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Terms and Concepts



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"a process is said to be aleatoric ... if its course is determined in general but depends on chance in detail" (Meyer-Eppler 1957, 55).

Asemic (writing)
"The word asemic means "having no specific semantic content". With the nonspecificity of asemic writing there comes a vacuum of meaning which is left for the reader to fill in and interpret... Through its formatting and structure, asemic writing may suggest a type of document and, thereby, suggest a meaning."

"The world is nonlinear. This fact has a profound effect on the behavior of most dynamical and evolutionary systems: their future behavior cannot be predicted in the long run. The startling point is that even very simple classical systems are afflicted and not just such complex ones as the evolution of mankind or the weather. Indeed, to give an explicit example, even systems as 'simple' as the driven damped pendulum... suffer from unpredictability in certain ranges of parameter space. Deterministic systems of this kind are called chaotic, a term adapted from common language to have a notion for the stunning unexpected irregularity displayed by such systems. (Physics is full of these adaptations, e.g. force, energy, etc.). As deterministic chaotic systems (in science in the form of mathematical models) abound in nature, a new branch of physics opened up called chaos physics. It spreads through physics like the mycelia of fungi." (Lauterborn, 1990)

An ecosystem is a biological environment consisting of all the organisms living in a particular area, as well as all the nonliving, physical components of the environment with which the organisms interact, such as air, soil, water and sunlight. It is all the organisms in a given area, along with the nonliving (abiotic) factors with which they interact; a biological community and its physical environment.

"the arising of novel and coherent structures, patterns and properties during the process of self-organization in complex systems" (Jeffrey Goldstein 1999)


"Varela was a proponent of the embodied philosophy which argues that human cognition and consciousness can only be understood in terms of the enactive structures in which they arise, namely the body (understood both as a biological system and as personally, phenomenologically experienced) and the physical world with which the body interacts. He introduced into neuroscience the concepts of neurophenomenology, based on the phenomenological writings of Edmund Husserl and of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and on "first person science," in which observers examine their own conscious experience using scientifically verifiable methods."

"The hermeneutic circle describes the process of understanding a text hermeneutically. It refers to the idea that one's understanding of the text as a whole is established by reference to the individual parts and one's understanding of each individual part by reference to the whole. Neither the whole text nor any individual part can be understood without reference to one another, and hence, it is a circle. However, this circular character of interpretation does not make it impossible to interpret a text; rather, it stresses that the meaning of a text must be found within its cultural, historical, and literary context."