Cf. : ontogenic adaptation, evolutionary adaptation

He then explores the question of when and how symbolic explanations are permissible and useful in addressing autonomous systems. The first step is scrutinizing the notion of a symbol, because "...in order to understand fully how the cognitive domain of such a system can operate and be modified, we must look at the dynamic regularities that arise within the system and that can be treated as symbolic events." (Varela, 1979, p. 81) This leads to delineation of two primary features of 'symbols' in natural systems, of which the one relevant here is:

"Internal Determination. An object or event is a symbol only if it is a token for an abbreviated nomic chain that occurs within the bounds of the system's organizational closure. In other words, whenever the system's closure determines certain regularities in the face of internal or external interactions and perturbations, such regularities can be abbreviated as a symbol, usually the initial or terminal element in the nomic chain."

(Varela, 1979, pp. 79-80)

Varela then invokes the example of nitrogen base triplets 'encoding' an amino acid in a cell's protein sequences. This is 'encoding' only in the sense that the triplet's occurrence is correlated with a repetitive pattern discernible in the actual / causal (i.e., 'operational') dynamics of the cell. "But such a dynamic pattern occurs entirely within the bounds of the cell's closure; the cell itself contains the 'interpretation' for the symbol. We then chose the triplet as the symbol for the amino acids by abbreviating the long sequence of chemical steps from the internal recursion where such chemical reactions normally operate." (p. 80)

In (seemingly arbitrarily) associating triplets with amino acids, an observer is using a sort of explanatory shorthand by ignoring at least some of the operations which realize the pattern of dynamics thus denoted. "To the extent that this ignoring is based on the regularities of the dynamics of an autonomous system, this symbolic description is admissible, and it plays a useful role in the study of autopoietic systems on a larger time scale ... In the molecular examples of admissible symbols, their underlying causal chains are still apparent and accessible, and we can switch from one type of description to the other with a certain ease." (p. 80)

Cf. : explanation, operational explanations, symbol, symbolic explanations

Cf. : auto-

In The Embodied Mind (Varela, Thompson & Rosch, 1991), the term heteronomy is apparently used as a synonym for allonomy.

Cf. : autonomous description, autonomy , control, control description, heteronomy

Cf. : allopoietic machine / system

Allopoietic machines are therefore construed as such icogdo an observer. They "...have an identity that depends on the observer and is not determined through their operation, because its product is different from themselves; allopoietic machines do have an externally defined individuality." (Varela, 1979, p. 15) This last feature derives from the fact that an allopoietic machine's "boundaries are specified by an observer, who by specifying its input and output surfaces, specifies what pertains to it in its operations." (Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. 81; Cf. : Varela, 1979, p. 15) "Since the changes that allopoietic machines may suffer without losing their definitory organization are necessarily subordinated to the production of something different from themselves, they are not autonomous." (Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. 80; Varela, 1979, p. 15)

Since the ascription of allopoiesis is a functional attribution, "...an observer can describe an autopoietic component of a composite system as playing an allopoietic role through the realization of the larger system that it contributes to realizing through its autopoiesis." (Varela, 1979a, p. 52). Such an ascription neither addresses nor negates the autopoietic status of the machine so treated. "In fact, autopoietic and allopoietic descriptions of a system are complementary pairs, depending on the observer's needs. They are a particular instance of ... the universal duality between autonomous and control descriptions..." (Varela, 1979, p. 16) Cf. : autopoietic machine.

Cf. : allopoiesis, allopoietic role, autonomy , autonomous machine, autopoiesis , autopoietic machine / system, purpose

Because (by definition) an autopoietic machine's function is defined and determined by its own organization (and the maintenance of that organization), any analogous reference to an autopoietic role is descriptively meaningless.

Cf. : allopoietic machine, autopoietic machine, machine, submachine

Ultimately, however, neither Maturana nor Varela explicitly embrace this connotation of objective status. Because their delineation of 'ambience' is qualified with respect to realization, the ambient ascribed by an observer of a living system's ontogeny is a descriptive construct of the observer, and not a definitive feature of the system's organization . (See Also: Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. 99) Varela (1979) occasionally refers to this construct as ambient.

For the sake of illustration, it is safe to say that ambience is equivalent in connotation to that which Winograd and Flores (1986) denote as the specific construct 'medium':

"...[W]e use the term 'medium' rather than 'environment' to refer to the space in which an organism exists. This is to avoid the connotation that there is a separation between an entity and its 'environment.' An entity exists as part of a medium, not as a separate object inside it."

(Winograd & Flores, 1986, p. 43, footnote 7)

Winograd and Flores' connotation of 'medium' being all-subsumptive (i.e., of both the system and its environs) matches the connotations given 'ambience' by Maturana and Varela (1980).

NOTE: In later (e.g., post-1985) writings, Maturana has commonly employed the term medium as an apparent surrogate for environment, although some passages can be interpreted as connoting something more like ambience. As such, it is not safe to blindly equate Maturana's later allusions to 'medium' with either Winograd and Flores' precise usage of that term or to Maturana and Varela's (1980) precisely-delineated construct of 'ambience.'

Figure AmbEnv illustrates the variant delineations of 'ambience', 'environment', and 'medium'. This figure is located within the entry for 'environment'.

Cf. : ambient, environment, medium

Cf. : ambience

This phrase is sometimes quoted as "Everything said is said by an observer...", as in the passage: "Everything said is said by an observer to another observer who can be himself or herself." (Maturana, 1978)

Cf. : observer

A more detailed overview of the context for this dichotomy (as well as Figure SymAsym illustrating it) can be found in the entry for Star.

Cf. : complementarity, Star, symmetry

Cf. : allo-

A. "...mechanistic (dynamic) systems defined as a unity by their organization. We shall say that autonomous systems are organizationally closed. That is, their organization is characterized by processes such that (1) the processes are related as a network, so that they recursively depend on each other in the generation and realization of the processes themselves, and (2) they constitute the system as a unity recognizable in the space (domain) in which the processes exist." (Varela, 1979, p. 55)

B. '...defined as a composite unity by a network of interactions of components that (i) through their interactions recursively regenerate the network of interactions that produced them, and (ii) realize the network as a unity in the space in which the components exist by constituting and specifying the unity's boundaries as a cleavage from the background...' (Varela, 1981a, p. 15)

Cf. : autonomy , autopoiesis , autopoietic machine / system, organizational closure

1.

The definitive quality of the class of systems subsuming autopoietic systems. This general class is defined by organizational closure in these systems' constitution. The concept is defined indirectly, through definition of the autonomous machine / system which exhibits this quality. The difference between autonomy and autopoiesis is that autopoietic systems must produce their own components in addition to conserving their organization and specifying their boundaries in the space of realization.

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2.

"Autonomy is the distinctive phenomenology resulting from an autopoietic organization: the realization of the autopoietic organization is the product of its operation."

(Varela, Maturana & Uribe, 1974, p. 188)

In the early literature, a label connoting "The condition of subordinating all changes to the maintenance of the organization. Self-asserting capacity of living systems to maintain their identity through the active compensation of deformations." (Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. 135) In this early, generic sense the term connoted "...the central feature of the organization of the living" (Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. xvii; also see Maturana, 1980a, p. 45) Although it is obviously closely related, this early usage of the term should not be construed as precisely synonymous with Varela's (1979) more rigorous (and distinct) usage (1. above).

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3.

In generic usage, the notion of self-guidance or self-control -- literally, "self-law." (Varela, 1979, p. xi). The opposite of allonomy or control.

Regardless of the specific above-cited nuance employed, 'autonomy' is the central principle or heuristic around which Maturana and Varela's theories revolve. As a subject for scientific enquiry, 'autonomy' entails a significant divergence from conventional models and techniques. Much of Varela's solo work during the 1970's concentrated on developing new tools with which to address systems as autonomous machines. In doing so, he laid out a map relating (a) the characterization of a system (in and of itself) as either autonomous or allonomous (subject to extrinsic control) versus (b) the mode of representation by which said system is modeled (either in terms of its closure or its observed interactions). This summary overview of the methodological landscape is reproduced in Table CharRep below.

TABLE CHARREP: Varela's Overview of System Characterization versus System Representation
Adapted from Varela (1979) (p. 206, Table 13.1)	BASIS FOR REPRESENTATION:
BASIS FOR CHARACTERIZATION:	Closure	Interaction
Autonomy	identity connectivity indefinite recursion eigenbehavior stability	perturbations - compensations cognitive domain resilience ontogenesis
Control	coordination of parts hierarchical levels finite recursion signal flow state transitions	black box dissipative structures input - output

Table CharRep is but a sketch of elements methodologically relevant to the study of systems as autonomous unities. The reader is invited to compare this Table's contents in relation to (e.g.) the dichotomy between the recursive and behavioral views of particular unities, the distinction between symbolic and operational explanations, and other constructs concerning observation / description / explanation.

Cf. : autonomous machine / system, autopoiesis , autopoietic machine (system), closure, Closure Thesis, organizational closure

1.

The theoretical construct definitive of the manner of operation of that class of systems that includes living systems. This term, combined from the Greek auto- (self) and poiesis (creation/production), was coined by Maturana in (approximately) 1972 (Cf. Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. xvii). Often loosely translated as 'self-creation' or 'self-production', the term connotes the process or dynamic by which an autopoietic machine / system maintains its autopoietic organization (via intrinsic processes of production of components realizing this particular organization). More specifically, autopoiesis is attributed to a machine (delineated as a a network of processes) which through that network of processes produces the components that:

"(1) through their interactions and transformations continuously regenerate and realize the network of processes (relations) that produced them; and

(2) constitute it (the machine) as a concrete unity in the space in which they [the components] exist by specifying the topological domain of its realization as such a network."

(Varela, 1979, p. 13)

In the primary literature, autopoiesis is not directly defined as a process. Instead it is defined indirectly, on the basis of how an 'autopoietic machine' operates. There are, in fact, very few instances in the primary literature where 'autopoiesis' is substantively treated in and of itself, and then only as a process characteristic of 'self-production' or 'homeostatic organization' -- constructs themselves framed mechanicistically with respect to the subject system's architectonics. For example, Varela (1979, pp. 24-26) comes closest to addressing 'autopoiesis' directly in the course of discussing productions of relations in a given system:

"What makes this system a unity with identity and individuality is that all the relations of production are coordinated in a system describable as having an invariant organization. In such a system any deformation at any place is compensated for ...by keeping its organization constant as defined by the relation of the productions that constitute autopoiesis. The only thing that defines the cell as a unity (as an individual) is its autopoiesis, and thus, the only restriction put on the existence of the cell is the maintenance of autopoiesis."

(Varela, 1979, p. 26, emphasis in the original)

"...[A]utopoiesis may arise in a molecular system if the relations of production are concatenated in such a way that they produce components specifying the system as a unity that exists only while it is actively produced by such concatenation of processes. This is to say that autopoiesis arises in a molecular system only when the relation that concatenates these relations is produced and maintained constant through the production of the molecular components that constitute the system through this concatenation."

(Varela, 1979, pp. 26-27)

NOTE: Given the above distinctions and qualifications about the nature and origin of the construct 'autopoiesis', the details on what makes a composite unity (system) 'autopoietic' are therefore to be found under the entries for autopoietic machine and autopoietic organization.

The strict, though indirect, definition of autopoiesis proposed in the early papers was intended to provide a basis for overcoming vague or problematical characterizations of living systems -- particularly those which represented vitalistic explanation of biological phenomena. As Maturana (1980a, p. 45) put it, the construct of autopoiesis:

"...resulted from the direct attempt ... to provide a complete characterization of the organization that makes living systems self-contained autonomous unities, and that makes explicit the relations among their components which must remain invariant under a continuous structural transformation and material turnover."

This passage reinforces the viewpoint that it is the constitutive organization of an autopoietic system which is primary in delineating autopoiesis. This is reflected even in the less formal popular account given in The Tree of Knowledge (Maturana & Varela, 1987, 1992):

"When we speak of living beings, we presuppose something in common between them; otherwise we wouldn't put them in the same class we designate with the name 'living.' What has not been said, however, is: what is the organization that defines them as a class? Our proposition is that living beings are characterized in that, literally, they are continually self-producing. We indicate this process when we call the organization that defined them an autopoietic organization."

(Maturana & Varela, 1992, p. 43, emphasis added)

Having said that, Maturana and Varela proceed (as they have consistently done in the more formal literature) to delineate the autopoietic organization as the basis for 'indicating' the process of 'autopoiesis.'

These last quotations illustrate a point which has proven somewhat problematical over the years. As mentioned at the outset, 'autopoiesis' has in fact been delineated and formally defined in terms of the constitution and operational character of an autopoietic machine or system. This definitional approach was entirely consistent with the mechanicistic perspective from which Maturana and Varela initially proceeded. To have invoked an ephemeral 'autopoiesis' (e.g., as a processual or qualitative referent) would have arguably entailed sliding into the sort of vitalistic explanation which they explicitly opposed and stringently avoided.

In other words, 'autopoiesis' is an abstract construct known solely in relation to a machine / system of a particular constitution which maintains its key constitutive character over time. Strictly speaking, autopoiesis has not been positively defined as a type of process in and of itself, even though it is clear in the context of its primary literature (e.g., Maturana & Varela, 1980) that it is the dynamic or process evidenced by, and reciprocally preservative of, the autopoietic organization / autopoietic machine. Nonetheless, it became common practice (even on occasion by Maturana and Varela themselves) to allude to 'autopoiesis' as a rhetorical shorthand connoting (in terms of process) the constitutive and operational details of a particular system. This is most evident when addressing the dynamics of an autopoietic system -- i.e., when the processes manifest in the autopoietic network comprise the referential foreground, and the mechanics of the network itself are relegated to the background.

Given the above-cited conditions, it is possibly understandable, though definitely somewhat ironic, that this indirectly- or allusively-defined shorthand term should become the de facto label for the essence of Maturana and Varela's work, as well as a common label for that work itself (Cf. 2. below). So long as such invocations retain (or at least can be linked to) the sort of mechanicistic context in which the process 'autopoiesis' is definitively framed, this is not problematical. What is problematical is explanatory invocation (and reliance upon) the process or dynamic of 'autopoiesis' absent this context. To invoke 'autopoiesis' (e.g., as 'self-production') without concomitantly explaining the constitutive elements of the system(s) for which such invocation is made, is to deny any basis for evaluating the applicability of the construct (as it was defined originally). The most well-known example of such an invocation would be that of German sociologist Niklas Luhmann, who adopted 'autopoiesis' as a processual construct in analyzing social systems, yet never (to date) bothered to explain what in his view are the key constitutive elements (e.g., 'organization', 'structure') by which such an application might be assessed in terms of Maturana and Varela's clear-cut definitional criteria.

The explanatory risk in invoking 'autopoiesis' absent attention to the machine / system manifesting it has two distinguishable (but admittedly intertwined) components. The first is that an observer may simplistically project the feature 'autopoiesis' onto a unity with which she has insufficient or imperfect observational engagement upon which to base its ascription. Phrased another way, stripping the processual construct away from the machine manifesting it opens the possibility of its mistaken attribution to something only partially or indirectly observed. Varela (1979) provides some illustration for this type of risk in writing of recognizing an autopoietic system (as distinct from autonomous systems in general):

"In general, the actual recognition of an autopoietic system poses a cognitive problem that has to do both with the capacity of the observer to recognize the relations that define the system as a unity, and with his capacity to distinguish the boundaries that delimit this unity in the space in which it is realized (his criteria of distinction). Since it is a defining feature of an autopoietic system that it should specify its own boundaries, a proper recognition of an autopoietic system as a unity requires that the observer perform an operation of distinction that defines the limits of the system in the same domain in which it specifies them through its autopoiesis. If this is not the case, he does not observe the autopoietic system as a unity, even though he may conceive it."

(Varela, 1979, p. 54)

The second, but related, explanatory risk has to do with ascribing autopoiesis to systems with which the observer / explainer may have 'proper' observational engagement, but for which the observer ignores addressing the key features of the autopoietic organization by which the process of autopoiesis is defined. Varela (1979) also addresses this issue in passing, during his discussion of ascribing autopoiesis to other (autonomous) systems (i.e., systems of similar apparent constitution or apparent mode of operation, but not 'living systems'). Varela notes that other systems, being autonomous, entail:

"...assertion of the system's identity through its functioning in such a way that observation proceeds through the coupling between the observer and the unit in the domain in which the unity's operation occurs.

What is unsatisfactory about autopoiesis for the characterization of other unities ... is also apparent from this very description. The relations that characterize autopoiesis are relations of productions of components. ... Given this notion of production of components, it follows that the cases of autopoiesis we can actually exhibit, such as living systems or model cases ..., have as a criterion of distinction a topological boundary, and the processes that define them occur in a physical-like space...

Thus, the idea of autopoiesis is, by definition, restricted to relations of productions of some kind, and refers to topological boundaries. These two conditions are clearly unsatisfactory for other systems exhibiting autonomy." [...of which Varela specifically mentions animal societies and human social institutions -- Ed.]

(Varela, 1979, p. 54, emphasis in the original)

The difference between autonomy and autopoiesis is that autopoietic systems must produce their own components in addition to conserving their organization . Autonomous machines need only exhibit organizational closure, and they are not required to produce their own components as part of their operation.

---

Cf. : allopoiesis, allopoietic machine, autopoietic machine, machine.

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2.

A label sometimes used to denote the body of Maturana and Varela's theoretical work.

---

Cf. : autopoiesis theory, autopoietic theory, theory of autopoiesis.

Cf. : autopoiesis (2.), autopoietic theory, theory of autopoiesis.

This term is used only within one paragraph in this paper, and as such it's somewhat difficult to discern whether it is being used as (a) a summary term for the 'mode of closure' evidenced in autonomous / autopoietic systems generally, or (b) a specific analogue to more clearly delineated constructs such as operational closure or organizational closure. Because the term is invoked specifically to discuss autonomy , one might make a case that it connotes organizational closure. However, there is no evidence beyond this to suggest such a linkage between the two constructs.

Cf. : closure, operational closure, organizational closure

(i) through their interactions and transformations regenerate and realize the network of processes (relations) that produced them; and (ii) constitute it as a concrete unity in the space in which they exist by specifying the topological domain of its realization as such a network. (Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. 135, Cf. : Varela, 1979, p. 13)

Any unity meeting these specifications is an autopoietic machine / system, and any such autopoietic system realized in the physical space is a living system. The particular substantiation of a given unity -- its structure -- is not a sufficient factor for making the system "living". The key feature of a living system is maintenance of its organization, i.e, preservation of the relational network which defines it as a systemic unity. Phrased another way, '...autopoietic systems operate as homeostatic systems that have their own organization as the critical fundamental variable that they actively maintain constant.' (Maturana, 1975, p. 318)

Varela, Maturana & Uribe (1974) provide a concise set of criteria for autopoietic machine, arranged as a 6-point key by which one may proceed step-by-step in evaluating autopoiesis for a given unity. This key is illustrated in Table AutoKey below.

