing on the Schützean model of multiple realities, Luhmann manages to blur the distinction between instrumentality and rationality by relativizing both within systemic complexity. According to Luhmann, complexity characterizes a multifaceted social system, such as science itself. However, I argue that where complexity, in Luhmann, interprets the systemic, it also employs presentism and partial situationalism to explain the essence and methodology of science as a system.

Robinson’s discussion on Integrated Systems Theory in Chapter Three provides a highly positivistic account of the causes of crime in a way that challenges notions of free will, choice and ultimately personal responsibility. The chapter makes an important link between General Systems Theory and understandings of complexity found in the rest of the book, through an exposition of positivistic and complicated factors that are probabilistic in leading to crime. The chapter also focuses on the most recent developments in theory that relate to these approaches, with the author specifically introducing and summarising what we know about the emerging approach at the cellular level called epigenetics, and recent efforts to integrate such approaches with higher-level factors as potential explanations of aggressive and violent behaviours.

This chapter reviews the link between parenting and children's obesity risk behaviours. The evidence reviewed and the structure of this chapter is guided by the Ecological Systems Theory, which embodies the premise that human behaviour cannot be understood without taking into consideration the context in which a person lives. In the case of young children, the family provides the key context in which socialization occurs and behavioural patterns emerge.

This chapter looks at the concept of ‘system’ as applied to the study of language, and the methodological and theoretical dilemmas that this raises for the study of language and law. The question is whether a system-based model can offer a ‘realistic’ representation of law, the mind, society, and so on. Linguistics is seen as a branch of systems theory, and this raises problems since linguistics is anti-normative, whereas law is inherently normative. The fundamental challenge represented by systems theories is that they tend to marginalise, or completely deny, the relevance of social actors’ subjectivity and of organising control over social meanings. In its extreme form, this implies that social actors ‘do not know what they are doing’, and their lived experience is an ‘epiphenomenal’ or contingent rather than constitutive feature of social interaction. Law seeks a particular answer to a particular question, whereas linguistics offers a general answer to a general question. Theories analyzed include Saussurean linguistics, Chomskyan theory, and ethnomethodology.

This chapter proposes the Wild Systems Theory as a potentially integrative perspective on embodied communication. The fundamental assumption here is that organisms need to be understood as systems that survive through energy transformations. In this perspective, cognition and communication are functions that are enabled by a dynamical control system. Each layer of this hierarchically organised system embodies aspects of the contexts organisms need to survive in, at different scales. Communication is conceptualised as a special case of control where organisms jointly gain control over the environment.

This chapter delineates the sleep environments found in industrialized nations using the Developmental Systems Theory (DST) as a framework for understanding their variability. It discusses the environments of both nighttime and daytime sleep, focusing on infants and young children. It argues that sleep environments cannot be understood as unitary constructs, but rather only by examining the characteristics of individuals who choose them and the society, community, and culture within which those individuals are embedded.

In many respects the “thesis statement” of the book as a whole, this chapter attempts to theorize the meaning of paradoxical statements in the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Charles Sanders Peirce. Utilizing and extending Gregory Bateson’s theory of communication, this essay observes a distinction between content and form which then entails a “second-order” observation as articulated in the systems theory of Niklas Luhmann. Form is theorized as radical discontinuity, a concept without identity, the “double consciousness.” This thesis not only allows Emerson and Peirce to be drawn into the purview of systems theory, but it also discovers an unheralded “posthumanist” tradition in American thought.

For all their advances, the life sciences remain tied to the contrast of form to matter that pervades most other areas of contemporary thought. Immaterial “information” in the genes, for instance, is said to impart form to inert stuff. Apart from being anachronistic, this set of assumptions and tropes--“Biologos”-- detracts from the very material interactions by which life processes proceed. A comparison of several religious stances toward evolution with biology’s discourse of genetic information reveals that their shared conceptual underpinnings are at odds with what is actually known and implemented in scientific biology. The writings of certain aggressively secular neo-Darwinists, furthermore, are in significant tension with their authors’s own antireligious public stances. Recasting infocentric understandings of heredity, development, and evolution in terms of Developmental Systems Theory eliminates the vitalist, essentialist, and preformationist implications of Biologos while restoring to us the living material world.

This chapter introduces readers to the key problem of “epigenesis” in both Romantic biopoetics and the history of biology in general. Romantic aesthetics and biology are frequently said to converge in the ideal of “organic form”: the organism or artwork as autonomous, self-organizing whole. But William Blake’s The First Book of Urizen, for instance, satirically demolishes this vitalist depiction of life as the power to self-organize. Putting Blake into dialogue with contemporary zoologists Erasmus Darwin and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, the chapter reconstructs an unfamiliar, materialist theory of epigenesis that is rooted in embryonic receptivity, rather than vital power. Here viable morphology is an archive of a being’s successive con-formations with its material and social surround – a notion of living form that ultimately challenges vitalism’s ongoing tendency to cast the life of the body as that which resists or evades symbolic structuration. “Epigenesis, an epilogue” sketches how these formerly heretical Romantic and “Lamarckian” ideas are enjoying a revival in the “epigenetic” corrective to the genetic determinism of twentieth-century evolutionary biology.

