Second Order Science Foundation
The umbrella under which ISCE now sits. Research, publication, and convening on second-order science.
Inquiry · Second-order · Coherence · Emergence. A continuing inquiry into the conditions of inquiry.
For two decades, ISCE — the Institute for the Study of Coherence and Emergence — held space for inquiry that took its own conditions of inquiry seriously. It founded the journal Emergence: Complexity & Organization, helped establish a literature where complexity, cybernetics, and organizational thought could meet without flattening one another, and convened a generation of scholars working across the seams between disciplines.
That work continues. Under the Second Order Science Foundation, ISCE now stands less as an institute apart and more as a rubric — a research lineage, a program of work, a heading under which the questions science forgets to ask remain open.
Four bound concerns: Inquiry, the activity rather than the institution; Second-order, the science that includes its own observers; Coherence, the pattern that holds wholes together; Emergence, what appears that was not there before.
To inquire is to refuse the closure of method. ISCE foregrounds inquiry as practice — exformative dialogue, the second-student tutorial, augmented writing — over inquiry as credentialed output.
Cybernetics of cybernetics. Constructivist epistemology. The UnCritically Examined Presuppositions (UCEPs) that any first-order science must inherit and any second-order science must surface.
How parts speak to each other; how meaning crosses disciplinary seams without dissolving them. The pattern that connects — Bateson's phrase — read as a working program rather than a slogan.
Anticipatory systems. Complexity. The irreducibility of what arises to what produced it. Emergence is the standing rebuke to flattening explanation, and the working subject of the journal ISCE founded.
The umbrella under which ISCE now sits. Research, publication, and convening on second-order science.
The journal ISCE founded. Two decades of work at the meeting place of complexity science and organizational thought. Archive in recovery — link forthcoming.
A subconference on respecting human agency in the age of AI. Shanghai, Sept 28 – Oct 1, 2026.
Inquiries, collaborations, manuscripts in the program's territory.