TABLE AUTOKEY: A Six-Step Key for Determining Whether a Given Unity is Autopoietic (Varela, Maturana & Uribe, 1974, pp. 192-193)
1. Determine if: The unity has identifiable boundaries (via interactions)	If so: Proceed to 2.
	If not: "The unity is indescribable and we can say nothing." (p. 192)
2. Determine if: "...there are constitutive elements of the unity, that is, components of the unity." (p. 192)	If so: Proceed to 3.
	If not: "...the unity is an unanalyzable whole and therefore not an autopoietic system." (p. 192)
3. Determine if: ...the unity is a mechanistic system, that is, the components properties are capable of satisfying certain relations that determine in the unity the interactions and transformations of these components." (p. 192)	If so: Proceed to 4.
	If not: "...the unity is not an autopoietic system." (p. 193)
4. Determine if: "...the components that constitute the boundaries of the unity constitute these boundaries through preferential neighborhood relations and interactions between themselves, as determined by their properties in the space of their interactions." (p. 193)	If so: Proceed to 5.
	If not: "...you do not have an autopoietic unity because you are determining its boundaries, not the unity itself." (p. 193)
5. Determine if: "...the components of the boundaries of the unity are produced by the interactions of the components of the unity, either transformation of previously produced components, or by transformations and/or coupling of non-component elements that enter the unity through its boundaries." (p. 193)	If so: Proceed to 6.
	If not: "...you do not have an autopoietic unity." (p. 193)
6. Determine if: "...all the other components of the unity are also produced by the interactions of its components as in 5.	If so: "...you have an autopoietic unity in the space in which its components exist." (p. 193, emphasis in the original)
	If not: "...and there are components in the unity not produced by components of the unity as in 5., or if there are components of the unity which do not participate in the production of other components, you do not have an autopoietic unity." (p. 193)

Autopoietic machines are the opposite of allopoietic machines, which are defined in terms of a purpose other than maintenance of their own organization. However, an observer can ascribe allopoietic ( allo-referred) status to an autopoietic machine within a subsuming context. Autopoietic machines may be described or manipulated as components of "...a larger system that defines the independent events which perturb them ... [and] can in fact be integrated into a larger system as a component allopoietic machine, without any alteration in its autopoietic organization." (Varela, 1979, p. 16) (See Also: higher-order, second-order, third-order) Conversely, an observer may analytically decompose an autopoietic machine, treating each of its "...partial homeostatic and regulatory mechanisms as allopoietic machines (submachines) by defining their input and output surfaces." (Varela, 1979, p. 17) Such a decomposition does not sum up (as a collection of allopoietic submachines) to an appropriate description of autopoietic machines, because it "...does not reveal the nature of the domain of interactions that ... [autopoietic machines] ... define as concrete entities operating in the physical universe." (Varela, 1979, p. 17)

Cf. : autonomy , autopoiesis , autonomous machine (system), machine

Cf. : living organization, organization , organization of the living

"An autopoietic organization constitutes a closed domain of relations specified only with respect to the autopoietic organization that these relations constitute, and thus it defines a space in which it can be realized as a concrete system, a space whose dimensions are the relations of production of the components that realize it."

(Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. 135)

Note that this "autopoietic space" is not isomorphic with the general physical space which is the context for realization of the composite unity . Perhaps the best interpretation is to consider an autopoietic space to be analogous to a state space (a depictive construct for a system's attributes). Maturana and Varela (1980, pp. 90 ff.) ascribe three dimensions to the autopoietic space, corresponding to the three classes of relations of production.

Cf. : domain, relations of production, space

See autopoietic machine

Cf. : autopoiesis (2.), theory of autopoiesis, autopoiesis theory, biology of cognition, Santiago theory

See autopoietic machine

"The fundamental operation that an observer can perform is an operation of distinction, the specification of an entity by operationally cleaving it from a background."

(Maturana, 1978, p. 55)

As such, this term is used more or less colloquially, and not as a formal alternative to (e.g.) ambience or medium.

"All the peculiar characteristics of the different kinds of organisms are superimposed on this basic circularity and are subservient to it, securing its continuance through successive interactions in an always changing environment." (Maturana, 1970a, p. 5)

For a living system, "...its identity is maintained as long as the basic circularity that defines the system as a unit of interactions remains unbroken." (Maturana, 1970a, p. 5)

Cf. : circularity, circular organization

1. (With respect to a system observed):

"Any operation or change in operation of an organism in relation to an environment, in any domain in which the observer distinguishes this operation or change in operation, is a behavior or action in this domain."

(Maturana, 1989)

The "...changes of a living being's position or attitude, which an observer describes as movements or actions in relation to a certain environment." (Maturana & Varela, 1992, p. 136) As such, behavior is an observer-ascribed description of the observed system's apparent transformations within the similarly observer-dependent environment in which the observation occurs.

"...[T]he behavior of an organism is only a description that the observer does of a sequence of postural changes (structural) that the organism exhibits in relation to the medium in which it is observed. These postural changes are expressions of the structural dynamics of the organism, and they appear with the participation of the nervous system when it exists."

(Maturana, 1987, p. 322)

This last quoted passage points to the necessity of bearing in mind that behavior (as ascribed by an observer) must be qualified with respect to the same phenomenal domain juxtaposition as applies to any observation of a composite unity. The following passage illustrates this point, as Maturana discusses the linkage of the living system's two phenomenal domains of realization (as both simple and composite unity) through the cognitive domain of the observer:

"Behaviour, as a relation between a living system operating as a whole and the medium operating as an independent entity, does not take place in the anatomical/physiological domain of the organism, but depends on it. In other words, anatomical/physiological phenomena are necessary for behaviour to happen, but do not determine it because they are involved in the operation of only one of the participants of the dynamics of relations that constitutes it, namely, the living system. It is only the observer that conserves a double look by attending simultaneously, or in succession, to the structural dynamics of a system and to its relations as a whole, who can speak of a generative relation between the processes of the structural dynamics of a living system (anatomy and physiology) and the phenomena of its domain of behaviour."

(Maturana, 1995)

We often overlook these observer-dependent factors when we take observations of an organism's / system's apparent transformations to support an explanation of those transformational events in mentalistic or psychologistic terms. By doing so, we are in fact projecting onto the observed transformational events an explanatory mechanism which is an artifact of our observation. Maturana provides a lucid illustration of this in discussing perception:

"Since the observer distinguishes the organism as a system that moves in a medium, conserving necessarily its structural correspondence with it (adaptation) ... , the observer can distinguish behaviors that appear in the organism associated to its interactions. It is in this context of the association between behavior and medium configured by this distinction that the word perception is habitually used, supposing that such behaviors emerge from the determination of the organism (or of its nervous system), in the level of the sensorial encounter, by an external object."

(Maturana, 1987, p. 322)

The expansion of this basic construct to encompass complex behavioral phenomena proceeds with regard to the typical allusions to circularity and domanial qualification:

"Every kind of behavior is realized through operations that may or may not be applied recursively. If recursion is possible in a particular kind of behavior and if it leads to cases of behavior of the same kind, then a closed generative domain of behavior is produced. There are many examples: Human dance is one, human language, another."

(Maturana, 1978, p. 52)

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2. (With respect to the observer):

The "... referential and deterministic sequence of states of nervous activity, in which each state determines the next one within the same frame of reference." (Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. 52) More generally, Maturana characterizes the fundament for an ascription of "behavior" (1. above) as the ongoing mediation of the nervous system between the organism's receptor and effector surfaces. (Cf. Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. 26)

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3.

A term used in the more or less colloquial sense of an organism's "function" or "performance." (Cf. Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. 31)

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4.

In one specific case, 'behavior' appears as a synonym for conduct (from which this term is more commonly distinguished). This occurs in Maturana and Guiloff (1980, p. 139):

"(v) Conduct or behaviour. The interactions in which it is seen to enter as well as the active relations that a living system is seen to adopt while operating (realizing its autopoiesis) within a given context, and which are described by an observer with reference to this context, constitute its conduct or behaviour."

Perhaps the most concentrated treatment of "behavior" -- particularly insofar as it is a phenomenon subject to observation -- is to be found in Maturana and Guiloff (1980). In this paper, the authors make a distinction between those behaviors which an observer might distinguish as acquired / learned versus innate / instinctive. They take care to point out that this distinction has no necessary bearing on the fundamental explanation of behavior put forth in autopoietic theory:

"If two living systems have isomorphic structures, then their respective domains of states as well as their respective domains of perturbations are also isomorphic, regardless of whether the structure of one living system was inherited while the structure of the other was acquired during its ontogeny. The result is that these two living systems under isomorphic systems of perturbations undergo isomorphic changes of states that are seen as equivalent conducts by an observer."

(Maturana & Guiloff, 1980, p. 139)

In both cases, the observed behavior of each system is a result of their structure-specified responses to perturbation. This structural determination is the central (and only) explanation needed in the context of autopoietic theory.

"...[T]he distinction that we make between instinctive and learned behaviours has significance only if referred to the different origins of the individual structures of the organisms concerned (instinctive if inherited and learned if acquired during ontogeny), and not to the manner in which the structure of an organism determines its behaviour."

(Maturana & Guiloff, 1980, p. 139)

Cf. : behavioral coupling, conduct, domain of behavioral phenomena

"...the autopoietic conduct of an organism A becomes a source of deformation for an organism B, and the compensatory behavior of organism B acts, in turn, as a source of deformation of organism A, whose compensatory behavior acts again as a source of deformation of B, and so on recursively until the coupling is interrupted."

(Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. 120)

For all practical purposes, this term can be considered an informal synonym for reciprocal structural coupling, albeit it a synonym framed from a distinct referential vantage. The primary basis for differentiating the constructs is that one is framed with respect to behavior and the other with respect to structure . The focus of the former is the organism's attitudinal (or other parametric) status with respect to its discerned environment, and the focus of the latter is the internal constitution of the organism.

The complementarity of referential framing evident between behavioral and structural coupling is analogous to that between deformation and perturbation. Perhaps it is no more than a derived effect of the literature's "ontogeny", but it's interesting to point out that the canonical 1970's treatments of behavioral coupling typically invoke deformation, whereas the more numerous treatments of structural coupling typically invoke perturbation. Crudely put for the sake of illustration, the former case invokes a structural status to explain something framed as an event, while in the latter case invokes an event to explain something framed with regard to the participating systems' structures.

Cf. : structural coupling, deformation, perturbation, consensual domain

As discussed by Varela (Goguen & Varela, 1978; Varela, 1979), one of two alternative observational vantages on a system and its operation(s) (the other being recursive view). The behavioral view "...reduces a system to its input-output performance or behavior, and reduces the environment to inputs to the system..." and the "...effect of outputs on environment is not taken into account...". In contrast, (with respect to a given system) the recursive view "...emphasizes the mutual interconnectedness of its components..." and "... arises when emphasis is placed on the system's internal structure." (Goguen & Varela, 1978, p. 34; Varela, 1979, p. 86)

"...[T]he behavioral view arises when emphasis is placed on the environment, and recursive view arises when emphasis is placed on the system's internal structure.

If [via the recursive view -- Ed. ] we stress the autonomy of a system S_i ... then the environmental influences become perturbations (rather than inputs) which are compensated for through the underlying recursive interdependence of the system's components ... Each such component, however, is treated behaviorally, in terms of some input-output description.

The recursive viewpoint is more sophisticated than the behavioral, since it involves the simultaneous consideration of three different levels [i.e.: component / system-whole / environment -- Ed. ], whereas the behavioral strictly speaking involves only two [i.e.: system-whole / environment -- Ed. ]. ... [E]xpressing interest in how the system achieves its behavior through the interdependent action of its parts adds a new distinction, between the system and its parts."

(Goguen & Varela, 1978, p. 34)

The cognitive point of view (CPOV) conforming to the behavioral view is illustrated in Tableau BehView below. A summary illustration of the dichotomy between behavioral and recursive views can be found in Figure CPOV, located within the entry for cognitive point of view.

TABLEAU BehView: Behavioral View of a System S
Cognitive Point of View	A cognitive point of view (CPOV) specifies the distinctions, indications, and basic stance via which an observer engages the 'world' intersecting her cognitive domain. The 'focus' or 'referential crosshairs' are set in the medium of engagement, in what would be the environment for any system S in that medium.
In Terms of Description ...	With the focus set in the environment, system S is apprehended and engaged as a simple unity. Dynamic transformations are apprehended as such in the environment, and in terms of this environment (e.g., as distortions in the environment's referential matrix, vis a vis the observer).
In Terms of Explanation ...	The dynamic transformations are explained as phenomena framed with regard to the environment. The relationship of system S to these phenomena can not be explained except in terms of "import / export". System S remains opaque to explanation, and is attributed the character of a processor of the phenomena 'imported' and/or 'exported' (which are themselves re-framed as 'inputs' and/or 'outputs' to/from system S).

Although the foundation for the behavioral / recursive view dichotomy can be discerned in the primary literature going back to Maturana (1970a), it is neither so explicitly addressed, nor even invoked, as in the Varela sources cited here. Maturana's subsequent analyses of phenomena such as languaging and (most particularly) the hierarchical evolution of self-consciousness through recursive linguistic behavior could have been considerably more lucid had this (or an equivalent) logical accounting for indexicality been employed.

Cf. : cognitive point of view, recursive view

1.

A term which appears colloquially in The Tree of Knowledge (Maturana & Varela, 1992) as an apparent synonym for 'object', 'entity', and/or 'unity'. Cf. p. 40:

"The act of indicating any being, object, thing, or unity involves making an act of distinction ... Each time we refer to anything ... we are specifying a criterion of distinction, which indicates what we are talking about and specifies its properties as being, unity, or object."

---

2.

Used in a more specific sense, a term connoting a specimen of a living system -- typically in the phrase "living being".

Nowhere in the primary literature is 'being' defined in such a way as to give it any special connotation distinct from 'unity' or 'entity'. Similarly, the primary literature does not explicitly address 'being' in any specific sense as an ontic unit (i.e., a being) or as an ontological state or quality of existence (i.e., being). As such, the often-suggested parallels or linkages between autopoietic theory and (e.g.) Heideggerian phenomenological philosophy are not explicitly suggested by any invocation of the term 'being' by Maturana and/or Varela.

Cf. : entity, unity

"...[A]utopoietic unities specify biological phenomenology as the phenomenology proper of those unities with features distinct from physical phenomenology. This is so, not because autopoietic unities go against any aspect of physical phenomenology -- since their molecular components must fulfill all physical laws -- but because the phenomena they generate in functioning as autopoietic unities depend on their organization and the way this organization comes about, and not on the physical nature of their components (which only determine their space of existence."

(Maturana & Varela, 1992, p. 51)

Given this focus by Varela, the attribution of a biological phenomenology to a composite unity will be contingent on the level of composition at which autopoiesis is realized. In other words, a composite unity which either (a) subsumes components which (in and of themselves) exhibit autopoiesis and/or (b) exhibits autonomy as a whole may or may not exhibit a biological phenomenology, subject to certain conditions:

"[I]f a new unity is produced that is not autopoietic, its phenomenology, which will necessarily depend on its organization, will be biological or not according to its dependence on the autopoiesis of its components, and will accordingly depend or not depend on the maintenance of these as autopoietic units. If the new unity is autopoietic, then its phenomenology is biological and obviously depends on the maintenance of its autopoiesis, which in turn may or may not depend on the autopoiesis of its components."

(Varela, 1979, p. 31)

This passage is not restricted to higher-order autopoietic systems, in which autopoiesis is realized at two or more levels of composition. A higher-order autopoietic system would be of the sort addressed in the final sentence -- where the composite unity is autopoietic, provided the maintenance of the composite depended on the autopoiesis of its (autopoietic) components.

Cf. : component, higher-order (autopoietic system), biological phenomenon, mechanical phenomenology, phenomenology, statical phenomenology

The earliest paper in the primary literature (Maturana, 1970) begins by stating, "Cognition is a biological phenomenon and can only be understood as such; any epistemological insight in the domain of knowledge requires this understanding." (p. 3) This opening declaration paved the way for the theoretical development of the biology of cognition. Once the core construct of autopoiesis was introduced and fleshed out, biological phenomena themselves would then be delineated with respect to the product of their scrutiny:

"... [A] phenomenon is a biological phenomenon only to the extent that it depends in one way or another on the autopoiesis of one or more physical autopoietic unities."

(Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. 135)

[Biological phenomena] "...are necessarily phenomena of relations between processes which satisfy the autopoiesis of the participant living systems. Accordingly, under no circumstances is a biological phenomenon defined by the properties of its component elements."

(Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. 113)

"...[A] biological phenomenon will be any phenomenon that involves the autopoiesis of at least one living being."

(Maturana & Varela, 1992, p. 52)

Cf. : biological phenomenology

Cf. : autopoiesis (2.), autopoiesis theory, autopoietic theory, Santiago theory, theory of autopoiesis

The recourse to "boundaries" is based on the idea that autopoietic systems, through their processes of self-production, delineate a "topology" in the space of their operations. If the observer observes an autopoietic entity with respect to the dimensions in which its processes of topological production are manifested, this topological boundary is discernible via the closure of the entity's constituent processes. As such, the construct of "boundary" connotes the self-circumscription of an organizationally-closed system in the context of its environment (as ascribed by an observer). A "boundary" is not, then, strictly held to be a discernible "sheath" or "shell" (i.e., a bounding component of the system's structure ), though such structural manifestations of the system's boundary may be evident.

Though intriguingly salient to autopoietic theory, the calculus of indications is external to the primary corpus of autopoietic theory, and it will not be discussed in any further detail within the Encyclopaedia. Readers interested in exploring this substantial campaign by Varela are encouraged to read Laws of Form, Principles of Biological Autonomy (Varela, 1979), and/or the papers cited herein. Additional materials relevant to the calculus of indications are listed in the Observer Web's Bibliography and Guide to Internet Resources.

More specifically, Maturana considered it misleading because it obscured:

• "... the actual appreciation of the sufficiency of the notion of property as defined by the distinctive operation performed by the observer when specifying a unity ...

• ... the understanding of the dependency of the identity of the unity on the distinctive operation that specified it.

• ... the understanding of the phenomenal domains as determined by the properties of the unities that generate them

• ... the non-intersection of the phenomenal domains generated by the operation of a composite unity as a simple unity in a medium and by the operation of its components as components."

(Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. xviii, vertical spacing added for readability)

"We call the structural changes that occur in a system with conservation of organization, changes of state; and those that occur with loss of organization, disintegrations."

(Maturana, Mpodozis & Letelier, 1995)

"Living systems as they exist on earth today are characterized by exergonic metabolism, growth and internal molecular replication, all organized in a closed causal circular process that allows for evolutionary change in the way the circularity is maintained, but not for the loss of the circularity itself. ... This circular organization constitutes a homeostatic system whose function is to produce and maintain this very same circular organization by determining that the components that specify it are those whose synthesis or maintenance it secures. ...Furthermore, this circular organization defines a living system as a unit of interactions and is essential for its maintenance as a unit ..."

(Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. 9)

Cf. : autopoiesis , circularity, homeostasis, organization

1.

A term employed to connote closure, particular with respect to form (e.g., organization ) or dynamics (e.g., operations or processes). The construct of "circularity" occurs frequently in the literature as a description for a process or path which is closed upon itself (in the sense of eventually returning to the point of its origin). This in turn sets the stage for a necessary cyclicity in systems exhibiting such circular form: "The circularity of their organization continuously brings them back to the same internal state (same with respect to the cyclic process)." (Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. 10)

Because autonomous and autopoietic systems exhibit organizational closure, circularity and cyclicity are important aspects of their description. "It is the circularity of its organization that makes a living system a unit of interactions, and it is this circularity that it must maintain in order to remain a living system and to retain its identity through different interactions." (Maturana, 1970a, p. 5; Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. 9) This explains why Maturana made circularity a central theme beginning with his earliest writings on a novel approach to analyzing living systems. "All the peculiar characteristics of the different kinds of organisms are superimposed on this basic circularity and are subservient to it, securing its continuance through successive interactions in an always changing environment." (Maturana, 1970a, p. 5)

Because such systems are self-organizing, -referential, -maintaining, etc., their operations cannot be fully explained without recourse to circularity. As such, "circularity" is a generic explanatory theme necessitated by the form of Maturana and Varela's approach, and it is a necessary theme in approaching self-organization . Jantsch (1980, Chapter 10) extensively explores circularity (and cyclicity) in this general sense.

---

Cf. : basic circularity, circular organization,

---

2.

A term connoting a paradoxical state of referential or explanatory "looping" -- specifically, that state of affairs confronting all scientific studies of cognition -- that the object of study (the human "mind") is also the instrument by which that study is conducted. Maturana alludes to this sense of circularity most succinctly in saying of cognition and language (as instruments of addressing cognition and language themselves):

"These two experiential conditions are my starting point because I must be in them in any explanatory attempt; they are my problem because I choose to explain them; and they are my unavoidable instruments because I must use cognition and language in order to explain cognition and language."

(Maturana, 1988a)

The most specific label for this particular sense (of referential / explanatory paradox) is fundamental circularity.

---

3.

A term used to negatively characterize a path of argumentation or course of reasoning -- typically on the figurative basis of said path's 'circling back on itself' to explain or demonstrate something which in fact was employed earlier as a foundational element. An example is the common colloquial indictment of 'presuming as given that which one sets out to prove'. Given the above-cited basic and fundamental circularities which Maturana and Varela's chosen foci entail, critics of their work have often claimed that their proffered line(s) of explanation, by virtue of following the circular contours of their subject matter, are guilty of this presumptively erroneous / fallacious method.

