Abstract

Open peer commentary on the target article “Who Conceives of Society?” by Ernst von Glasersfeld. Excerpt: Von Glasersfeld’s presupposition that all organisms are isolated subjective knowers can thus remain viable within a framework that sees the personal and social as mutually informing. Implying that isolated knowers coordinate the ways in which they “bump” into one another – and that this coordination impacts the kinds of perturbations that arise within them – constitutes a perfectly rational variation on von Glasersfeld’s theory of rational knowing