The embodiment of difference in patterns of relationship between the organism and its environment is the means through which living forms create their own organization. Morphogenesis, like other developmental processes, is self-organizing and its study demonstrates how the whole enters into the parts of the whole and why its own general rules and properties bump against molecular biology’s genetic determinism. Bateson follows Developmental Systems Theory, supporting its view that genes do not control that and neither DNA, nor the cell are sole contributors to complex differentiation, for both develop within a higher context. Recursions are probably the only way a truly complex (organic system) can be created—through an exponential geometry of information (K. S. Thompson)—while timing is of particular interest as it links developmental processes to evolution and also to ecosystem development. In the recycling process, biota respond not only to the immediate presence of mineral nutrients, but also to the context of their timing and frequency of particular entries into the recycling process and by developing sensitivity to frequency of return time ‘stacks’ the order of events in an ecological system (Allen and Hoekstra). The heterarchical stacking is best depicted in bagel-like toruses (D. H. McNeil).

Drawing on the notions of rational and conflict perspectives, this chapter focuses on how curriculum decisions are made and who the key agencies are, which have a role in the formal process of educational policymaking in Hong Kong.

Chapter 2 introduces REC’s Equal Partner Principle, according to which invoking neural, bodily, and environmental factors all make equally important contributions when it comes to explaining cognitive activity. In line with that principle, it is made clear how REC can accept that cognitive capacities depend on structural changes that occur inside organisms and their brains, without understanding such changes in information processing and representationalist terms. This chapter explicates the Hard Problem of Content, aka the HPC, as basis for a compelling argument for REC. The HPC is a seemingly intractable theoretical puzzle for defenders of unrestricted CIC. A straight solution to the HPC requires explaining how it is possible to get from informational foundations that are noncontentful to a theory of mental content using only the resources of a respectable explanatory naturalism that calls on the resources of the hard sciences. It is revealed how the need to deal with the HPC can be avoided by adopting REC’s revolutionary take on basic cognition, and why going this way has advantages over other possible ways of handling the HPC.

This chapter provides a historical overview of the ideas underlying ‘whole-word phonology’, from the 1970s to the present. The importance of a prosodic (syntagmatic) analysis is grounded in the ideas of Firth, as adapted to early child language (Waterson, 1971). Other studies have proposed ways in which ideas based on analyses of early child data, such as lexical primacy (Ferguson & Farwell, 1975) or Radical Templatic Phonology (Vihman & Croft, 2007), are relevant for adult as well as child language. Key ideas included in the overview are developmental reorganization (Macken, 1979), template matching and the two-stage model (Menn, 1983), and exemplar theory and usage-based models (Menn et al., 2013). The principles of Dynamic Systems Theory (Thelen & Smith, 1994) are related to early phonological and lexical development.

This chapter introduces The Stack model in detail. The Stack is a platform, and despite our familiarity with that word, we do not have sufficient understanding of platforms as technical and institutional systems. Comparing them to States and Markets, we can appreciate how they enable unique kinds of sovereignty, both geographic and subjective. This chapter considers some key historical examples of computing platforms used to model and reform entire societies and economies, and considers these as precedent lessons our Stack model. It discusses the technical structure of software and hardware stacks, and abstracts them as a general model for complex systems architectures. The chapter also introduces the six layers of The Stack, Earth layer, Cloud layer, City layer, Address layer, Interface layer, and User layer.

Many of the subject matters discussed under the topic of pseudoscience can be readily distinguished from science proper, and there are few individuals with any serious scientific training who would mistake these for science-based disciplines.  Harder to identify and distinguish are those disciplines that may have begun as a genuine science but have transformed into pseudosciences primarily through their pursuit of positive results. This chapter discusses one such example, drug prevention research, and contends that the adoption of so-called “evidence-based practice” by this field of study has been a key driver of its decent into pseudoscience. It discusses this process using a systems approach and focusses specifically on two negative feedback loops, one entailing flexible data analysis and selective reporting and one entailing minimal adherence to study design criteria. These lops are illustrated using examples of prevention and treatment programs that have been deemed “model” intervention by the National Registry of Evidence-based Programs and Practices (NREPP).

The concluding chapter, The Black Stack, draws out the tangled implications of The Stack as a challenge to design and to geopolitical thought, one to be achieved and/or resisted. The figure of “The Black Stack” stands for the Stack-to-come that we know will arrive but which we cannot possibly recognize in advance. As a global platform, The Stack may represent an epochal closure of the planet under an absolutist regime of algorithmic capital, and/or the fragility of its totality may also bring radical breaks, as its universalism produces unexpected new cosmopolitan positions. What may at first appear as the apotheosis of The Stack’s worst tendencies may, in the long run, prove to be the basis of a far-better geopolitics. Design must be attentive to the role that these reversals play in how new technologies produce new accidents, and how accidents in turn produce new technologies.