Frankly, most such charges appear to derive from a confusion of explanatory circularity (i.e, 'circular reasoning') with the above-cited intrinsic forms of circularity. To be fair, however, some further comments should be offered as a more substantive basis for rebuttal. Because Maturana's formulations of 'reason', 'rationality', and 'theory' all rely on the general construct of 'explanation', these comments will be framed with regard to this last, and most relevant, topic.

To the extent that 'circular reasoning' is isomorphic with 'explaining exactly what you already assume', one might well rebut such claims by pointing out that a priori assumptions (objects, values, claims) are relegated by Maturana (e.g., 1991) to the class of philosophical explanations -- the opposite of the class of scientific explanations into which he claims his theories properly fall. To the extent 'circular reasoning' connotes pre-specification of what is to be addressed, one must concede this is an intrinsic component of Maturana's scientific method (as the first element in his criteria of validation for scientific explanations). However, this would lead to 'circular reasoning' only to the extent that the phenomenon initially specified as the focus of explanation was itself employed as a component of its own explanation. Maturana specifically forbids such a thing when he writes: "A proposed explanation which explicitly or implicitly includes the phenomenon to be explained as a feature of the proposed system [i.e., model offered as the explanatory hypothesis -- Ed.], is not a scientific explanation." (Maturana & Guiloff, 1980, p. 137)

"The organization of a system, then, specifies the class identity of a system, and must remain invariant for the class identity of the system to remain invariant: if the organization of a system changes, then its identity changes and it becomes a unity of another kind."

(Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. xx)

"...[T]he organization of a composite unity specifies the class of entities to which it belongs. It follows that the concept or generic name that we use to refer to a class of entities points to the organization of the composite unities that are members of the class."

(Maturana, 1978)

Another allusion to "class" concerns the character of cognition afforded by an autopoietic system's circular organization, "... which treats every interaction and the internal state that it generates as if it were to be repeated, and as if an element of a class. (Maturana & Varela, 1980, pp. 49-50) Most specifically, when we as observers distinguish a composite unity , we are in effect distinguishing a class. "This situation, in which we recognize implicitly or explicitly the organization of an object when we indicate it or distinguish it, is universal in the sense that it is something we do constantly as a basic cognitive act, which consists no more and no less than in generating classes of any type." (Maturana & Varela, 1992, p. 43)

Both the cited general and specific intersections of "class" and cognition imply a primary generality of orientational / referential / distinction-making behavior. Phrased another way, this implies that the observer observes from a fundamentally general stance, rather than lacing together multiple specific instances to arrive at the general. This implication is nowhere more explicitly reinforced than when Maturana and Varela state "... functionally, for a living system every experience is the experience of a general case, and it is the particular case, not the general one, which requires many independent experiences in order that it be specified through the intersection of various classes of interactions." (Maturana & Varela, 1980, pp. 49-50)

These allusions to "class" are invoked for the purposes of discussion and explanation. Nowhere in the literature is there an extensive treatment of whether (much less how) this could relate to (e.g.) discernment of "classes" by an observer in (e.g.) ordering her cognitive domain, making inferences, etc. As such, the notion of "class" is not pursued (to any great extent) in the direction of linking it to set-theoretical notions descriptive of cognitive (particularly inferential) phenomena. Such discussion is limited to only a few instances (e.g., Maturana & Varela, 1980, pp. 49 ff. -- Cf. : inference)

This relatively low attention to developing the role of "class" in autopoietic theory is not surprising, given that a dominant theme of the theory is the autonomy of the subject system. From such a perspective, it is sufficient to invoke the "class"-like character of interaction as the basis for behavioral / orientational flexibility. Fuller treatment of "class" in a formal (particularly a set- theoretic) sense lies beyond the scope of autopoietic theory's focus, because it would entail (a) requisite characterization of that lying beyond or outside the autonomous system, and (b) an allusion to some abstract feature of class subsumption -- in effect what Varela calls a symbolic description.

Cf. : inference, organization , unity

Cf. : class, identity, organization

Critics of Maturana and Varela have interpreted the defining closure of autonomous / autopoietic systems to indicate these are "closed systems" in the traditional sense. This is quite simply not the case, and results from (a) a misinterpretation of Maturana and Varela's terminology and (b) inattention to the manner in which the explanatory constructs underlying a traditional ascription of system "openness" (e.g., feedback) are addressed in autopoietic theory.

"Please note that when we speak of organizational closure, by no means do we imply interactional closure, i.e., the system in total isolation. We do assume that every system will maintain endless interactions with the environment which will impinge and perturb it. If this were not so, we could not even distinguish it."

(Varela & Goguen, 1978, p. 294, emphasis in the original)

Cf. : closure, feedback, organizational closure, stability

It is important to note that this property of 'closure' does not make autonomous / autopoietic systems 'closed' in the classic cybernetic sense of isolated from the environment or impervious to environmental influence. 'Closure' doesn't mean autonomous systems are unresponsive; it only means that their changes of state in response to changes in their medium are realized and propagated solely within the network of processes constituting them (as they are defined). The difference has more to do with the way a system is defined than how that system (once defined) operates.

"Please note that when we speak of organizational closure, by no means do we imply interactional closure, i.e., the system in total isolation. We do assume that every system will maintain endless interactions with the environment which will impinge and perturb it. If this were not so, we could not even distinguish it."

(Varela & Goguen, 1978, p. 294, emphasis in the original)

A fuller explanation of this point can be obtained in Varela (1979, pp. 56 ff.), who frames the issue in terms of delineating a systemic unity such that the scope of the defined unity subsumes all processes which operationally define it. For example, in organizational closure the network of defining processes is internal to the system as circumscribed. This includes those processes of system "feedback", which in traditional cybernetics are defined as external to a system -- in either the sense that (a) they are channels for "information" from without (i.e., the 'environment') or (b) they are defined as extrinsic or secondary to the constitutive nature of the system.

Cf. : feedback, organizational closure, operational closure, stability

"Every autonomous system is organizationally closed."

(Varela, 1979, p. 58, emphasis in the original)

"Every system-whole is organizationally closed."

(Varela & Goguen, 1978, p. 293)

The Closure Thesis is a central component of Varela's solo theoretical work of the 1970's. Both the 'system-whole' and 'autonomous system' constructs cited above denote composite unities of the sort which 'systems theory' has taken as its topical focus. The emphasis on organization clearly derives from the seminal work in delineating autopoietic machines, and the usage of that term is entirely consistent with its invocation here. The Closure Thesis represents an axiomatic basis upon which to extend the notion of 'organization' and its closure as evidenced in those systems (both natural and artificial) of interest to the stature of a feature definitive of those same systems. The following excerpt from Varela & Goguen (1978) summarizes the rationale for such an extension:

"Question: What have we learned from the descriptions of system-wholes in the last decade? Answer: That in order to account for the coherence of the observed systems, their constitutive interactions must be mutual and reciprocal, so as to become an interconnected network.

There seems to be plenty of evidence to substantiate this view of system-wholes. The traditional source of examples has been living systems. Surely in them the circularity of interconnectedness is more striking than anywhere else, both topologically and functionally. But, biological systems are not unique in this respect, and the current interest in ecological wholeness and world models are testimony to our growing understanding of this. ...

In terms of organization, then, empirical observation reveals that the system-wholes are organizationally closed: their organization is a circular network of interactions rather than a tree of hierarchical processes.

Conversely, then, if we are trying to make more precise our notion of a whole, we propose to make these empirical results a guideline. That is, we propose to take the circular and mutual interconnectedness of organization, or organizational closure, as the characterization of system-wholes."

(Varela & Goguen, 1978, pp. 292-293, emphasis in the original)

This thesis was then developed in the light of organizational closure itself as well as the corollary constructs of (a) criteria of distinction / indication (by which a system-whole is identified by an observer), and (b) stability (as specifically re-defined). After addressing the criticisms typically leveled at their approach (cf. Note below), they conclude:

"In summary: we have the three interrelated notions of criteria of indication, systemic stability, and organizational closure. They appear related thus: given a criterion for distinction, system-wholes can be identified by their stable properties, and empirical experience tells us that such stability is due to organizational closure. Whence the Closure Thesis, that can be now restated in a second, less compact form:

Every (distinguishable) system-whole is (distinguishable through its stable properties arising from it being) organizationally closed."

(Varela & Goguen, 1978, p. 295)

NOTE: For more detailed discussion of Varela & Goguen's rebuttal of two conventional criticisms as they apply to the Closure Thesis, i.e.: (a) 'Are organizationally closed unities 'closed systems'?'; and (b) 'Aren't 'inputs' and 'outputs' necessary components of a system?', refer to the entries for operational closure and feedback, respectively.

By declaring the Closure Thesis and exploring its ramifications, Varela (alone and in concert with J. Goguen) generated a basis for critiquing classical cybernetics / engineering approaches to systems. In these earlier approaches, the systems' essential circularity is not acknowledged, or is acknowledged only in terms of imperfect constructs such as feedback. By not addressing circularity as an intrinsic element of their models, adherents of these approaches are left to lay out specifications of a system in 'linear' terms / referents -- a tactic only made possible by 'punctuating' (to use Bateson's terminology) circular paths and flows with constructs such as 'input' and 'output' so as to filter out circularity in favor of more tractable (if less faithful) models and schemata. Given the distortions which may ensue, this 'punctuation' may be more properly considered 'puncturing'.

The Closure Thesis requires one to prioritize the subject system's organizational closure, which in turn mandates direct attention to this circularity. What, then, might this connote for reforming systems analysis and engineering?

"The Closure Thesis, we submit, is a methodological guideline: if you are to study a system, assume it has a closed organization, analyze individual pathways until a reconstruction of the network is obtained, and then putting all of these circuits together simultaneously, see what kinds of stability they can generate. The i/o [i.e., input/output -- Ed.] approach is, in fact, a moment in this process, insofar as we fix certain modes of interaction with a purpose in mind."

(Varela & Goguen, 1978, p. 318)

Cf. : closure, feedback, organization, organizational closure, operational closure, stability, system, system-whole

"A notion which represents the interactions of the observer, not a phenomenon operative in the observed domain. A mapping of a process that occurs in the space of autopoiesis onto a process that occurs in the space of human beings (heteropoiesis) and, thus, not a reformulation of the phenomenon."

(Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. 135)

The term "coding" is generally used to denote the symbolic inter-mappings associated with a cognitivist view of communication (e.g., the metaphor of the tube). The autopoietic account of communication as languaging denies that coding is the essence of such communicative interactions.

Cf. : communication, language, languaging, metaphor of the tube

"Cognition is a biological phenomenon and can only be understood as such; any epistemological insight in the domain of knowledge requires this understanding."

(Maturana, 1970a, p. 3)

"Any understanding of the cognitive process must account for the observer and his role in it."

(Maturana, 1970a, p. 4)

These two declarations from the earliest document in the literature base succinctly delineate the foundation for Maturana and Varela's autopoietic account of those events or phenomena we term "cognition". First, whatever cognition may be, it is most definitely a biological phenomenon -- i.e., it is a characteristic of those systems we label "living", and which have been made the province of biological science. Second, there is no explanation for "cognition" which avoids being discerned, analyzed, or expressed by one of the living systems manifesting that selfsame phenomenon. Addressing cognition as an impersonal or objective subject, absent grounding in the unavoidable groundedness of experience, cannot possibly encompass the topic.

Maturana and Varela proceeded from the perspective of individual organisms' cognitive activities as a function of their embodied experience. For them, cognition is a consequence of circularity and complexity in the form of any system whose behavior realizes maintenance of that selfsame form. This shifts the weight of discussion from discernment of those active agencies and replicable actions through which a given process ("cognition") is conducted (the viewpoint of cognitivism) to the discernment of those features of an organism's form which determine that entity's engagement with its milieu. In other words, cognition is a matter of interacting in the manner(s) in which one is capable of interacting, not processing what is objectively there to be seen. "Living systems are cognitive systems, and living as a process is a process of cognition." (Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. 13)

In this view, cognition is a consequence of (structurally-realized and structurally-determined) interactions. "A cognitive system is a system whose organization defines a domain of interactions in which it can act with relevance to the maintenance of itself, and the process of cognition is the actual (inductive) acting or behaving in this domain." (Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. 13) More specifically:

"... for every living system the process of cognition consists in the creation of a field of behavior through its actual conduct in its closed domain of interactions, and not in the apprehension or the description of an independent universe. Our cognitive process (the cognitive process of the observer) differs from the cognitive processes of other organisms only in the kinds of interactions into which we can enter, ... and not in the nature of the cognitive process itself."

(Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. 49)

In other words, the foundation for the autopoietic view of cognition is not "information" as some quantum commodity available in the environment. Owing to this, autopoietic theory diverges from some interpolations of J. J. Gibson's (e.g., 1979) otherwise similar ecological approach (Cf. Varela, Thompson & Rosch, 1991, pp. 202-204). Unlike cognitivism, autopoietic theory does not rely upon a formalizable model of information or symbol processing (Cf. Varela, et al., 1991) to describe cognition as information processing or communication as a matter of coding. Autopoietic theory also diverges from "classical" cybernetics in the sense that it does not treat system behavior as being regulated by a traffic in "information" -- e.g., "feedback" -- See Also: Varela, 1979, p. 56).

Cf. : class, cognitive domain, description, explanation, inference, language, languaging, observer

"The domain of all the interactions in which an autopoietic system can enter without loss of identity is its cognitive domain; or, in other words, the cognitive domain of an autopoietic system is the domain of all the descriptions which it can possibly make"

(Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. 119)

This latter allusion to descriptions primarily applies only to an autopoietic system which can operate as an observer.

It is sometimes difficult to maintain a clear distinction between a system's cognitive domain and its domain of interactions (" the domain of all the deformations that it may undergo without loss of autopoiesis" (Ibid.)) or its phenomenological domain. This confusion derives in large part from the generality of their definitions. A phenomenological domain is a general explanatory construct denoting the realm specified by the properties of a unity or one or more classes of unities (Cf. Varela, 1979, pp. 46-47). Crudely stated, the phenomenological domain is the domain in which the unity is extant in and of itself -- the totality of its context of simple or static realization, and the background to its dynamic realization. A domain of interactions is a distinct explanatory construct denoting the realm specified by "...the particular mode through which its autopoiesis is realized in the space of its components, that is, by its structural coupling." (Varela, 1979, p. 47) Crudely stated, the domain of interactions is the domain in which the unity can act (change; undergo deformation). A cognitive domain, crudely stated, is the domain in which the unity can, and does, adapt in the course of its ontogeny.

Cf. : cognition, domain of interactions, description, phenomenological domain

"...treat cognitive phenomena (such as language or perception) as structural phenomena by formulating them as phenomena of ontogenic or phylogenic adaptation, resulting from ontogenic or phylogenic structural selection, rather than as phenomena of transfer of information, communication, or meaning. These, as semantic phenomena, cannot be handled by biology."

Cf. : semantic phenomena

"...[T]he establishment of system boundaries is inescapably associated with what I shall call a cognitive point of view, that is, a particular set of presuppositions and attitudes, a perspective, or a frame in the sense of Bateson ... or Goffman ...; in particular, it is associated with some notion of value, or interest. It is also linked up with the cognitive capacities (sensory capabilities, knowledge background) of the distinctor. Conversely, the distinctions made reveal the cognitive capabilities of the distinctor. It is in this way that biological and social structures exhibit their coherence..."

(Varela, 1979, p. 85; Goguen & Varela, p. 32)

Because the phrase 'cognitive point of view' is more commonly invoked by Varela than 'cognitive viewpoint', this will be the term employed for discussion herein. For the sake of economy, it will be abbreviated CPOV.

A CPOV, therefore, circumscribes the particular 'layout' or 'topology' of an observer's observing situation. This circumscription specifies the focus of observational engagement (i.e., where the observer's 'referential cross hairs' are targeted), and this in turn specifies the topology of the observer's immediately-accessible domain of referentiality. These constraining or qualifying features are best illustrated in the context in which the CPOV was originally introduced. In Goguen and Varela (1978), the discursive focus was on "...the role which distinction plays in the creation and recognition of systems." (Goguen & Varela, 1978, p. 32) As such, they introduce and employ the notion of CPOV in the course of delineating how such observational constraints set the stage for a hierarchy of system levels (of discernment). This in turn set the stage for discussion of issues such as the dichotomies of autonomy / control and recursive / behavioral views on a system and its operations.

A summary illustration of this construct, including comparison of the behavioral and recursive subcategories, is given in Figure CPOV below.

Cf. : behavioral view, observer, observer-community, phenomenology, phenomenological domain, recursive view

"A cognitive system is a system whose organization defines a domain of interactions in which it can act with relevance to the maintenance of itself ..."

(Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. 13)

This is the basis for the process of cognition, as delineated in autopoietic theory. It is important to note that this basic definition frames capacity for cognition in terms of a system's formal character (its organization ) insofar as this is reflected in the scope of events into which it can enter while maintaining this character. This divorces autopoietic theory's notion of cognition from those elements most commonly cited in conventional, cognitivistic accounts: "information", 'symbols', and the "processing" of these things as the hallmark of cognitive activity.

Cf. : cognition, cognitive domain

1. [General usage]

Those "...coordinated behaviors mutually triggered among the members of a social unity." (Maturana & Varela, 1992, p. 193) The phenomenon ascribed to the inter-organism behavioral coordination which an observer construes as communicative. (Cf. Maturana & Varela, 1992, p. 195)

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2. [Specific usage, in contrast with simple "interaction"]

In this more specific usage, the term "communication" is employed to analyze what distinguishes "communicative" behaviors (See Also: 1.).

In this usage, communication is behavior entailing orientation which is contrastively opposed to simple or automatic "interaction" wherein interactors are basically triggering each other's responses. In communication (in this sense), one organism orients "...the behavior of the other organism to some part of its domain of interactions different from the present interaction, but comparable to the orientation of that of the orienting organism." (Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. 27) Note that the orientation of interest is not necessarily to some external referent, but to some distinguishable subregion of the domain of interactions. "This can take place only if the domains of interactions of the two organisms are widely coincident; in this case no interlocked chain of behavior [i.e., no "interaction" in the simple sense -- Ed.] is elicited because the subsequent conduct of the two organisms depends on the outcome of independent, although parallel, interactions. (Maturana & Varela, 1980, pp. 27-28)

Cf. : orientation

"A chain of interlocked interactions such that although the conduct of each organism in each interaction is internally determined by its autopoietic organization, this conduct is for the other organism a source of compensable deformations."

(Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. 136)

Cf. : consensual domain, structural coupling, perturbation.

Cf. : explanation

Compensation is not "absolute" in the sense that any or all arbitrary parameters or ordering arrangements are recovered after deformation / perturbation. With regard to autopoietic systems in particular, compensation is sufficient if the unity or system's organization is preserved:

"...[A]ny deformation at any place is not compensated by bringing the system back to an identical state of its components as it would be described by projecting it upon a three-dimensional Cartesian space; rather it is compensated by keeping its organization constant as defined by the relation of the relations of production of relations of constitution, specification, and order which constitutes autopoiesis. In other words, compensation of deformation keeps the autopoietic system in the autopoietic space."

(Maturana & Varela, 1980, pp. 92-93)

Cf. : perturbation, , ontogeny, compensatory change

"...the autopoietic conduct of an organism A becomes a source of deformation for an organism B, and the compensatory behavior of organism B acts, in turn, as a source of deformation of organism A, whose compensatory behavior acts again as a source of deformation of B, and so on recursively..."

(Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. 120)

Cf. : behavioral coupling, compensation, deformation, perturbation, structural coupling

Cf. : compensation, deformation, perturbation, conservative change, innovative change

1.

A relation between descriptions such that they comprise a mutually defining duality -- i.e., that one is the obverse of the other, but neither is entirely addressable in isolation. Varela (1979) characterizes this duality as being based on "...how things are put together and related through our descriptions, not losing track of the fact that every 'it' can be seen on a different level as a process." (p. 100)

Varela (1976; 1979, pp. 99 ff.) spends a great deal of effort in characterizing the seemingly paradoxical manner in which complementarity recurs in systems-oriented enquiry. He distinguishes between (a) Hegelian-type dualities in which the elements' dichotomy is manifest within one level of reference / description and (b) those recursively resolvable dualities in which an apparent conflict of type (a) is resolved in terms of the conflicting elements constituting a unifying term at a 'higher' level. Type (a) complementarity is the type most widely addressed in 19th and 20th century studies. Type (b) complementarity is the object of Varela's Star schema.

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2.

