TY - JOUR A1 - Stumm, Stefan T1 - Epistemological Implications of a System — Theoretical Understanding for Sustainability Models T2 - Systems Research and Behavioral Science N2 - In the sense of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), global efforts to create a sustainable society will not be sufficiently successful under the current geopolitical and socio-economic trends. For this reason, recent sustainability research has increasingly focused on systemic coherence, the subject of cognition, and psychological and epistemological aspects. With regard to the sustainability discourse, this article proposes a perspective based on systems theory's findings in its enactivist interpretation. It understands this as a joint process of sense-making that must be actively maintained on an ongoing basis. Scientific knowledge and human experience are not described as mutually exclusive and informing spheres but as part of the world of experience actively spanned by the organism in its self-execution, which inherently involves ambiguities and complexity reductions that leave the subject and object undetermined. Such an understanding of systemic thinking should help to prevent the process of sustainable development itself from being called into question when some goals are inevitably missed. KW - enactivism KW - epistemology KW - subject of cognition KW - sustainability KW - sustainable society KW - systems theory KW - systems thinking KW - Nachhaltigkeit KW - Gesellschaft KW - Systemtheorie KW - Systemdenken KW - Enaktivismus Y1 - 2025 UR - https://hst.opus.hbz-nrw.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/1040 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hbz:tr5-10409 VL - 42 IS - 0 (Early View) SP - 1 EP - 15 PB - Wiley ER -