The target article proposes social tinkering as a process of directed innovation to address local challenges, which, through spontaneous order, yields complex cultural systems. We broadly agree that the accumulation of innovations can contribute to the emergence of more complex social systems. Nonetheless, we argue that (1) the recombination and repurposing of precedents need to be modeled through an action-based approach in order to allow for the qualitatively novel innovations; and that, (2) spontaneous order is not sufficient to account for the emergence of social normativity and normatively binding social systems (e.g., cultural institutions).

The target article argues that spontaneous order can account for the emergence of complex social systems, driven by the accumulation of innovations that come to constitute norms, conventions, and institutional rules. We argue that even though the target article acknowledges the role of normativity in complex social systems, spontaneous order through accumulation does not account for its emergence. The issue is that the spontaneous order does not involve normativity – it may explain regularities but not normativities, including those within (psycho-)social reality (Bickhard, Reference Bickhard2019). Thus, the blind-spot of the tinkering account seems to be the normative ontology of the psycho-social – why do individuals feel compelled to follow social norms? The account seems to presuppose rather than explain the (psycho-)social normativity at play. That is, the ability of individuals to innovate while facing novel challenges, by using and recombining extant psycho-social structures, is subject to two different interpretations concerning the ontology of the minds driving the process: a foundationalist-combinatorial ontology and an action-based emergent ontology. To the extent that the target article is agnostic about such ontological issues, it may run into some in-principle problems.

The foundationalist-combinatorial ontology has been argued to be unable to account for the emergence of qualitatively novel psycho-social phenomena and, in turn, normative social reality (Allen & Bickhard, Reference Allen and Bickhard2013, Reference Allen and Bickhard2022). All “novel” ways of interacting and representing (e.g., those in social situations and culture) would be a product of assembling and rearranging already existing components. Pure recombination cannot alter the functional organization internal to precedents and, hence, innovations are constrained by the properties of the predefined combinatorial spaces. Thus, for the foundationalist interpretation, novelties cannot be qualitatively different from precedents and norms cannot be more than regularities (Campbell, Reference Campbell2015; Overton, Reference Overton2013; Witherington, Reference Witherington2014).

In contrast, an action-based ontology of the mind and social reality should be used to account for the emergence of social normativity (for such an account, see Mirski et al., Reference Mirski, Baran, Ozgan and Allen2026). Such an ontology offers explicit modeling of how qualitative novelty (i.e., emergence) is possible through interactively knowing the environment (Bickhard, Reference Bickhard2024; Carpendale & Lewis, Reference Carpendale and Lewis2006; Di Paolo et al., Reference Di Paolo, Rohde, De Jaegher, Stewart, Gapenne and Di Paolo2014). Such emergence increases in complexity through internal reflection on repurposing and recombination as interactive knowing (Allen et al., Reference Allen, Mirski and Bickhard2024; Campbell & Bickhard, Reference Campbell and Bickhard1986). This model of reflection is also relevant to draw a contrast with the target article in terms of its role for language-mediated culture complexity (i.e., stages 5 & 6). Although language may function to facilitate reflection on explicit representations of social rules, we would argue that individual-level reflection must develop before any explicit representing is possible (Allen & Bickhard, Reference Allen and Bickhard2018). In particular, understanding language as a symbolic system requires reflection from the child and such a system could not evolve prior to the emergence of reflection in phylogeny (Campbell & Bickhard, Reference Campbell and Bickhard1986).

Our second concern is that spontaneous order is not sufficient to account for the emergence of social normativity and normatively bindings systems at the societal level. The target article accounts for social normativity through mechanisms such as punishment and ostracism; yet, these mechanisms presuppose the normative organization they are meant to explain. This presupposition becomes most visible at the level of complex social systems. Institutions like political systems do not emerge from the spontaneous order of individual-level tinkering but reproduce the normative conditions under which further tinkering is possible and legitimate. That is, the spontaneous order account may describe how normativities emerge but does not explain why they are binding (Bickhard, Reference Bickhard1980, 2019, Reference Bickhard2024). Since the psychological and the social are intrinsically related, a consistent action-based ontology is required, one that involves self-maintaining dynamics at the societal and individual levels.

From the action-based interactivist perspective that we endorse (Bickhard, Reference Bickhard2024), social normativity emerges through institutionalization. Institutionalization is a process in which social interactions become self-maintaining social organizations that can recur across situations and individuals. Unlike accumulation of precedents, institutionalization occurs when social interactions are no longer ad hoc solutions to local challenges and are recognized by all parties as interactions of a specific type in the presence of a conventionalized cue (Bickhard, Reference Bickhard1980). Such cues indicate types of situations that are defined by the range of interactions that are considered appropriate. Therefore, any deviation from this range constitutes a violation of the social organization that can entail a sanction and/or repair. Thus, institutionalization imposes constraints on potential interactions in a given situation and hence defines normative ways of interacting. It is this organization of appropriate action potentialities that generates the normative force and self-maintenance at the societal level that spontaneous order alone cannot produce. Finally, institutionalization is inherently reflexive (Bickhard, Reference Bickhard1980, Reference Bickhard2024). Institutionalized situations are embedded in other institutionalized situations so that meta-institutionalized situations can transform the functions and appropriateness of lower-level interactions. This reflexivity allows the emergence of meta-normative organizations and more complex social systems such as language and culture (Bickhard, Reference Bickhard1980). Taken together, this suggests that what the target article describes as spontaneous order may itself depend on institutionalized normative grounds that it has not yet made explicit.