Any of the pairs of unities, constructs or attributes exhibiting complementarity (1.). A synonym for complementary pair.

Cf. : asymmetry, complementary pair, Star, symmetry

"Every unity can be treated either as an unanalyzable whole endowed with constitutive properties which define it as a unity, or else as a complex system that is realized as a unity through its components and their mutual relations."

(Varela, Maturana & Uribe, 1974, pp. 187-188)

As such, this single invocation of the term does not provide a strong basis for equating it with the later usage of 'complex systems' generally as the subject matter of 'complexity studies.'

Analyses of composite unities (e.g., "systems") are therefore qualified with regard to two dichotomies among categories of explanatory phenomena, viz.: (a) "components" as essential constituents versus "parts" as sub-unities discerned by the observer; and (b) the "relations of production" definitive of an autopoietic machine versus what I shall term the "relations of discerned composition" by which the observer attributes part / whole relationship(s). (Cf. Maturana & Varela, 1980, pp. 48-49) This explanatory "gap" cannot be overcome:

"In principle a part should be definable through its relations within the unit that it contributes to form by its operation and interactions with other parts; this, however, cannot be attained because the analysis of a unit into parts by the observer destroys the very relations that would be significant for their characterization as effective components of the unit."

(Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. 49)

NOTE: In this cited passage, Maturana is apparently using the term "unit" to mean the unity being analyzed (as discerned by the analyzing observer).

This "fractured" set of definitory constructs would seem to call into question both the epistemological status of the observer's analysis and the ontological status of the system(s) analyzed. Maturana's resolution is to ascribe the part / whole relationships entirely to the descriptive domain of the observer.

"Accordingly, in a strict sense a unit does not have parts, and a unit is a unit only to the extent that it has a domain of interactions that defines it as different from that with respect to which it is a unit, and can be referred to only ... by characterizing its organization through the domain of interactions which specify this distinction. In this context, the notion of component is necessary only for epistemological reasons in order to refer to the genesis of the organization of the unit through our description, but this use does not reflect the nature of its components."

(Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. 49)

This point is reinforced in a discussion of the explanatory nature of the key relations of specificity and relations of order which define an autopoietic space. These relations are stated to be explanatory necessities in ascribing autopoiesis, but they are not to be taken as literal reflections of an ontological status.

"...[W]hen we speak about relations of specification we refer to the specification of components in the context of that which defines the system as autopoietic. Any other element of specificity that may enter, however necessary it may be for the factibility [factual characterization] of the components, but which is not defined through the autopoietic organization, we take for granted. Similarly ... (r)elations of order refer to the establishment of processes that secure the presence of the components in the concatenation that results in autopoiesis. No other reference is meant, however conceivable it may be within other perspectives of description."

(Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. 89)

Cf. : part, context, description, organization , unity

"If we recursively apply the operation of distinction to a [simple] unity, so that we distinguish components in it, we respecify it as a composite unity that exists in the space that its components define because it is through the specified properties of its components that we observers distinguish it."

(Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. xix)

"A composite unity is a unity distinguished as a simple unity that through further operations of distinction is decomposed by the observer into components that through their composition would constitute the original simple unity in the domain in which it is distinguished. A composite unity, therefore, is operationally distinguished as a simple unity in a metadomain with respect to the domain in which its components are distinguished because it results as such from an operation of composition."

(Maturana, 1988b, 6.iii.)

It is important to bear in mind that the notion of composite unity connotes a duality of distinguishability (as a whole; as a coherent set of components) on the part of an observer, which does not necessarily imply any absolute correspondence of referentiality in terms of (e.g.) space of discernment or constitutional integrability. The space or domain of eduction for a composite unity is not (and arguably cannot be) the same as that for the simple unity to which it corresponds. This is well-illustrated with respect to autopoietic systems:

"...[I]f an autopoietic system is treated as a composite unity, it exists in the space defined by its components, but if it is treated as a simple unity the distinctions that specify it as a simple unity characterize its properties as a simple unity, and define the space in which it exists as such a simple unity."

(Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. xix)

...and it applies to the general case of any composite unity:

"The organization of a system defines it as a composite unity and determines its properties as such a unity by specifying a domain in which it can interact (and, hence, be observed) as an unanalyzable whole endowed with constitutive properties. The properties of a composite unity as an unanalyzable whole establish a space in which it operates as a simple unity. In contrast, the structure of a system determines the space in which it exists as a composite unity that can be perturbed through the interactions of its components, but the structure does not determine its properties as an unity."

(Maturana, 1978)

As such, any scientist:

"... must distinguish two phenomenal domains when observing a composite unity: (a) the phenomenal domain proper to the components of the unity, which is the domain in which all the interactions of the components take place; and (b) the phenomenal domain proper to the unity, which is the domain specified by the interactions of the composite unity as a simple unity."

(Maturana, 1978)

....and such scientific observation of a living system entails two particular such phenomenal domains. This duality of domains of observation in turn distinguishes the manner (for each of the alternatives) in which the observer / scientist may observe (and hence, describe and explain) the subject system.

"...the first phenomenal domain, in which the interactions of the components are described with respect to the living system that they constitute, is the domain of physiological phenomena; the second phenomenal domain, in which a living system is seen as if it were a simple unity that interacts with the components of the environment in which its autopoiesis is realized, is the domain of behavioral phenomena."

(Maturana, 1978)

"If the observer chooses to pay attention to the environment, he treats the system as a simple entity with given properties and seeks the regularities of its interaction with the environment, that is, the constraints on the behavior of the system imposed by its environment. ... On the other hand, the observer may choose to focus on the internal structure of the system, viewing the environment as background -- for example, as a source of perturbations upon the system's autonomous behavior. From this viewpoint, the properties of the system emerge from the interaction of its components."

(Varela, 1979, p. 85) For most intents and purposes, the term 'composite unity' can be considered a synonym for 'system' (in colloquial usage) as it appears in the primary literature. In its colloquial usage, the classical cybernetics construct 'system' is always a composite unity. The canonical definitions of 'system' (e.g., by von Bertanlanffy) intersect solely with the convergence of parts into a discernible whole. The reverse (that they intersect with respect to deconstruction of the whole into specifiable parts) is not always tenable -- at least to the extent that one assumes integrability to be a defining attribute of a "system." This is largely because the notion of dynamic integrality typically presumed in invoking "systems" is not, in fact, a portion of the canonical definitions for that term. This issue was raised during the early days of the cybernetics movement, but its resolution was not accomplished by the time the construct 'system' had passed into popular usage.

As such, the most defensible ascribed correspondence between composite unity and 'system' is contingent upon a vantage from which the latter is taken as a whole.

"...[W]e can always treat a composite unity as a simple unity that does not exist in the space of its components, but which exists in a space that it defines through the properties that characterize it as a simple unity."

(Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. xix)

Cf. : organization , simple unity , structure , system, system-whole, unity

1.

A specific analytical term employed to circumscribe the character of an autopoietic system's behavior. It denotes any of the "...changes that an organism undergoes while maintaining its autopoiesis. ... The conduct of an organism is revealed to an observer by the changes that it causes in the ambience (including the observer) in which it exists." (Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. 124)

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2.

In more colloquial usage, a synonym for behavior in the most general sense. Maturana and Guiloff (1980, p. 139) explicitly equate the two terms: "(v) Conduct or behaviour. The interactions in which it is seen to enter as well as the active relations that a living system is seen to adopt while operating (realizing its autopoiesis) within a given context, and which are described by an observer with reference to this context, constitute its conduct or behaviour."

Cf. : behavior

Cf. : denotation / denotative, description, linguistic behavior, languaging, orientation

"...[T]he experience that we connote as we use the word consciousness, is one of self distinction as we distinguish ourselves making distinctions. And I maintain that that experience takes place as we operate in the distinction of the operation of distinction that recursively associates our bodyhood with the operations of distinction in which we participate as we operate in language alone or in our interactions with others. In other words, I consider that consciousness takes place as a particular relational dynamics when an organism operates as participant in a domain of recursive distinctions in language, and that it is not an entity or the property of an entity. I also consider that in order to be able to ascribe consciousness or self awareness to the operation of an organism, an observer must be able to claim that the organism to which he or she makes the ascription operates in second and third order recursive distinctions in language. Or, still other words, I claim that consciousness is an ascription that an observer makes to a living system if he or she thinks that its behaviour can only be understood as the self distinction of a self-distinction."

"Consciousness is not localized in the nervous system or in the body in general, it is lived as an experience in self consciousness, and it is lived only as long as there is in the living being that lives it the operationality that makes it arise as a fourth recursion in languaging. Furthermore, consciousness is lived as it is lived as an experience, and cannot be handled as an entity, or as a process, or as an operation in the nervous system, nor can it be attached to any structural feature of the nervous system, even though if the structure of the nervous system is altered the experience of consciousness is also altered or disappears."

(Maturana, 1995)

The allusions to specific 'orders' of recursion in linguistic behavior refer to the model Maturana provides in the above-cited essay, which outlines a progression of 'levels' or 'orders' by which recursion generates successively higher orders of behavioral engagement. For a more detailed illustration of this model, see the entry for self-consciousness.

Cf. : linguistic behavior, languaging, self-consciousness

"I call the behavior through which an organism participates in an ontogenic domain of recurrent interactions, consensual or linguistic according to whether I want to emphasize the ontogenic origin of the behavior (consensual), or its implications in the present state of the ongoing interactions (linguistic)."

(Maturana, 1988b, 8.ii.a.)

Accordingly, 'consensuality' is not limited in scope to linguistic interactions. It is the basis upon which languaging operates, when consensual action or activity appears (from an observer's vantage) to serve as a referent for further action / activity in the consensual domain thus established:

"When one or more living systems continue their co-ontogenic structural drift through their recurrent interactions in a consensual domain, it is possible for a recursion to take place in their consensual behavior resulting in the production of a consensual coordination of consensual coordinations of actions. If this were to happen, what an observer would see would be that the participants of a consensual domain of interactions would be operating in their consensual behavior making consensual distinctions upon their consensual distinctions, in a process that would recursively make a consensual action a consensual token for a consensual distinction that it obscures. Indeed, this process is precisely what takes place in our languaging in the praxis of living."

(Maturana, 1988b, 8.ii.b.)

Cf. : consensual distinction, consensual domain, linguistic behavior, languaging, self-consciousness

Cf. : consensual domain, distinction, linguistic domain, observer

"When two or more autopoietic systems interact recurrently, and the dynamic structure of each follows a course of change contingent upon the history of each's interactions with the others, there is a co-ontogenic structural drift that gives rise to an ontogenically established domain of recurrent interactions between them which appears to an observer as a domain of consensual coordinations of actions or distinctions in an environment. This ontogenically established domain of recurrent interactions I call a domain of consensual coordinations of actions or distinctions, or, more generally, a consensual domain of interactions, because it arises as a particular manner of living together contingent upon the unique history of recurrent interactions of the participants during their coontogeny."

(Maturana, 1988b, 8.ii.a.)

Because consensual domains are defined both by the structures of their participants and the history by which they came to exist, they are not reducible to descriptions framed only in terms of either.

"In each interaction the conduct of each organism is constitutively independent in its generation of the conduct of the other, because it is internally determined by the structure of the behaving organism only; but it is for the other organism, while the chain [of interactions] lasts, a source of compensable deformations that can be described as meaningful in the context of the coupled behavior."

(Varela, 1979, pp. 48 - 49)

Cf. : coupling, structural coupling, linguistic domain

Cf. : compensatory change, innovative change

1.

In specific usage, a synonym for relations of constitution (Cf. Maturana and Varela, 1980, pp. 90-91)

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2.

This term is occasionally employed rhetorically to generally connote the relations through which a systemic unity is composed, without apparent allusion to the strict usage of 1. above.

"For the constructivist, the dreams of reason denote a common denominator running through our language and logic, manifest as a wish for what we call 'reality' to have a certain shape and form. The wish has several dimensions.
...
Radical constructivism challenges this wish, thus taking on the unpopular job of shattering the fantasy of an objective reality. Constructivists argue that there are no observations -- i.e., no data, no laws of nature, no external objects -- independent of observers. The lawfulness and certainty of all natural phenomena are properties of the describer, not of what is being described. The logic of the world is the logic of the description of the world."

(Segal, 1986, pp. 3-4)

'Constructivism' is the general label for an epistemological position which (a) denies that individual knowledge directly accesses and unequivocally mirrors an 'objective reality' verbatim and (b) claims that individual knowledge is instead 'constructed' by the observer in response to the medium, but in terms and on terms of the observer's own constitutive features (e.g., modes of operation, conceptualizations, conceptual capacities).

NOTE:

Because Ernst von Glasersfeld's 'radical constructivism' is the most widely-known example (as opposed to an autonomous subcategory) of 'constructivism', information about 'constructivism' generally (including von Glasersfeld's views) is given here, and the Encyclopaedia entry for radical constructivism will concentrate on those points specific to von Glasersfeld's work and its relation to autopoietic theory. As such, citations from von Glasersfeld addressing 'radical constructivism' are invoked here as generally descriptive of 'constructivism' per se.

What is Constructivism?

The term 'constructivism' has been employed for some time in Western philosophy with connotations distinct from the epistemological constructivism discussed here. In addition, it has served as the label for one loose (or multiple similar -- take your pick) schools of thought and/or practice in the arts and architecture. What concerns us here is its current denotation of an epistemological stance, illustrated by the following representative passages:

"It is an unconventional approach to the problems of knowledge and knowing. It starts from the assumption that knowledge, no matter how it be defined, is in the heads of persons, and that the thinking subject has no alternative but to construct what he or she knows on the basis of his or her own experience. What we make of experience constitutes the only world we consciously live in. It can be sorted into many kinds, such as things, self, others, and so on. But all kinds of experience are essentially subjective, and though I may find reasons to believe that my experience may not be unlike yours, I have no way of knowing that it is the same."

(Glasersfeld, 1995, p. 1)

"It deals with a topic that was already known to the pre-Socratics, but which in our day is gaining increasing practical importance, namely, the growing awareness that any so-called reality is -- in the most immediate and concrete sense -- the construction of those who believe they have discovered and investigated it. In other words, what is supposedly found is an invention whose inventor is unaware of his act of invention, who considers it as something that exists independently of him; the invention then becomes the basis of his world view and actions."

(Watzlawick, 1984, p. 10 (Foreword))

"Radical constructivism is uninhibitedly instrumentalist. It replaces the notion of 'truth' (as true representation of an independent reality) with the notion of 'viability' within the subjects' experiential world. Consequently it refuses all metaphysical commitments and claims to be no more than one possible model of thinking about the only word we can come to know, the world we construct as living subjects."

(Glasersfeld, 1995, p. 22)

Why is Constructivism a Difficult Perspective to Espouse?

Adopting a constructivistic epistemology requires a commitment of effort and patience on the part of scholars and students. This derives from the fact that Western philosophy (and the natural and social sciences which reflect it in their foundations) has been predicated on the presumption of a single objective reality whose assumed unequivocality has served as the 'fulcrum' for most of its theoretical underpinnings and, hence, its practical accomplishments. As such:

"Constructivism in its pure, radical sense is incompatible with traditional thinking. As different as most philosophical, scientific, social, ideological, or individual world images may be from one another, they still have one thing in common: the basic assumption that a real reality exists and that certain theories, ideologies, or personal convictions reflect it (match it) more correctly than others."

(Watzlawick, 1984, p. 15 (Introduction))

"Radical constructivism, thus, is radical because it breaks with convention and develops a theory of knowledge in which knowledge does not reflect an 'objective' ontological reality, but exclusively an ordering and organization of a world constituted by our experience."

(Glasersfeld, 1984, p. 25)

Who Exemplifies Constructivism?

In this section will be listed some representative examples of constructivist scholars. The criteria for inclusion in this listing include citation of (or linkage to) second-order cybernetics / autopoietic theory, explicit commitment (as opposed to vague allusion) to 'constructivism' as delineated here, and provision of substantial work which may prove fruitful for students of autopoietic theory to explore.

Precursors

Ernst von Glasersfeld (cf. his entry below) has been the constructivist most explicit in describing his 'line of descent' from and parallels with other thinkers. The following are the ones to whom he gives particular credit:

• George Berkeley (whose 'solipsism' von Glasersfeld believes has been unfairly exaggerated)
• Giambattista Vico
• Immanuel Kant (for the noumena/phenomena distinction and the priority of the a priori categories)
• Silvio Ceccato
• Percy Bridgman (with respect to operational delineation of concepts)
• Jean Piaget (whom von Glasersfeld identifies as his most important influence)
• Edmund Husserl (with respect to elementary constructs)
• Hans Vaihinger

Lynn Segal, in his book focused on constructivism (1986) adds to this list (e.g.):

• Gregory Bateson
• Warren McCulloch
• Erwin Schrödinger

...and no list would be complete without mentioning the gestalt psychologists (e.g., Köhler), von Uexküll's biological research (now re-emerging as the basis for biosemiotics), and Merleau Ponty (the philosopher most explicitly linking epistemology and behavior to embodiment). Although arguably not a pure 'constructivist' himself, Richard Rorty has provided the single most cogent and detailed critique of objectivistic representationalism in his 1979 book Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.

von Foerster

Heinz von Foerster is a key figure in the development of second-order cybernetics (in which the observer is taken to be an intrinsic component of any adequate description of a system) and in the trend toward constructivism within cybernetics and intersecting fields. A long-time colleague and friend of Maturana (who did research at von Foerster's Biological Computation Laboratory, University of Illinois), it was von Foerster who encouraged Maturana to write his emerging ideas in the form of a paper (Maturana, 1970a). Working on the issue(s) of systemic cognitive processes, it is von Foerster who first elucidated many of the constructs and positions which we now associate with 'constructivism' in the context of systems theory and cybernetics. Many of von Foerster's writings are difficult to obtain. Luckily, his classic essay 'On Constructing a Reality' is reprinted in Watzlawick (1984), and Segal (1986) is wholly focused on the development of constructivism with regard to von Foerster and his colleagues. These two publications fortunately make von Foerster reasonably accessible to the interested reader.

von Glasersfeld

Ernst von Glasersfeld (e.g., 1984; 1995) is the best-known current exponent of a constructivist epistemology. His radical constructivism has continuously evolved during his long career in psychology and education (cf. Glasersfeld, 1995). His seminal explorations of epistemological issues were undertaken in the context of learning, and the results originally published focused on education -- particularly mathematics education. Von Glasersfeld has been the constructivist most explicit in describing his 'line of descent' from prior thinkers, and the one most outspoken in contextualizing constructivism with regard to other work in Western philosophy and science. His 1995 book Radical Constructivism is a good overview of his career and his radical constructivism. Cf. the entry for radical constructivism.

Watzlawick

Paul Watzlawick is a well-known scholar and writer in the areas of psychology and psychotherapy. His interests in interpersonal communication led him progressively toward constructivistic orientations on epistemology. His 1976 book How Real is Real? is an excellent critique of epistemological objectivism for the popular audience. His edited collection The Invented Reality (Watzlawick, 1984) is perhaps the best available compendium on constructivist thinking.

Kelly

The American psychologist George Kelly (1955) developed a pragmatic perspective on everyday knowledge he termed constructive alternativism. Based on this, he devised a structural theory of personal epistemology based on personal constructs -- bipolar dimensions along which entities (elements) may be ranked. Kelly also developed a methodology (within the context of psychotherapy) for eliciting and refining a subject's personal constructs interactively -- repertory grid technique (RGT) -- which has been successfully applied in venues as formal as knowledge engineering for artificial intelligence design. Although Kelly explicitly avoided getting entangled in philosophical issues to any great depth, the person-specificity of the constructs he analyzed is readily mapped onto the general stance of epistemological constructivism. As such, Kelly is often cited as an example of constructivist thinking -- albeit one more concerned with practical applications (in psychotherapy) than in philosophy per se.

Cf. : epistemology, radical constructivism, solipsism

"The entity characterized is a cognitive entity, but once is is characterized the characterization is also subject to cognitive distinctions valid in the metadomain in which they are made by treating the characterization as an independent entity subject to contextual descriptions."

(Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. xxiii)

Hence, the "meaning-giving" function attributed to the notion of "context" is itself a function of the observer's recursive cognitive process, not an extrinsic attribute of the environment in which the object is discerned.

