  In biological systems, the capacity of anticipation--that is, entertaining a
model of the system within the system--can be considered as naturally given.
Human languages enable psychological systems to construct and exchange mental
models of themselves and their environments reflexively, that is, provide
meaning to the events. At the level of the social system expectations can
further be codified. When these codifications are functionally
differentiated--like between market mechanisms and scientific research
programs--the potential asynchronicity in the update among the subsystems
provides room for a second anticipatory mechanism at the level of the
transversal information exchange among differently codified meaning-processing
subsystems. Interactions between the two different anticipatory mechanisms (the
transversal one and the one along the time axis in each subsystem) may lead to
co-evolutions and stabilization of expectations along trajectories. This
recursive incursion on the incursive dynamics of expectations can be modeled
using hyper-incursion. The knowledge-based subdynamic at the global level which
thus emerges, enables historical agents to inform the reconstruction of
previous states and to co-construct future states of the social system, for
example, in a techno-economic co-evolution.

Physics and Society