This observer-induced characterization of "context" derives directly from the autopoietic analysis of the nervous system and its functions:

"...[I]n general, the organization and structure of a living system (its nervous system included) define in it a 'point of view', a bias or posture from the perspective of which it interacts determining at any instant the possible relations accessible to its nervous system. Moreover, since the domain of interactions of the organism is defined by its structure, and since this structure implies a prediction of a niche, the relations with which the nervous system interacts are defined by this prediction and arise in the domain of interactions of the organism."

(Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. 21)

In other words, the focusing of signification is directly contingent upon the embodiment of the observer.

Cf. : the discussion of the environment as the prime "context" for "beholding an autopoietic system" in its [distinct] ambience -- Maturana & Varela (1980, pp. 99). In this regard, the increasingly prevalent (in later years) tendency to employ medium in ways which blur the distinctions among these more strictly-defined constructs has some bearing on this view of context.

Figure AmbEnv illustrates the basic relations among ambience, environment, and medium (vis a vis variant delineations in the relevant literature). This figure is located within the entry for 'environment'.

Cf. : the discussion of the evaluation of relations of specificity and relations of order in a "context" (as delineated above), based on their status as referential notions pertaining to an observer (as opposed to relations of constitution). (Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. 89)

Cf. : the discussion of purpose being evaluable only within a context (as defined above) which is provided by an observer and is extant only in her cognitive domain. (Maturana & Varela, 1980, pp. 85-86)

Cf. : ambience, environment, medium

Cf. : allonomy, autonomy , control description

Cf. : allonomy, autonomous description, autonomy , control description

If there is a distinction to be made between a cooperative domain of interactions and a consensual domain, it would reasonably be based upon a distinction between general interactional behavior and specifically linguistic interactional behavior. Such a division is (weakly) alluded to in two passages in which Maturana states:

"Consensus arises only through cooperative interactions in which the resulting behavior of each organism becomes subservient to the maintenance of both."

and

"...[B]ecause the outcome of the interaction is determined in the cognitive domain of the orientee regardless of the significance of the message in the cognitive domain of the orienter, the denotative function of the message lies only in the cognitive domain of the observer and not in the operative effectiveness of the communicative interaction. The cooperative conduct that may develop between the interacting organisms from these communicative interactions is a secondary process independent of their operative effectiveness."

(Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. 32)

Cf. : consensual domain, domain of interactions

"When two or more autopoietic systems interact recurrently, and the dynamic structure of each follows a course of change contingent upon the history of each's interactions with the others, there is a co-ontogenic structural drift that gives rise to an ontogenically established domain of recurrent interactions between them which appears to an observer as a domain of consensual coordinations of actions or distinctions in an environment. ... I speak of coordinations of actions or coordinations of distinctions, according to whether I want to emphasize what takes place in the interaction in relation to the participants (coordinations of actions), or what takes place in the interactions in relation to an environment (coordinations of distinctions)."

(Maturana, 1988b, 8.ii.a)

As Maturana's reformulation of 'language' evolved, his original reliance on constructs such as 'cooperative domain of interactions' and 'structural coupling' faded in preference to the now-familiar 'coordinations of coordinations' (of action or beahvior). The seminal 1978 paper 'Biology of Language' in fact uses the term 'coordination' only once, and then generically:

"The conditions under which a conversation takes place (common interest, spatial confinement, friendship, love, or whatever keeps the organisms together), and which determine that the organisms should continue to interact until a consensual domain is established, constitute the domain in which selection for the ontogenic structural coupling takes place. Without them, a consensual domain could never be established, and communication, as the coordination of noncreative ontogenically acquired modes of behavior, would never take place."

(Maturana, 1978, p. 55, emphasis added)

As time went on, 'coordination' (of action / behavior) became a discrete construct at the center of Maturana's explanation of 'language'. By 'discrete' I mean that instead of referring to 'coordination' (a process, as is insinuated in the 1978 quote above) Maturana is speaking of 'coordinations' (unit manifestations of such a process, as in the 1988b passage quoted first in this entry). The following passages illustrate the progression during the decade following the seminal 1978 paper:

"The objects that two conversing observers describe, arise as such only in language as a manner of ontogenic coordination of conduct that results in some organisms from their ontogenic structural drifts in reciprocal structural coupling ... In other words, objects arise only in the particular coontogenic history of recurrent ontogenic coordination of conduct that language is (see Maturana, 1978, and Maturana and Varela, 1980)."

(Maturana, 1983, Section F.)

"Our world of cognition through perception is like that: we bring forth a world of distinctions through the changes of state that we undergo as we conserve our structural coupling in the different media in which we become immersed along our lives, and then, using our changes of state as recurrent distinctions in a social domain of coordination of actions (language), we bring forth a world of objects as coordinations of actions with which we describe our coordinations of action."

(Maturana, 1983, Section H.)

"An observer claims that language, or better, languaging, is taking place when he or she observers a particular kind of flow (that I shall describe below) in the interactions and co-ordinations of actions between human beings. As such, language is a biological phenomenon because it results from the operations of human beings as living systems, but it takes place in the domain of the co-ordinations of actions of the participants, and not in their physiology or neurophysiology."

(Maturana, 1988a, p. 45)

"When two or more autopoietic systems interact recurrently, and the dynamic structure of each follows a course of change contingent upon the history of each's interactions with the others, there is a co-ontogenic structural drift that gives rise to an ontogenically established domain of recurrent interactions between them which appears to an observer as a domain of consensual coordinations of actions or distinctions in an environment. This ontogenically established domain of recurrent interactions I call a domain of consensual coordinations of actions or distinctions ... Furthermore, because an observer can describe such a domain of recurrent interactions in semantic terms, by referring the different coordinations of actions (or distinctions) involved to the different consequences that they have in the domain in which they are distinguished, I also call a consensual domain of interactions a linguistic domain. ... I speak of coordinations of actions or coordinations of distinctions, according to whether I want to emphasize what takes place in the interaction in relation to the participants (coordinations of actions), or what takes place in the interactions in relation to an environment (coordinations of distinctions)."

(Maturana, 1988b, 8.ii.b.)

'Coordination of action' is not, in the final analysis, an atomic construct (even though it has been progressively employed as if it were). A 'coordination of action / behavior' in the linguistic domain is a relational phenomenon reliant upon other relational phenomena realized in the bodyhood of the languaging subject. To refer to linguistic phenomenon solely in terms of such 'coordinations' is to employ a shorthand nomenclature concentrating on the behavioral / interactional aspects of the subject system without delving into the details of its structure and mechanics. There is no innate problem with such shorthand unless it obscures the relational phenomena upon which the conduct labeled by an observer as a 'coordination' is predicated. That there is something underpinning 'coordination' is well-illustrated by the following remark:

"In fact, aphasias and apraxias are, according to what I have said, necessary consequences of localized lesions that interfere with the generation, in the nervous system, of the relations of activity that give rise to the particular sensory-effector correlations involved in the coordinations of actions that constitute the human operation in a linguistic domain."

(Maturana, 1983, 'Note Added in Proof' / afterword)

Cf. : behavior, consensual, consensual domain, language, languaging, linguistic behavior, recursion, structural coupling

Cf. : replication, reproduction, self-reproduction

The most important application of this term is structural coupling, wherein the coupling engagement reciprocally affects the structure of each engaged system. A closely related, but distinctly framed, construct is behavioral coupling.

Cf. : behavioral coupling, structural coupling

1. (...of scientific explanations)

Maturana's (1978; 1988a; 1988b) label for a set of four operational conditions which, if satisfied in the praxis of living of an observer, circumscribe the course of scientific method and the basis for acceptance (i.e., 'validation') of a scientific explanation. The criteria of validation thus delineate the standard by which explanations generated in (Maturana's formulation of) scientific method are judged viable.

Table CriofVal below provides a summarization of Maturana's primary expositions on the criteria of validation, as they appear in the three above-cited essays. It is interesting to note how, over the course of a decade, the description of each condition becomes (a) more qualified in general and (b) qualified with respect to other evolving constructs (e.g., praxis of living).

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TABLE CRIOFVAL: Criteria of Validation for Scientific Explanations (per Maturana: 1978; 1988a; 1988b)
Maturana (1978) p. 28	Maturana (1988a) pp. 34-35	Maturana (1988b) 4.i.A
(A) SETTING THE EXPLANATORY FOCUS
[O]bservation of a phenomenon that, henceforth, is taken as a problem to be explained ... [T]he observer specifies a procedure of observation that, in turn, specifies the phenomenon that he or she will attempt to explain.	The specification of the phenomenon to be explained as a feature of the praxis of living of the observer through the description of what he or she must do to experience it.	The specification of the phenomenon to be explained through the stipulation of the operations that a standard observer must perform in his or her praxis of living in order to also be a witness of it in his or her praxis of living.
(B) GENERATING AN EXPLANATORY HYPOTHESIS
[P]roposition of an explanatory hypothesis in the form of a deterministic system that can generate a phenomenon isomorphic with the one observed ... [T]he observer proposes a conceptual or concrete system as a model of the system that he or she assumes generates the observed phenomenon.	The proposition in the praxis of living of the observer of a mechanism that as a consequence of its operation would give rise in him or her to the experience of the phenomenon to be explained.	The proposition, in the domain of operational coherences of the praxis of living of a standard observer, of a mechanism, a generative mechanism, which when allowed to operate gives rise as a consequence of its operation to the phenomenon to be explained, to be witnessed by the observer also in his or her praxis of living. ... [T]he phenomenon to be explained and its generative mechanism take place in different nonintersecting phenomenal domains in the praxis of living of the observer.
(C) POSITING RAMIFICATIONS OF THE EXPLANATORY HYPOTHESIS
[P]roposition of a computed state or process in the system specified by the hypothesis as a predicted phenomenon to be observed ... [T]he observer uses the proposed model to compute a state or a process that he or she proposes as a predicted phenomenon to be observed in the modeled system.	The deduction from the mechanism proposed in (b) and of all the operational coherences that it entails in the praxis of living of the observer, of other phenomena as well as of the operations that the observer must do in his or her praxis of living to experience them.	The deduction, that is, the computation, in the domain of operational coherence of the praxis of living of the standard observer entailed by the generative mechanism proposed in (b), of other phenomena that the standard observer should be able to witness in his or her domain of experiences as a result of the operation of such operational coherences, and the stipulation of the operations that he or she should perform in order to do so.
(D) SUBSEQUENT OBSERVATION / ASSESSMENT OF THE EXPLANATORY HYPOTHESIS
[The observer] ... attempts to observe the predicted phenomenon as a case in the modeled system. If the observer succeeds in making this second observation, he or she then maintains that the model has been validated and that the system under study is in that respect isomorphic to it and operates accordingly.	The actual experience by the observer of those additional phenomena deduced in (c), as he or she perform in his or her praxis of living those operations that, according to what has also been deduced in (c), would be generated in it as he or she realises them.	The actual witnessing, in his or her domain of experiences, of the phenomena deduced in (c) by the standard observer who actually performs in his or her praxis of living the operations stipulated also in (c).
Source material in the above table is quoted directly from the cited essays.

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2. (...of philosophical explanations)

In contrast to the detailed treatment given scientific explanation over the years, Maturana is much broader in describing the criteria of validation for philosophical explanations:

"The criteria of validation of the explanations entailed in a philosophical theory can be many, provided they are internally logically consistent."

(Maturana, 1991)

Insofar as philosophical explanations are predicated on logical descent from a priori principles or tenets, their 'criteria of validation' are built into their starting point(s) and/or their method of derivation. The relative lack of creative and generative capacity Maturana ascribes to philosophical explanation (as a process) minimizes the necessity of describing a mechanism for obtaining or ensuring validation (beyond the reliance on a priori bases and presumptively coherent and complete rules / modes for derivation).

NOTE: Both the singular (criterion of...) and plural (criteria of...) forms occur in Maturana's writings. Perhaps because he most commonly refers to the set of criteria listed above, the plural form is the one most frequently encountered.

Cf. : The entry for theory, which provides a more detailed comparison of scientific versus philosophical explanations / theories.

Cf. : explanation, scientific explanation, scientific method

The criterion of acceptability is intimately linked to this manner of listening (a stance or disposition in the awaiting of an answer / explanation). The particular manner of listening in which a listener evaluates or receives a candidate explanation will entail a particular criterion of acceptability, and it will circumscribe (a)the set of viable (acceptable) explanations as well as (b) the set of observers of similar acceptance (and hence agreement).

NOTE: Both the singular (criterion of...) and plural (criteria of...) forms occur in Maturana's writings. Perhaps because he most commonly refers to a unary benchmark for acceptability, the singular form is the one most frequently encountered.

Cf. : explanation, manner of listening

"To be sure, there are many ways to perform this subdivision of our experience. But some criterion of distinction is always present. Given some criterion, we distinguish and recognize things such as animals, galaxies or families. Some system-wholes appear to be quite universally distinguished (e.g., persons); others (e.g., nations) seem more variable. Every culture will select quite specifically which are the predominant criteria of distinction ..."

(Varela & Goguen, 1978, p. 293, emphasis in the original)

As used here, a criterion of distinction connotes a projective sort of circumscription which derives from an act of reference. This derivative or projective connotation distinguishes a criterion of distinction from a criterion of acceptability (of an explanation) in the sense that the latter is (or, at least, not uniquely other than) "given" -- i.e., not contingent upon a given situation per se.

Cf. : distinction, unity

"A theory is an explanatory system that interconnects many otherwise apparently unrelated phenomena (experiences), which is proposed as a domain of coherent explanations that are woven together with some conceptual thread that defines the nature of its internal connectivity and the extent of its generative applicability in the domain of human actions. As such, a theory is valid for those who accept both the criterion of validation of the explanations that it entails, and the criterion of internal connectivity that makes it a fully coherent conceptual system."

(Maturana, 1991)

Just as a criterion of validation is the standard for what makes an explanation valid (for a given mode of explanation), the criterion of internal connectivity is the standard (or set of standards) for what makes a topically-coordinated set of explanations (i.e., a theory) valid with respect to the given mode of explanation.

Maturana employed this construct as a tool to differentiate between 'scientific' and 'philosophical' theories. More details on this dichotomy are given under the entry for theory.

Cf. : explanation, theory

"A culture is a network of conversations that define a way of living, a way of being oriented in existence in the human domain, and involves a manner of acting, a manner of emotioning, and a manner of growing in acting and emotioning. One grows in a culture by living in it as a particular way of being human in the network of conversations that defines it. Because of that, the members of a culture effortlessly live the network of conversations that constitute it, as a natural and spontaneous background, like the one which is given and in which one finds him/herself by the simple fact of being, independently of the social as well as non-social systems to which one can belong."

(Maturana, 1989)

One aspect of a culturally-defined 'way of living' is the manner in which the cultural network of conversations operates to delineate its particularly-accepted 'manner(s)' by which participants enact their membership in a given culture. Varela & Goguen (1978) allude to one means for accomplishing this in terms of setting acceptable or conventional criteria of distinction by which the essential distinctions underlying cognitive and conversational activity are made and/or recognized:

"To be sure, there are many ways to perform this subdivision of our experience. But some criterion of distinction is always present. Given some criterion, we distinguish and recognize things such as animals, galaxies or families. Some system-wholes appear to be quite universally distinguished (e.g., persons); others (e.g., nations) seem more variable. Every culture will select quite specifically which are the predominant criteria of distinction ..."

(Varela & Goguen, 1978, p. 293, emphasis in the original)

Owing to the fact that deformation (in contrast to perturbation) refers to the subject system rather than to an event impinging upon it, this term is heavily invoked in discussion of a system's (particularly an autopoietic system's) ontogeny -- its history of structural transformation. A good illustration of this is Varela's (1979, p. 32) framing of both the potential and actualized ontogeny of an autopoietic system with respect to deformations which the system may withstand without loss of identity.

Deformation of an autopoietic system without loss of identity requires that the system's organization be preserved. The range of compensable changes which the system may tolerate without disintegration is therefore determined by the system's organization. In other words, although deformation is evidenced by change (even if only transient) in the system's structure , the range or scope of allowable / tolerable deformation is circumscribed with regard to its organization.

Because the manner and course of deformation will serve as primary evidence in observing a system's behavior, it is important to point out that deformation is not restricted to changes impelled by factors exogenous to the subject system. Because of the closure exhibited by autopoietic systems (e.g., the closure of the human nervous system), they are capable of deformation as a result of their own behavior.

"There are two sources of deformations for an autopoietic system as the appear to be to an observer: one is constituted by the environment as a source of independent events in the sense that these are not determined by the organization of the system; the other is constituted by the system itself as a source of states that arise from compensations of deformations, but that themselves can constitute deformations that generate further compensatory changes."

(Varela, 1979, p. 32)

This appearance (to the observer) results in a distinction between the system's and the observer's perspective on ontogeny (as a succession of deformations and compensatory changes). "In the phenomenology of the autopoietic organization these two sources of perturbations are indistinguishable, and in each autopoietic system they braid together to form a single ontogeny." (Varela, 1979, p. 32) In contrast, to the observer this ontogeny "...partly reflects [the system's] history of interactions with an independent environment." (Ibid.)

Cf. : compensation, compensatory change, perturbation, ontogeny

"A language, whether in its restricted or in its generalized form, is currently considered to be a denotative system of symbolic communication, composed of words that denote entities regardless of the domain in which these entities may exist. Denotation, however, is not a primitive operation. It requires agreement or consensus for the specification of the denotant and the denoted. If denotation, therefore, is not a primitive operation, it cannot be a primitive linguistic operation, either. Language must arise as a result of something else that does not require denotation for its establishment, but that gives rise to language with all its implications as a trivial necessary result."

(Maturana, 1978, p. 50)

Maturana's exposition of linguistic behavior (Cf. Maturana & Varela, 1980, pp. 13-14; 26-29) specifically elaborates on the denotative / connotative distinction when it draws a contrast between the denotative character of behaviors through which a cognitive system (organism) encounters its niche and those more 'connotative' behaviors via which an observer may orient another in the course of linguistic behavior within a consensual domain. Denotation, rather than serving as the foundation for such interactivity, is instead a convenient way of describing it:

"Within a consensual domain the various components of a consensual interaction do not operate as denotants; at most, an observer could say that they connote the states of the participants as they trigger each other in interlocked sequences of changes of state. Denotation arises only in a metadomain as an a posteriori commentary made by the observer about the consequences of operation of the interacting systems."

(Maturana, 1978, p. 50)

Cf. : description, linguistic behavior, languaging, orientation

The distinction between 'Description' and 'description' is a key to the original theoretical development of linguistic behavior as a matter of reciprocal orientation among interactors. The reader is best advised to review Maturana & Varela (1980), pp. 13-14; 26-29. In later writings (most particularly those of Maturana) this second-order sense of 'description' becomes the unique sense employed. For example:

"...[A]ll participants in a language domain can be observers with respect to the sequences of coordinations of actions in which they participate, constituting a system of recursive distinctions in which systems of distinctions become objects of distinction. Such recursive distinctions of distinctions in the happening of living in language that bring forth systems of objects, constitute the phenomenon of description. As a result, all that there is in the human domain are descriptions in the happening of living in language which, as happenings of living in language, become objects of descriptions in language."

(Maturana, 1988b, 9.v.)

Cf. : distinction, linguistic behavior, languaging, object, orientation

1.

The termination of a composite unity occurring when its organization is disrupted beyond preservation of the character which defined that unity in its distinction. (Cf. Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. xxi) Phrased another way, disintegration occurs when the system's organization is modified or disrupted to the point that it cannot maintain the circularity of internal states prescribed in its initial distinction (Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. 10). Maturana (1978) defines disintegration as "... changes of structure with loss of identity...".

This last version highlights one of the problems in addressing disintegration -- i.e., whether or not the essential indexicability (i.e., identity ) is preserved. The notion of what is the "identity" for a given composite unity must naturally be qualified with the circumstances of its discernment by an observer. It is the organization of a composite unity which determines its class identity, but the primary literature is never really clear on whether this factor (organization) somehow uniquely "identifies" a composite unity. It would seem straightforward to propose that it is the composite unity's structure (i.e., the specific components realizing it) which is by definition unique, and therefore uniquely indexicable. However, nowhere in the primary literature is this proposition explicitly stated.

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2.

A term for a change of state resulting in loss of a composite unity's defining organization. In this sense, the term is used to connote that which leads to disintegration (1.), rather than the event itself. For example:

"We call the structural changes that occur in a system with conservation of organization, changes of state; and those that occur with loss of organization, disintegrations."

(Maturana, Mpodozis & Letelier, 1995)

It is this sense of the term which is invoked in Maturana's definition of instantaneous domain of the possible disintegrations.

"Behind the simplest idea of a system, stands the basic act of splitting the world in what we consider separable and significant entities."

(Varela & Goguen, 1978, p. 293)

A very central notion in Maturana and Varela's work is distinction. "The basic cognitive operation that we perform as observers is the operation of distinction." (Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. xix). As the fundamental act of cognitive operation, distinction affords an observer the ability to "...specify a unity as an entity distinct from a background, characterize both unity and background with the properties with which this operation endows them, and specify their separability." (Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. xix)

"A distinction splits the world into two parts, 'that' and 'this', or 'environment' and 'system', or 'us' and 'them', etc. One of the most fundamental of all human activities is the making of distinctions. Certainly, it is the most fundamental act of system theory, the very act of defining the system presently of interest, of distinguishing it from its environment."

(Varela, 1979, p. 84)

"The fundamental operation that an observer can perform is an operation of distinction, the specification of an entity by operationally cleaving it from a background. Furthermore, that which results from an operation of distinction and can thus be distinguished, is a thing with the properties that the operation of distinction specifies, and which exists in the space that these properties establish."

(Maturana, 1978, p. 55)

"An observer makes distinctions through operations that cleave a continuum and bring forth entities as distinguishable unities or wholes, specifying them and the background in which they exist. The observer exists by making distinctions of distinctions, and brings itself forth by making such distinctions in a recursive manner..."

(Maturana, 1983)

"The basic operation that an observer performs in the praxis of living is the operation of distinction. In the operation of distinction an observer brings forth a unity (an entity, a whole) as well as the medium in which it is distinguished, and entails in this latter all the operational coherences that make the distinction of the unity possible in his or her praxis of living."

(Maturana, 1988b, 6.ii.)

Because the operation of distinction is thus characterized as the mechanism of eduction for any object of reference, it follows that autopoietic theory prioritizes the observer's vantage over any pre-given ontic absolute as the foundation for description and explanation. "Unity distinction ... is not an abstract notion of purely conceptual validity for descriptive or analytical purposes, but is an operative notion referring to the process through which a unity becomes asserted or defined: the conditions that specify a unity determine its phenomenology." (Varela, 1979, p. 31; Cf. : Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. 96) This establishes a reciprocity of dependence between observer and observed -- a constraint which necessarily illuminates and mandates that reference to unities be qualified with respect to the context of discernment on the part of the observer and the context within which that unity is discerned as a coherent or unary focus.

The two senses in which the term "distinction" is employed both refer to this process of a unity 's assertion or definition. They differ in that one (1.) refers to the process by which a unity is defined by an observer, while the other (2.) invokes a unity's self-distinction through the topological effect(s) of its organizational closure.

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1.

The act or process by which an observer recognizes a unity . Paralleling Spencer Brown (1969), Maturana and Varela use the term "distinction" to denote -- "...the pointing to a unity by performing an operation which defines its boundaries and separates it from a background." (Maturana, 1975, p. 325) Varela (1979a, p. 84) explains: "A distinction splits the world into two parts, 'that' and 'this', or 'environment' and 'system', or 'us' and 'them', etc. ..Certainly, it is the most fundamental act of system theory, the very act of defining the system presently of interest, of distinguishing it from its environment." This parallels in spirit the statements of Bateson (Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity, New York: Bantam, 1988, p. 29): "...(P)erception operates only upon difference. All receipt of information is necessarily the receipt of news of difference..." Varela differentiates this sense of the term from 2. (below) by labeling it conceptual (1979, p. 30).

Distinction effects a complementary recognition of both unity and background. Through distinction, the observer

"...specifies a unity as an entity distinct from a background and a background as the domain in which an entity is distinguished. An operation of distinction, however, is also a prescription of a procedure which, if carried out, severs a unity from a background, regardless of the procedure of distinction and regardless of whether the procedure is carried out by an observer or by another entity."

(Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. xxii)

Distinction constrains the domain of discourse, because the act of distinguishing specifies (even if only implicitly) both something referred to and the context in which it is manifest. Because a unity is brought forth only through distinction, "...each time we refer to a unity in our descriptions, we are implying the operation of distinction that defines it and makes it possible." (Maturana & Varela, 1992, p. 40)

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2.

The act or process by which a unity effects or asserts its own separability from its ambience or background. This sense of "distinction" highlights the manner in which an autonomous / autopoietic system establishes, as the topological manifestation of its organizational closure, a literal or functional boundary delineating its extent with respect to its ambience. Varela differentiates this sense of the term from 1. above by labeling it physical (e.g., when realized in the physical space). (1979, pp. 30-31)

This second connotation of distinction pertains to the manner in which a unity may, through its own character or operation, accentuate its capacity for distinguishability from the ambience. This should not be taken to mean that an autonomous system necessarily "distinguishes itself" in the sense that it is somehow operating as an observer observing itself. Nor does it necessarily imply that self-assertion in the sense described above automatically controls the distinction of that same unity by an (external) observer. It would be safe, however, to note that such self-assertion would increase the probability of an (external) observer's distinctions corresponding to the unity's "self- distinctions" to the extent that (a) both sets of distinctions are manifest in a given phenomenal domain (including the intersection of two largely distinct phenomenal domains through the observer) and (b) this phenomenal domain was the same (or largely intersected with the one) in which the observer's distinction (of the self-asserting unity) was realized.

Cf. : criterion of distinction, unity

1. the relations among observed systems and the unities (medium) with which they can be observed to engage (e.g., phenomenological domain) or

2. the foregoing plus all potential states of relation and/or activity among the given unities (e.g., domain of interactions).

With respect to the phenomenology of living systems, the term is applied as a illustrative descriptor for the "world brought forth" -- a circumscription of experiential flux via reference to current states and possible trajectories. Maturana and Varela define a number of domains in developing autopoietic theory's formal aspects into a phenomenological framework.

Domains are most typically introduced to circumscribe exclusive realms or sets -- i.e., they serve as categorization constructs for sorting out unities and phenomena. The functional definition of domains by the unities and/or relations constitutive of them makes them definitional constructs which generate (by implication regarding entitative status, interrelationship, or prospective occurrence) their own discrete referential extent. This definitional reliance upon the constitutive elements provides a basis for differentiating domains in terms of differentials among unities and/or relations. As such:

"...[D]ifferent domains cannot explain each other because it is not possible to generate the phenomena of one domain with the elements of another; one remains in the same domain. One domain may generate the elements of another domain, but not its phenomenology, which in each domain is specified by the interactions of its elements, and the elements of a domain become defined only through the domain that they generate."

(Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. 55)

Owing to this "exclusivity", epistemological issues must be qualified with respect to both (a) the cognitive domain of the observer and (b) the domain(s) with which the observer is engaged at a given moment. "Any nexus between different domains is provided by the observer who can interact as if with a single entity ..." (Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. 55) In so interacting, the observer can generate any of a potentially unlimited set of relations. These relations "... as states of neuronal activity arising from concurrent interactions of the observer in different domains (physical and relational) constitute the elements of a new domain in which the observer interacts as a thinking system, but do not reduce one phenomenological domain into another." (Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. 55)

The term "domain" typically insinuates a realm of dynamics. Maturana and Varela conventionally reserve the term space for the static context in which unities are delineated. However, there are occasional instances in the literature where "domain" and "space" are apparently used as interchangeable terms denoting a general "realm" or "sphere" or "set". See the discussion under space (2.).

Cf. : space, domain of *, cognitive domain, explanation, phenomenological domain.

Cf. : disintegration, domain of perturbations, instantaneous domain of the possible destructive interactions, instantaneous domain of the possible perturbations, instantaneous domain of the possible disintegrations, instantaneous domain of the possible changes of state

Cf. : phenomenal domain, unity , simple unity , domain of physiological phenomena, behavior

Cf. : domain of destructive changes, domain of destructive interactions, domain of perturbations, domain of states, instantaneous domain of the possible destructive interactions, instantaneous domain of the possible perturbations, instantaneous domain of the possible disintegrations, instantaneous domain of the possible changes of state

Cf. : domain of changes of state, domain of allowable perturbations, instantaneous domain of the possible destructive interactions, instantaneous domain of the possible perturbations, instantaneous domain of the possible disintegrations, instantaneous domain of the possible changes of state

The label "constitutive" derives from the claim that an observer "constitutes" her 'reality' through her praxis of living. This "constitutive" character affords the potential for diverse explanations, no one of which can claim primacy by virtue of "objectivity." Maturana introduces these points by laying out three claims pertaining to observers operating under the rubric of constitutive ontologies:

• "...[E]verything that the observer distinguishes is constituted in its distinction, including the observer him- or herself, and it is as it is there constituted." (Maturana, 1988a, p. 33)

• "...[E]ach domain of explanations, as a domain of reality, is a domain in which entities arise through the operational coherences of the observer that constitutes it..." (Maturana, 1988a, p. 33)

• "...[I]n the domain of constitutive ontologies there are as many different legitimate domains of reality as domains of explanations an observer can bring forth through the operational coherences of his or her praxis of living, and everything an observer says pertains to one." (Maturana, 1988a, p. 33)

Cf. : domain of transcendental ontologies, explanation, explanatory path, objectivity-in-parenthesis

Cf. : domain of changes of state, domain of destructive interactions, domain of perturbations, instantaneous domain of the possible destructive interactions, instantaneous domain of the possible perturbations, instantaneous domain of the possible disintegrations, instantaneous domain of the possible changes of state

Cf. : perturbation, domain of changes of state, domain of destructive interactions, domain of perturbations, instantaneous domain of the possible destructive interactions, instantaneous domain of the possible perturbations, instantaneous domain of the possible disintegrations, instantaneous domain of the possible changes of state

"...[E]very distinction specifies a domain of existence as a domain of possible distinctions; that is, every distinction specifies a domain of existence as a versum in the multiversa, or, colloquially, every distinction specifies a domain of reality."

(Maturana, 1988b, 10.vi.)

Cf. : explanation, explanatory path, objectivity-in-parenthesis, objectivity-without-parenthesis, constitutive ontology, transcendental ontology, domain of reality, universum, multiversum

Cf. : explanation, praxis of living, manner of listening, criterion of acceptability

"The domain of interactions of an autopoietic unity is the domain of all the deformations that it may undergo without loss of autopoiesis. Such a domain is determined for each unity by the particular mode through which its autopoiesis is realized in the space of its components, that is, by its structure. It follows that the domain of interactions of an autopoietic unity is necessarily bounded, and that autopoietic unities with different structures have different domains of interactions."

(Maturana & Varela, 1980, pp. 118-119)

Cf. : cognitive domain; phenomenological domain, instantaneous domain of the possible destructive interactions, instantaneous domain of the possible perturbations, instantaneous domain of the possible disintegrations, instantaneous domain of the possible changes of state

Cf. : consensual domain, ontogeny, structural coupling

Cf. : biological phenomenology, domain of interactions, domain of changes of state

Cf. : domain of allowable perturbation, domain of changes of state, domain of destructive changes, domain of destructive interactions, instantaneous domain of the possible destructive interactions, instantaneous domain of the possible perturbations, instantaneous domain of the possible disintegrations, instantaneous domain of the possible changes of state

Cf. : phenomenal domain, unity , composite unity , domain of behavioral phenomena

"...[E]very distinction specifies a domain of existence as a domain of possible distinctions; that is, every distinction specifies a domain of existence as a versum in the multiversa, or, colloquially, every distinction specifies a domain of reality."

(Maturana, 1988b, 10.vi.)

Cf. : explanation, explanatory path, objectivity-in-parenthesis, objectivity-without-parenthesis, constitutive ontology, transcendental ontology, domain of existence

This term occurs infrequently, and then only in the earliest publications. As time went on, it faded from the literature, as did the domain of relations' invocation in describing the observer's eduction of unities.

Cf. : domain of interactions, interaction, entity, unity , unit of interactions

Cf. : domain of changes of state, instantaneous domain of the possible destructive interactions, instantaneous domain of the possible perturbations, instantaneous domain of the possible disintegrations, instantaneous domain of the possible changes of state

"...claims that his or her explanations are validated by their reference to entities that he or she assumes to exist independently of what he or she does. Matter, energy, God, Nature, mind, consciousness, and so on, can be such entities, and there can be as many different transcendental ontologies as different kinds of entities different (or the same) observers may assume to exist independently of what they do, to validate their explanations."

(Maturana, 1988a, p. 32)

For Maturana, objectivity entails exclusivity: "...different transcendental ontologies are exclusive, and each constitutes all that there is, specifying as it is brought forth by the observer the only objective domain of reality that he or she accepts as a foundation for his or her explaining." (Maturana, 1988a, p. 32) This exclusivity is a result related to that exclusivity by which objectivity-without-parenthesis affords a presumptive basis for demanding obedience by virtue of "objectivity." Statements, propositions, and / or explanations framed so as to fall outside the referential scope of a transcendental ontology (as well as those which conflict with or fail support from it) are rejected or denigrated as "false."

Cf. : explanation, explanatory path, objectivity-without-parenthesis, universum, parenthesis

Cf. : domain of changes of state, domain of perturbations, instantaneous domain of the possible destructive interactions, instantaneous domain of the possible perturbations, instantaneous domain of the possible disintegrations, instantaneous domain of the possible changes of state

"In daily life, such a course of structural change in a system contingent on the sequence of its interactions in the medium in which it conserves organisation and adaptation is called 'drift'."

(Maturana, 1988a, p. 46)

A variety of types of such drift are invoked -- particularly in The Tree of Knowledge -- all of which play on this theme of local determination effecting change. The variation among these related terms is a variation of denotation for the factor or characteristic whose change is being explained by this construct.

Cf. : natural drift, ontogenic drift, phylogenetic drift, structural drift

"Eigenbehaviors can be characterized as the fixed points of certain transformations. Consider an operation a, from a domain A to itself, a: A --> A. A fixed point for a is a value v ...[occurring in the range of A] ...such that a(v) = v."

(Varela, 1979, p. 171)

Much of Varela's attention during the mid-to-late 1970's was directed toward exploring mathematical means for addressing systemic autonomy, closure, and resultant forms of operation. One of the problems in modeling systems exhibiting closure and autonomy is that they are so characterized on the basis of the 'coordination' of their constituent elements and processes in manifesting the whole, as well as a 'simultaneity' (as opposed to a linear sequentiality) of the constituent processes in operation. Varela's (1979) approach to this modeling problem proceeded from the following basis:

"The self-referential and recursive nature of a network of processes, characteristic of the autonomy of natural systems, is captured by the invariant behavior proper to the way the component processes are interconnected. ... The (fixed-point) invariance of a network can be related explicitly to the underlying recursive dynamics; the component processes are seen as unfoldment of the unit's behavior."

(Varela, 1979, p. 170)

To address such invariant behaviors of a subject system, Varela proposed the label eigenbehavior:

"The name seems justified on several counts. First, the prefix 'eigen' carries from the German the connotation of 'proper' and 'self', and eigenbehavior is properly or self-determined behavior, i.e., autonomy. Second, the compound is a generalization consistent with the standard use of 'eigenvalue' and 'eigenvector' in linear algebra to denote certain fixed points of linear maps. Thirdly, in at least two fields the term eigenbehavior has been proposed to denote, in particular instances, exactly what from our point of view is a solution to some system's closure. [Jerne in immunology; von Foerster in cybernetics -- Ed.]"

(Varela, 1979, pp. 170-171)

It is important to note that this definition links the notion of 'emotion' to a specific referential ground with respect to the emotive organism's biological constitution, and not to an abstracted or transcendental state or orientation.

"In daily life we distinguish different emotions when looking at the actions and corporal posture or behavior of another being, whether it is our self, another person or a non-human animal. Furthermore, we also know that in daily life every emotion implies that only certain actions are possible to the person or animal that exhibits them. For these reasons, I maintain that what we distinguish as emotions, or what we connote with the word emotion, are corporal dispositions that specify at every moment the domain of actions of an animal (human or non human)..."

(Maturana, 1989)

"What we distinguish in daily life as we distinguish emotions are kinds of relational behaviors, not particular doings. And what we connote biologically as we speak of emotions referring to ourselves or to other animals, are body dynamic dispositions (involving the nervous system and the whole body) that determine what we or they can do or not do, in what relations we or they can enter or not enter, at any moment. As a result, different emotions can be fully characterized as different domains of relational behaviors or as dynamic body dispositions for relational behaviors."

(Maturana & Verden-Zöller, 1996)

The simple fact that Maturana alludes to emotions at all perhaps explains why his cognitive theories have engendered widespread interest (and even enthusiasm) in psychotherapeutic circles.

Cf. : emotioning, mood

"...[E]motioning, as a flow of one emotion to another, is a flow of one domain of actions to another."

(Maturana, 1989)

Emotioning, then, connotes the ongoing or dynamic flow of experience with respect to emotions. The trajectory of emotion(s) which manifests this flow is the conceptual basis for addressing consensual interactivity. The instance of this most deeply explored by Maturana is that flow of human social activity (languaging) associated with language. For example:

"When we move within language in interactions with others, our emotions change according to an emotioning which is the function of the history of interactions that we have lived and in which our emotioning emerged as an aspect of our coexistence with others outside and inside languaging. At the same time, with the flow of our emotioning in a path that has resulted from our history of common life inside and outside language, we change our domain of actions and, therefore, the path of our languaging and of our reasoning changes."

(Maturana, 1989)

Cf. : emotion, language, languaging

"A history of structural coupling that brings forth a world" (Varela et al., 1991, p. 206). This is the term for the reciprocal process by which (1) an observer educes unities from her medium within the limits of her phenomenology (i.e., as constrained by her embodiment) and (2) the ontogenic coupling results in incremental regularization in the structure of the observer (her embodiment).

"The fundament of an enactive account is not an objective ontological substrate, but the phenomenology of the individual. Varela et al. (1991) define enaction in terms of two intertwined and reciprocal factors: (1) the influence of an actor's embodiment in determining the trajectory of behaviors; and (2) the historical transformations which generate emergent regularities in the actor's embodiment. These two aspects can be mapped onto two different usages of the English verb 'enact'. First is 'to enact' in the sense of 'to portray, to bring forth something already given and determinant of the present', as in a stage actor enacting a role. The second is 'to enact' in the sense of 'to specify, to legislate, to bring forth something new and determining of the future', as in a government enacting a new law. Objectivism makes its focus the first sense of enactment -- there is a pre-given world structuring and regulating the actor. Radical subjectivism takes as its focus the opposite sense of the term -- the existential enactor determines the world. When the actor (enactor) is herself reciprocally enacted, these processes intersect at a nexus which, if reified, might provide an obvious focus for enquiry. However, as Varela et al. (1991) point out, this nexus is ephemeral and groundless -- always simultaneously enacting and being enacted."

(Whitaker, 1992, p. 109)

"As a result, Varela et al. (1991, p. 116) describe their enquiry as concerning "...the processual transformation of the past into the future through the intermediary of transitional forms that in themselves have no permanent substance." (Ibid., footnote 237)

The groundlessness and reciprocity of enaction make it a difficult position to describe, much less defend, in the context of conventional Western views on (e.g.) epistemology. For centuries, the fundamental orientation to cognition has been how the organism can apprehend, decipher, and interact with an objective world whose ontological status is the presumptive firmament for all such enquiry. The recent work in constructivism (the epistemological position most commonly attributed to Maturana and Varela's work) emphasizes the innate capacities of the observer in apprehending a 'reality' neither denied nor claimed capable of direct knowledge. Such an approach (while certainly more attuned to Maturana and Varela's theories) may nonetheless be construable as lying one step off the 'middle way' which enaction purports to describe. One early clue to such a potential point of difference can be found in Varela (1984b), in which he can be interpreted as implying a distinction between constructivism (a la von Glasersfeld) and the 'middle way' he was already promoting. (Cf. the entry for epistemology -- especially Table Epist1)

Cf. : constructivism, enactive approach, enactive cognitive science, epistemology

Enactive cognitive science is presented as a third alternative to the currently-prevalent schools of thought labeled cognitivism and emergence. The former is that perspective emphasizing symbolization, representationalism, and the computer as a metaphor for a cognitive system. The latter is that perspective emphasizing behavioral / configurational emergence in parallel distributed networks, and this formal model inspired by the neural system as a metaphor for a cognitive system.

Because the definition of enactive cognitive science is accomplished primarily through comparisons and contrasts with the other two paradigms, it is best explained in the same manner. The two tables presented below cover the general and the specific comparative analyses presented in The Embodied Mind. The first (Table ECS1) offers a summary overview of the three cognitive science traditions. The second (Table ECS2) provides a summary of how these three traditions address the key questions which the authors delineated as the criteria for cognitive science as a coherent explanation.

TABLE ECS1: Overview of the Three Traditions in Cognitive Science
COGNITIVISM	EMERGENCE	ENACTIVE
METAPHOR FOR THE MIND
Digital Computer	Parallel Distributed Network	No Fixed Metaphor -- 'Mind' is not Separable from Experience and the World
METAPHOR FOR COGNITION
Symbol Processing	Emergence of Global States	Ongoing Interaction within the Medium
THE WORLD IN RELATION TO THE COGNITIVE SYSTEM
Separate Objective	Separate Objective	Engaged "Brought Forth"
Representable in terms of symbols	Representable in terms of patterns of activation in the network	Presentable through action
RELATION OF 'MIND' TO BODY / WORLD
Separable	Separable	Inseparable
Cartesian Dualism Mind and body are categorically distinct and hermetically sealed from each other	Epiphenomenal Dualism Mind related to body and/or world as the emergent to the ground/basis of emergence	Phenomenology Mind and world are reciprocally enacted during a history of interactivity or engagement
EXPONENTS
Simon, Newell, Chomsky, Fodor, Pylyshyn	Rumelhart, McClelland, Dennett, Hofstadter	Maturana, Lakoff, Rorty, Piaget, Dreyfus
The information is derived from diverse points discussed throughout Varela, Thompson & Rosch (1991). Assignment of purported exponents is based on the categorization of Varela, Thompson & Rosch (1991), p. 7, Figure 1.1

TABLE ECS2: Traditions of Cognitive Science Compared with Respect to 3 Key Questions
COGNITIVISM	EMERGENCE	ENACTIVE
WHAT IS COGNITION?
"Information processing as symbolic computation -- rule-based manipulation of symbols."	"The emergence of global states in a network of simple components"	"Enaction: a history of structural coupling that brings forth a world."
HOW DOES COGNITION WORK?
(Via) "...any device that can support and manipulate discrete functional elements -- the symbols."	"Through rules for individual operation and rules for changes in the connectivity among the elements."	"Through a network consisting of multiple levels of interconnected, sensorimotor subnetworks."
HOW DO I KNOW WHEN A COGNITIVE SYSTEM IS FUNCTIONING ADEQUATELY?
"When the symbols appropriately represent some aspect of the real world, and the information processing leads to ... successful solution of the problem given..."	"When the emergent properties (and resulting structure) can be seen to correspond to a specific cognitive capacity -- a successful solution to a required task."	"When it becomes part of an ongoing existing world (as the young of every species do) or shapes a new one (as happens in evolutionary history)."
All quoted material comes form Varela, Thompson & Rosch (1991). The quoted points on cognitivism come from p. 42, on emergence from p. 99, and on enaction from p. 206.

1.

The document you are currently reading.

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2.

An ostentatious title employed with humorous intent to denote a compendium of lexically-arranged information compiled by Dr. Randall Whitaker on the theoretical work of Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela (autopoietic theory) and its derivatives.

1.

A prestigious reference publication whose claim to comprehensivity is compromised by persistent refusal to make any mention of autopoiesis. (As reported in The Observer).

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A paradigmatic exemplar of an ostentatious label, and the inspiration for the title of this document.

"The observer beholds simultaneously the entity that he considers ... and the universe in which it lies ..."

(Maturana, 1970a, p. 4)

"It is an attribute of the observer to be able to interact independently with the observed entity and with its relations; for him both are units of interaction (entities)."

(Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. 8 [originally from Maturana, 1970b])

This last citation illustrates an interesting point. In the earliest published literature, Maturana emphasized the linkage between an 'entity' and the interactions via which the observer engaged and/or educed it. This is the basis for equating entities with units of interactions:

"For the observer an entity is an entity (a unit of interactions) when he can describe it. To describe is to enumerate the actual or potential interactions and relations of the described entity. ... An entity is an entity if it has a domain of interactions ... The observer can define an entity by specifying its domain of interactions; thus, part of an entity, a group of entities, or their relations can be made units of interactions (entities) by the observer."

(Maturana, 1970a, p. 4)

These allusions to an entity's domain of interactions, etc., would seem to be secondarily derivative (and hence distinguishable, if not distinct) from the more essential eduction or apprehension by which the observer discerns such an indexicable referent as (e.g.) a unity. With regard to the more recent literature, any distinction between 'entity' and 'unity' remains unspecified, and may be considered inoperative. Maturana (in particular) has consistently used this term in his post-1985 writings, returning to his original habit of invoking the term as an apparent surrogate for " unity ". For example:

"In the operation of distinction an observer brings forth a unity (an entity, a whole) as well as the medium in which it is distinguished..."

(Maturana, 1988b, 6.ii.)

"A unity (entity, object) is brought forth by an act of distinction."

...and "distinction" is fundamental to:

"[T]he act of indicating any being, object, thing, or unity..."

(Maturana & Varela, 1992, p. 40, italics in the original)

This apparent synonymity is reinforced by the fact that there is little or no evidence to be found in these later writings that distinguish "entity" from 'unity', either in denotation or connotation. As a result, one is left to wonder if "entity" (especially as used by Maturana post-1985) connotes the observer-dependent status (of distinction / discernment) which explicitly qualifies the earlier term 'unity' and helps to distinguish it from the more colloquially-denotative usages of "entity."

For example, consider the following passage (from Maturana, 1988a, p. 32), wherein he states that an observer operating within the domain of transcendental ontologies (and hence subscribing to the explanatory path of objectivity-without-parenthesis):

"...claims that his or her explanations are validated by their reference to entities that he or she assumes to exist independently of what he or she does. Matter, energy, God, Nature, mind, consciousness, and so on, can be such entities, and there can be as many different transcendental ontologies as different kinds of entities different (or the same) observers may assume to exist independently of what they do, to validate their explanations."

In this particular passage, it is unclear whether "entity" is (a) used simply as a generic label for "any referent" or (b) specifically denotative of referents assumed to exist independently of the observer.

Based on the evidence of Maturana's earliest and latest writings on the subject, it would appear that 'entity' most commonly connotes a unity . If there is a distinction to be drawn between these two terms (as used by Maturana over his career), it would be that only in the earliest literature (e.g., Maturana: 1970a; 1970b) is 'entity' clearly equated with something observer-educed and therefore observer-contingent. Owing to (a) less detailed background specifications (for basic terms and concepts) in the most recent publications as well as (b) occasionally ambiguous allusions (Cf. above-cited passages) it is easy for a newcomer to overlook the observer-specified characteristics consistent with the most longstanding connotations of the term. This entails the risk that the newcomer would equate the term (especially as used by Maturana) with the colloquial usage connotative of objective existence (i.e., independence from the observer). However, the reader is referred to Maturana's (e.g., 1983) treatment of 'objects' to see that observer-contingency is still very much an explicit aspect of definition for even these most generic of referents.

There is one final point to be made in comparing 'entity' and 'unity'. Although 'unities' are subcategorized into simple unities and composite unities, the literature evidences no such distinction made among 'entities'. The most defensible position is that most typically 'entity' is an analogue for simple unity .

Cf. : unity , simple unity , composite unity , object

1.

A specific term applied to denote the observer's delineation of the referential background within which an organism is observed to operate. "The observer beholds simultaneously the entity that he considers (an organism, in our case) and the universe in which it lies (the organism's environment)." (Maturana, 1970a, p. 4) This is not the same as the ambience in which the organism is actually manifest, and it is definitely distinct from the niche specified by the observed organism's organization . In the later literature (particularly Maturana's post-1985 writings) the related term medium is sometimes used as an apparent analogue to environment (though in other cases such parallel connotations are not so readily apparent -- Cf. : entry for medium).

An observer "brings forth" an ascribed environment in the course of educing a unity or entity. As such, the environment is not an a priori referential or ontological background extrinsic to the act of observation. Instead, it is generated as an indexicable referent in the course of observation. This is evident in the following passages:

"The observer beholds simultaneously the entity that he considers (an organism, in our case) and the universe in which it lies (the organism's environment)."

(Maturana, 1970a, p. 4)

"The environment is defined by the classes of interactions into which the observer can enter and which he treats as a context for his interactions with the observed organism. The observer beholds organism and environment simultaneously and he considers as the niche of the organism that part of the environment which he observes to lie in its domain of interactions."

(Maturana & Varela, 1980, pp. 10-11)

"Every structure determined system exists in a medium. ... The part of the medium in which a system is distinguished, that is, the part of the medium that is operationally complementary to it, I call its niche. The niche is always specified and obscured by the system which is the only one that can reveal it. Furthermore, I call environment the part of the medium that an observer sees surrounding a system while this obscures its niche."

(Maturana, 1983, Section D.)

Figure AmbEnv:
Variant Delineations / Connotations for Ambience, Environment, and Medium

Figure AmbEnv illustrates the ambience / environment distinction as it is outlined in Autopoiesis and Cognition (Maturana & Varela, 1980). An observer distinguishes a unity (in this case, a simple unity ) from the ambience. The operation(s) of distinction by which the observer does this cleaves the unity from the contiguous background (ambience), thus leaving the "remainder" (as engaged by the observer) to referentially serve as an backdrop "environing" the unity. This environment, as a referential / indexical background, serves as the context in which the observer observes the unity.

As a description in the observer's cognitive domain, the environment is distinct from the ambience engaged by the organism and the niche delineated by such engagement.

"Niche and environment, then, intersect only to the extent that the observer (including instruments) and the organism have comparable organizations, but even then there are always parts of the environment that lie beyond any possibility of intersection with the domain of interactions of the organism, and there are parts of the niche that lie beyond any possibility of intersection with the domain of interactions of the observer."

(Maturana & Varela, 1980, pp. 10-11)

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Cf. : ambience, medium, niche, context

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2.

The term 'environment' is sometimes used rhetorically in its colloquial sense of a setting within which a system operates -- i.e., that which environs the system.

To be fair, it can be said that (in the primary literature up through 1980), neither Maturana nor Varela expended any great effort to link or contextualize their theories with established and/or more familiar philosophical positions. As a result, it is no surprise that deconstructing and critiquing autopoietic theory from the standpoint of philosophy has become a major sport.

Although Maturana and Varela's relative silence is essentially complete with respect to conventional ontological issues, there are isolated places in the primary literature where explicit references to other epistemological positions are cited. The most explicit of these is Varela (1984b), in which he provides (p. 217, footnote 14) a sketch of four epistemological positions spanning the range from objectivism (requiring only direct perception) to outright solipsism. In the context of this article, Varela is attempting to delineate a "middle way" which he proposes can be pursued (presumably, the 'middle way' presented as the focus of enactive cognitive science in the 1991 book The Embodied Mind).

This delineation is pursued by reference to four stances or perspectives ranging from that one implicit in the representationist programme all the way to the other extreme of outright solipsism. Varela's relative ordering of selected positions (converted into tabular form) is presented in Table Epist1.

TABLE EPIST1: A Mapping of Epistemological Positions
POSITION	CITED PROPONENT(S)	DESCRIPTION
Direct Perception	J. J. Gibson; H. Barlow	'Information' is inherent in the environment, and the neural system operates as a device for picking up / receiving this 'information'
Computational / Representational	Cognitive psychology, AI (e.g., J. Fodor, D. Marr)	Computational description of cognition in terms of symbolic representations and logical manipulations over these representations
"THE MIDDLE LINE" (between representationalism and solipsism)
Constructivism	E. von Glasersfeld	Primacy of interpreter's "internal guidance" over environmental factors
Solipsism	Berkeley	Everything is in the interpreter's head
[ This table, based on Whitaker (1992), is derived from Varela (1984b), p. 217, footnote 14 ]

One particular issue should be noted with respect to the table above. In the cited article, Varela was arguing for "a dialectical middle way ... between the Scylla of representationism and the Charybdis of solipsism, by planting ourselves firmly in the middle." (Varela, 1984b, p. 217) The most commonly cited epistemological analogue to autopoietic theory is von Glasersfeld's radical constructivism. Although von Glasersfeld has made some points about the correspondences between his work and that of Maturana and Varela, this favor has yet to be returned in kind. In fact, the brief allusion to von Glasersfeld in the article cited here is the most substantive such allusion written by either Maturana or Varela. In citing von Glasersfeld in the above-illustrated taxonomy, Varela writes of this position 'constructivism': "In this position one is already at the other side of the middle line..." (Varela, 1984b, p. 217, footnote 14) One might ask if von Glasersfeld's lying 'at the other side of the middle line' connotes that he (and, by implication, his radical constructivism) is: (a) positioned at some distance (no matter how small) from the 'middle way' Varela is promoting, and (b) if so, on what basis Varela distinguishes his preferred position from von Glasersfeld's. One clue (which surfaced years later) might be that by the time Varela's 'middle way' had evolved into the notion of enaction it entailed a groundlessness of primary reference (e.g., 'world', 'observer') with which constructivism (to the extent it is 'grounded' in the individual and her capabilities) could be seen to conflict.

Within the scant written corpus addressing both von Glasersfeld and Maturana / Varela, this is the only point at which an apparent disjunction is insinuated. In other writings (from both camps), and in writings of third parties referring to both, there are no substantial indications of a disjunction perceived by anyone concerned.

Cf. : constructivism, radical constructivism, representation, representationist programme, solipsism

Cf. : organization , theory 2. (of a system)

"Every human act takes place in language. Every act in language brings forth a world created with others in the act of coexistence which gives rise to what is human. Thus every human act has an ethical meaning because it is an act of constitution of the human world. This linkage of human to human is, in the final analysis, the groundwork of all ethics as a reflection on the legitimacy of the presence of others."

(Maturana & Varela, 1992, p. 247)

Because autopoietic theory is grounded in the biological nature of living systems, it addresses ethics only to the extent that criteria for ethical behavior derive from (or at least are suggested by) that biological perspective. It is Maturana who has most frequently and explicitly addressed ethical issues as they pertain to the biology of cognition. The most highly-elaborated 'ethical' analysis Maturana has developed to date concerns the tacit authority / power claims implicit in accepting and operating within the explanatory path of objectivity-without-parenthesis. The reader is referred to the Encyclopaedia entry for that explanatory path, in which the summarization of this issue will serve as an example of deriving ethical standpoints from the biology of cognition.

Ethical matters are also addressed in enactive cognitive science (cf. Varela, Thompson & Rosch, 1991, pp. 239; 245-254), but to date these have been approached with respect to general conditions relating to the epistemological dichotomy between nihilism and objectivism.

Cf. : objectivity-without-parenthesis

Cf. : adaptation, ontogenic adaptation

"An explanation can be characterized as a form of discourse that intends to make intelligible a phenomenal domain that has been recorded. ... [W]hen some domain is deemed explained, and thus rendered intelligible, it is so in reference to a social group of observers."

(Varela, 1979, p. 66)

"A reformulation of a phenomenon in such a way that its elements appear operationally connected in its generation."

(Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. 136)

More specifically (with respect to scientific method):

"...[A]n explanation is always an intended reproduction or reformulation of a system or phenomenon, addressed by one observer to another, who must accept it or reject it by admitting or denying that it is a model of the system or phenomenon to be explained."

(Maturana, 1978)

An explanation is always a "reformulation" in the sense that its generation by an observer occurs in the domain(s) in which that observer engages the phenomenon being explained, which is not the same as the domain in which the phenomenon is manifested (Cf. the exclusivity among domains). As a result, "it is the simultaneous logical isomorphism of the new element (relations) [among observer-conjoined domains of interaction] with their source systems through their mode of origin (class intersection) that gives the new domain thus generated (descriptions) its explanatory capacity." (Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. 55)

In other words, explanations are categorically distinct from their subject phenomena. This is a key point which is often blurred even among adherents of autopoietic theory, and which is typically ignored in conventional positivistic sciences.

"An explanation is always a reproduction, either a concrete one through the synthesis of an equivalent physical system [e.g., a model or simulation], or a conceptual one through a description from which emerges a system logically isomorphic to the original one, but never a reduction of one phenomenological domain into another. An adequate understanding of this irreducibility is essential for the comprehension of the biological phenomena, the consensual domains that living systems generate, and their conjoined evolution."

(Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. 55)

This non-isomorphism between the explained and the explanation is typically transparent in the course of our praxis of living. Immersed in this praxial flow, we tend to overlook "...that our experience is that we find ourselves observing, talking or acting, and that any explanation or description of what we do is secondary to our experience of finding ourselves in the doing of what we do." (Maturana, 1988a, p. 26) This oversight occurs "...because we normally collapse the experience upon the explanation of the experience in the explanation of the experience." (Maturana, 1988a, p. 27)

The most basic explanation of explanatory method given by Maturana necessitates two fundamental operations on the part of the explaining observer: "...(a) the specification (and distinction thereof) of the system (composite unity) or phenomenon to be explained; and (b) the identification and distinction of the components and the relations between components that permit the conceptual or concrete reproduction of the system or phenomenon to be explained." (Maturana, 1978)

As time has gone on, Maturana has increasingly invoked the notion of explanation in introducing and contextualizing his presentations on the biology of cognition. This invocation typically characterizes explanation in terms of posing "...questions that demand an explanation for their answer." (Maturana, 1988a, p. 27) This establishes a situation in which "...we become pacified only when we find an explanatory answer to our question." (Ibid.)

A necessary aspect of this situation is that the questioner (original questioner, or another who takes up the question) must have some criteria for acceptance of an answer for it to suffice as such an explanatory (and hence terminal) answer. The questioner (or other awaiting an explanatory answer) "...accepts or rejects a statement as a reformulation of a particular situation of his or her praxis of living, ...[and]...determines whether that statement is or is not an explanation." (Maturana, 1988a, p. 28) This evaluation is accomplished based on "...whether or not ...[the answer]... satisfies an implicit or explicit criterion of acceptability that he or she applies through or her manner of listening." (Ibid.) Finally, the establishment or adoption of such criteria of acceptability (be they implicit or explicit) entails qualifications with respect to the observer(s) awaiting an answer: "[E]ach manner of listening of the observer that constitutes a criterion for accepting explanatory reformulations of the praxis of living defines a domain of explanations, and the observers who claim to accept the same explanations for their respective praxes of living." (Ibid.) In the context of the biology of cognition, the most pertinent such "manner of listening" discussed would be the explanatory paths differentiating analyses of cognition.

The summary above outlines the general notion of 'explanation' in autopoietic theory, and its continual importance to Maturana's ongoing writings on cognition, languaging, and social behavior. There is, however, much more to this theoretical framework's development of ideas on 'explanation'. In the following sections, some of the more specific categories of explanation are introduced and described.

Analytic versus Synthetic Explanatory Paradigms (Varela, 1979)

In Principles of Biological Autonomy, Varela alludes to the classical philosophical distinction between analytic and synthetic paradigms. Based on his comments on these (and other) issues, Table AnavsSyn has been assembled to illustrate the relationship of these perspectives to constructs discussed here in the Encyclopaedia. Of particular importance are the parallels that can be drawn between the analytic / synthetic, recursive / behavioral (view), and composite / simple (unity) dichotomies. Linking the connotations of these differentially-framed distinctions provides a basis for sorting out their interrelationships as they pertain to observation of a system (e.g., for scientific purposes).

TABLE ANAVSSYN: Analytic versus Synthetic Explanatory Paradigms (based on Varela, 1979)
ANALYTIC	SYNTHETIC
SCOPE OF EXPLANATIONS
Framed with respect to reduction of phenomena to atomic elements	Framed with respect to the totality of the phenomenon being explained
EXAMPLES
Scientific reductionism Functional/structural decomposition	Holism Integrated systems analysis
CHARACTERIZATION OF SUBJECT SYSTEM
Subject as composite unity	Subject as simple unity
TYPICAL COGNITIVE POINT OF VIEW
Recursive view	Behavioral view

Operational versus Symbolic Explanations (Varela, 1979)

In his 1979 book Principles of Biological Autonomy, Varela spends much time outlining a categorizational scheme for explanations (particularly as they pertain to science generally, and studies of living systems specifically). In fact, the differentiation of explanatory classes and the characterization of autopoietic theory with respect to these classes arguably form an essential theme of this key book.

Varela differentiates between two broad categories -- operational explanations and symbolic explanations. The general contrasts between these two classes are outlined in Table OpvsSym below.

TABLE OPVSSYM: Varela's (1979) Comparative Analysis of Operational vs. Symbolic Subclasses of Explanation
Explanation (In General)
"A form of discourse that intends to make intelligible a phenomenal domain that has been recorded." (Varela, 1979, p. 66) Entails reformulation or reproduction of this recorded phenomenon in conceptual terms Entails that the conceptual terms employed are deemed appropriate
Operational Explanation	Symbolic Explanation
Terms of reformulation and categories employed belong to the same domain as the system(s) generating the phenomenon	Terms of reformulation and categories employed belong to a context encompassing the system(s) generating the phenomenon
Proposes conceptual or concrete system(s) / components reproducing the phenomenon in the same referential context (on the same terms) as the phenomenon being explained	Alludes to conceptual system(s) / components describing the phenomenon in a subsuming referential context
Observer provides explanatory links / nexuses consistent with the subject phenomenon's domain of manifestation	Observer provides explanatory links / nexuses extrinsic to the subject phenomenon's domain of manifestation
Demonstration / Simulation (Even if only conceptually / notionally manifested)	Representation / Mapping (Not necessarily grounded in domain of manifestation)
Necessarily reflects nomic linkages	Need not reflect nomic linkages

Varela employs the dichotomy between operational and symbolic explanations in a balanced fashion -- going so far as to discuss the two as complementary rather than antagonistic positions.

Scientific versus Philosophical Explanations (Maturana, 1991)

Over the course of the years, Maturana (e.g., 1978; 1988a; 1988b) has elaborated his version of scientific method -- the process by which scientific explanations are generated. By 1991, this framework was sufficiently mature that he was in a position to contrast it with the class of philosophical explanations. The delineation of these two explanatory classes ties into a host of other elements of his theories, not the least of which is the distinction between the explanatory paths of objectivity in / without parenthesis. More details on the better-developed of these two theoretical classes (the scientific) can be found under the entries for scientific method. A summary comparison of the two can be found under the entry for theory.

Cf. : domain of explanations, praxis of living, explanatory path, parenthesis

"The proposition, in the domain of operational coherences of the praxis of living of a standard observer, of a mechanism, a generative mechanism, which when allowed to operate gives rise as a consequence of its operation to the phenomenon to be explained, to be witnessed by the observer also in his or her praxis of living. This generative mechanism, that is usually called the explanatory hypothesis, takes place in the praxis of living of the observer in a different phenomenal domain than the phenomenal domain in which the phenomenon to be explained is witnessed, and the latter as a consequence of the former stands in an operational metadomain with respect to it. Indeed, the phenomenon to be explained and its generative mechanism take place in different nonintersecting phenomenal domains in the praxis of living of the observer."

(Maturana, 1988b, 4.i.A)

Cf. : criteria of validation, explanation, scientific method

An explanation is accepted or rejected by an observer on the basis of the "manner of listening" which derives from the criteria for acceptability via which she explicitly or implicitly responds to possible such explanations. The most relevant example of such a "manner of listening" is the mutually exclusive pair of explanatory paths which Maturana (1988a) claims as fundamental for an observer seeking explanation of her cognitive capacities. In the explanatory path of objectivity-without-parenthesis (or transcendental objectivity), the observer accepts her cognitive features without qualification with respect to their biological roots. In the explanatory path of objectivity-in-parenthesis (or constituted objectivity), the observer approaches her cognitive features with explicit regard to her own biological character and her cognitive capacities' biological fundament.

The single most detailed discussion of these constructs is to be found in Maturana (1988a), in which he provides (p. 32) one of his rare illustrations (termed the ontological diagram) laying out the relationships between these two modes of explanation.

Cf. : explanation, objectivity-in-parenthesis, objectivity-without-parenthesis, constituted objectivity, transcendental objectivity, ontological diagram

Cf. : calculus of indications

Cf. : component

"...one of the central intentions of the study of autopoiesis and organizational closure is to describe a system with no input or outputs (which embody their control or constraints) and to emphasize their autonomous constitutions; this point of view is alien to the Wienerian idea of feedback simpliciter."

(Varela, 1979, p. 56)

Indeed, it is Varela's contention that the notion of 'feedback' was immediately recognized for its capturing of some aspect(s) of a whole system's characteristic circularity, but that 'information-oriented' interpretations of the concept have obscured rather than illuminated that circularity over time. This can be seen as a failure in acknowledging and theoretically pursuing:

"...the interdependence between the need to consider whole system, and the correlated necessary appearance of circular interactions of processes. We do not feel that the full impact of this cognitive issue has been fully realized. When Wiener brought to the foreground the feedback idea, not only did it become immediately recognized as a foundational concept, but it also raised major philosophical questions as to the validity of the cause-effect doctrine. The picture seemed closer to a circular causation, where one can deal only with the ensuing totality and its manifested stability. In other words, the nature of feedback is that it gives a mechanism, which is independent of particular properties of components, for constituting a stable unit. And from this mechanism, the appearance of stability gives a rationale to the observed purposive behavior of systems and understanding teleology. ... Since Wiener, the analysis of various types of systems bears this same generalization: whenever a whole is identified, its interactions turn out to be circularly interconnected, and cannot be taken as linear cause-effect relationships if one is not to lose the system's characteristics..."

(Varela & Goguen, 1978, p. 316)

Cf. : circularity, self-referred, allo-referred, closure, organizational closure, stability

As is the case for 'purpose', 'function' must always be recognized as an aspect of the observer's description of a machine / system, and not a constituent feature of the machine / system itself.

"In saying that a function of P is F, we must pay closer attention to the character of F. It must be something like 'circulation', 'support', etc. All these notions suppose a larger, more embracing conceptual scheme: circulation in something, support of something. A functional description necessarily includes a larger context to which F makes reference."

(Varela, 1979, pp. 64-65: 'F' substituted for the Greek 'phi' owing to HTML coding and display constraints)

"...[N]o matter how direct the causal connections may be between the changes of state of the components and the state in which they originate in the total system, the implications in terms of design alluded to by the notion of function are established by the observer and belong exclusively to his domain of description. Accordingly, since the relations implied in the notions of function are not constitutive of the organization of an autopoietic system, they cannot be used to explain its operation."

(Varela, 1979, p. 65)

Cf. : allopoiesis, allopoietic machine / system, purpose, teleonomy.

This fundamental circularity makes for problems in analyzing living systems and their cognitive capacities. Maturana alludes to these problems in describing his difficulties in formulating a satisfactory account for these phenomena (Cf. the Introduction to Maturana & Varela, 1980, pp xi ff.), and he explicitly addresses it when he writes of cognition and language as both object and means of enquiry:

"...I must be in them in any explanatory attempt; they are my problem because I choose to explain them; and they are my unavoidable instruments because I must use cognition and language in order to explain cognition and language."

(Maturana, 1988b)

This fundamental circularity of subject matter and mode of enquiry calls into question the objectivism which provides the tacit basis for conventional cognitive studies. Because the only fixed reference point for such enquiry is the fact of the enquirer herself, autopoietic theory proceeds from the explanatory foundation of the observer, and both cognition and language are explained within this theory based upon characterization of the observer as a living system.

Cf. : circularity

Cf. : computer gestalt

"...[T]he ultimate and basic space that a composite unity can describe in a consensual domain is the space in which its components exist; the space in which its components exist determines the ultimate domain of interactions through which a composite unity can participate in the generation of a consensual domain."

"...[This]... ultimate space that the components of a composite system define is for such a system its ground space. Men, in particular, specify their ground space, the space which they define as composite unities by describing their components through their interactions through their components, as the physical space."

(Maturana, 1978, p. 57)

As such, 'ground space' is a general delineation for any space manifesting the role / specifications which in the case of living systems are attributed to the physical space. Maturana (1978) is the only paper in which this construct is explicitly delineated.

Cf. : space, physical space

Cf. : allonomy, heteronomy

Cf. : allopoiesis, autopoiesis , purpose, teleonomy

"If a system is realized through the coupling of autopoietic unities and is defined by relations of production of components that generate these relations and constitute it as a unity in some space, then it is an autopoietic system in that space, regardless of whether the components produced coincide with the unities that generate it through their coupled autopoiesis. If the autopoietic system thus generated is a unity in the physical space, it is a living system. If the autopoiesis of an autopoietic system entails the autopoiesis of the coupled autopoietic unities that realize it, then it is called an autopoietic system of higher order."

(Varela, 1979, p. 51)

Cf. : second-order, third-order

Cf. : ambience, ontogeny

"A process of change in which each state of the successive states of a changing system arises as a modification of a previous state in a causal transformation and not de novo as an independent occurrence."

(Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. 136)

Cf. : ontogeny

The above-cited passage clearly qualifies its invocation of 'homeostasis' with respect to an invariance of relations. This has not always been made clear enough in the literature that readers have distinguished Maturana and Varela's usage of the term from others. As a result, 'homeostasis' has, like 'closure', become one of the words most likely to confuse or misorient readers. Over the years, reference to 'homeostasis' has been phased out of the literature.

"Whenever the structure of a composite unity changes and its organization remains invariant, the identity of the entity remains the same and the unity stays unchanged as a member of its original class..." (Maturana, 1978)

This term approaches formal terminological status in the sense that it is a persistent construct invoked in describing living systems as exhibiting continuity under conditions of change. For example:

"A living system defines through its organization the domain of all interactions into which it can possibly enter without losing its identity, and it maintains its identity only as long as the basic circularity that defines it as a unit of interactions remains unbroken. Strictly, the identity of a unit of interactions that otherwise changes continuously is maintained only with respect to the observer, for whom its character as a unit of interactions remains unchanged."

(Maturana & Varela, 1980, pp. 9-10; Cf. : Maturana, 1970a, p. 5)

"The identity of an autopoietic unity is maintained as long as it remains autopoietic, that is, as long as it, as a unity in the physical space, remains a unity in the autopoietic space."

(Varela, 1979, p. 32)

Perhaps most indicative of this connotation (of continuity under dynamic change rather than indexicability) is a passage from Maturana's earliest paper, in which he discusses how a circular organization entails (figuratively) a prediction of subsequent interaction(s) sufficiently similar to prior ones which have been critical in maintaining the system so organized. If such a 'prediction' is realized "...the system maintains its identity (integrity) ..." (Maturana, 1970a, p. 6) Nowhere in the literature is the ascribed equivalence between 'identity' and form / configuration so definitively stated.

In the above-cited passages, "identity" is related to more formal constructs such as domain of interactions, organization , circularity, space, and observer. However, "identity" itself is never defined specially within the context of autopoietic theory. This is perhaps most puzzling with respect to organization , which is taken to be that which defines a given composite unity (e.g., to an observer). If organization defines that unity -- at least to the extent that the unity is an exemplar of a given class -- one might well wonder what (if any) extension(s) or qualifications to the construct of organization might serve to pin down "identity" as something more than a common term. The linkage between organization and identity is found throughout the primary and secondary literature, evidenced strongly in passages such as: "By organization Maturana refers to the relations between components that give a system its identity ... Thus, if the organization of a system changes, so does its identity." (Mingers, 1995, p. 29)

While it is generally safe to treat occurrences of this term as colloquial, one must bear in mind that "identity" (as a colloquial term) is never explicitly linked into the formal definitions of (e.g.) unity or entity (as static constructs). The above-cited passage from Maturana (1970a) clearly equates 'identity' with 'integrity' (of a system's form / configuration under conditions of dynamic change), but this is hardly a solidly positive definition. The other citations above are indicative of the relatively informal usage this term receives in the later (and more popular, hence most widely- known and cited) literature. As a result, there is no clear-cut basis for attempting to leverage the theory (i.e., via inference of consequences) employing the informality of this term's usage as a fulcrum.

Cf. : composite unity , entity, individuality, organization , unity

"The distinction we usually make between illusion and perception is based in the understanding that perception is the experience of capture of a reality independent of the observer, while illusion is an experience that we live "as if" it was perception, but that occurs in an inadequate connection with an external reality."

(Maturana, 1987, p. 323)

"Illusion", then, is the explanation invoked to account for apparent "perceptual mistakes" made by a living system which orients / responds to something which is not (at least to the ascribing observer) a matter of fact. As a result, "illusion" carries a negative connotation of error (in the path of objectivity-without-parenthesis), and it can be invoked in the interpersonal power games which this path affords (See Also: objectivity-without-parenthesis).

In the alternative explanatory path of objectivity-in-parenthesis, such "illusion" is not a conflict between the subject's perception and the objective 'reality' from which said perception presumably results, but rather "...the statement of a distinction listened at from a domain of reality different from that in which it takes place and where it is valid, and the experience of an illusion is an expression in the observer of his or her confusion of explanatory domains." (Maturana, 1988a, p. 32) Indeed, within this explanatory path one must concede living systems' "...inability to distinguish in experience what we distinguish in daily life as perception and illusion." (Maturana, 1988a, p. 29)

More broadly:

"...[W]e cannot distinguish between what we call an illusion, a hallucination, or a perception: illusion, hallucination, and perception are experientially indistinguishable. ... Our incapacity to experientially distinguish between what we socially call illusion, hallucination, or perception, is constitutive in us as living systems, and is not a limitation of our present state of knowledge."

(Maturana, 1988b, 5.0.)

The purported distinction among these classes of phenomena derives not from some a priori status, but rather from the manner in which their explanation is framed with respect to a referentially distinct metadomain. "It is only through the use of a different experience as a metaexperiential authoritative criterion of distinction, either of the same observer or of somebody else subject to similar restrictions, that such a distinction is socially made." (Maturana, 1988b, 5.0.) We engage phenomena through our explanations, but these explanations are always at least one step removed from the phenomenon being explained. There can be no ultimate or final reference point for explanation owing to the fact that "...regardless of the circumstances under which it occurs, its classification as a perception or as an illusion is a characterisation of it that an observer makes through a reference to another different experience that, again, can only be classified as a perception or as an illusion through reference to another one..." (Maturana, 1988a, p. 30)

Cf. : explanation, explanatory path, objectivity-in-parenthesis, objectivity-without-parenthesis, perception

"The act of distinction reveals a twofold aspect of the observer-community. On the one hand, it reveals the way in which such a distinction is accomplished: the criteria of distinction. On the other hand, it reveals the intention in selecting such criteria of distinction -- the relative value of the distinction. ...

A distinction cannot exist without its concomitant value. The distinction thus becomes an indication, i.e., an indication is a distinction that is of value. The indicative aspect of any distinction is of central importance because it is what enables the distinction to be changed throughout the history of the observer-community. This is so to the extent that values arise out of the continual self-interpretation of inquiring communities, which reinterpret the traditional or given indications in a partially redundant, but always partially innovative, way. Indications evolve within the uninterrupted process of the hermeneutic circle..."

(Varela, 1979, pp. 107-108)

Cf. : identity

"...[I]nductive inference is a necessary function (mode of conduct) that emerges as a result of the self-referring circular organization which treats every interaction and the internal state that it generates as if it were to be repeated, and as if an element of a class. Hence, functionally, for a living system every experience is the experience of a general case, and it is the particular case, not the general one, which requires many independent experiences in order that it be specified through the intersection of various classes of interactions.

... Inductive inference as a structural property of the living organization and of the thinking process, is independent of history, or of the relations between past and present that belong only to the domain of the observer."

(Maturana & Varela, 1980, pp. 49-50)

The above passage may seem a bit cryptic on first reading. If one were to trace it back to its origins in Maturana (1970a), the linkage between 'inference' and circular organization becomes clearer. In that seminal paper, Maturana employs prediction as an device for illustrating the character of a dynamically self-maintaining system with a circular organization. Such an organization "... implies the prediction that a necessary interaction that took place once will take place again." (Maturana, 1970a, p. 6) Only through such repetition of necessary interactions can the system avoid disintegration. Naturally, this doesn't mean that the exact same interaction occurs on any repetition, only that a sufficiently similar interaction occurs. This 'sufficient similarity' loosens the constraint of exactness and opens up the possibility for any of a number of possibly similar / sufficient interactions -- i.e., a dynamically-circumscribed analogue for a set.

"...[T]he predictions implied in the organization of the living system are not predictions of particular events but of classes of interactions. Every interaction is a particular interaction, but every prediction is a prediction of a class of interactions that is defined by those features in its members which will allow the living system to retain its circular organization ... This makes living systems inferential systems."

(Maturana, 1970a, p. 6)

This earlier exposition more clearly exposes the sense in which the later (1980) version of 'inference' is invoked. There should be no confusing of this sense of 'inference' with the colloquial usage of the term to connote a rationally or logically deterministic progression through a series of abstractions.

Cf. : class, cognition, organization , prediction

"We can define in-formation as the admissible symbolic descriptions of the cognitive domains of autonomous systems. We shall always write it with the hyphen to convey the differences of this view from that of information in the computer gestalt."

(Varela,1979, p. 266: italics in the original)

In-formation is Varela's label for a perspective on information which is qualified / modified with respect to the mechanicistic, autonomy-oriented stance developed by himself and Maturana in autopoietic theory. A summary of the general critique of traditional views which motivated this reformulation can be found in the Encyclopaedia entry for 'information'. Of the two co-creators of autopoietic theory, it is Varela alone who has gone beyond the criticism / dismissal of conventional notions of 'information' to specify an alternative or analogue framed with regard to this theoretical framework. The most explicit material on this reformulation is to be found in his 1979 book Principles of Biological Autonomy, where he justifies the variant terminology as follows:

"If we want to make apparent a difference in interpretation, it is quite difficult to use the same words and not be misled by the connotations that they have acquired in common and scientific parlance. The word 'information' (like the word 'order') has been so much associated with representational connotations that it would seem hopelessly lost for any other interpretation."

(Varela, 1979, p. 265)

In one of the literature's rare employments of summary illustration, Varela offers a table in which he contrasts in-formation and information. He differentiates these as extrema in a spectrum, characterized as follows:

"On the one end there is information as referential, instructional, representational. One the other end there is in-formation as constructed, nonreferential or codependent, conversational."

(Varela, 1979, p. 266)

Table (In-/In)formation below is a direct transcription of Varela's illustration.

TABLE (IN-/IN)FORMATION: Varela's (1979, p. 266) Comparison of In-formation and Information
In-formation	Information
In-formation is coherence or regularity, viability	Information is a mapping or correspondence
Extrinsic, not operational but only relative to an observer who establishes the uses	Intrinsic, operational
Unity is defined autonomously, and relates to it as perturbations	Relation to a unity is through allonomous inputs
Environment or world is defined through invariances relative to the system's operation	Requires a fixed, given world or environment
Observer-community is, explicitly, what detects the regularities	Does not include observer explicitly
In-formation is always interpretation	Information is instructive
Generated by structural coupling	Generated by definition

Cf. : admissible symbolic descriptions, symbol

Maturana and Varela explicitly reject the cognitivist view of cognition as information processing.

"This would mean that such inputs or outputs are part of the definition of the system, as in the case of a computer or other machines that have been engineered. To do this is entirely reasonable when one has designed a machine whose central feature is the manner in which we interact with it. The nervous system (or the organism), however, has not been designed by anyone... (T)he nervous system does not 'pick up information' from the environment, as we often hear... The popular metaphor of calling the brain an 'information-processing device' is not only ambiguous but patently wrong."

(Maturana & Varela, 1987, p. 169)

Maturana and Varela attribute the capacity for functional discrimination to the organism's structure , not to an internal manipulation of extrinsic 'information" or "signals', as the cognitivist viewpoint would have us believe. In fact, their organizationally- and structurally-oriented account of living systems does not require recourse to a conventional notion of "information". From a perspective focusing upon a system's autonomous nature, any "...bit of information is relative to the maintenance of a system's identity, and can only be described in reference to it ... In this sense information is never picked up or transferred, nor is there any difference whatsoever between informational and noninformation entities in a system's ambient." (Varela, 1979, p. xiv)

An illustrative example of this approach can be found in the treatment given systemic relations of specificity which are often addressed with respect to an "information" construct. Maturana and Varela explain the realization of these relations in terms of the system itself.

"Notions such as coding and transmission of information do not enter in the realization of a concrete autopoietic system because they do not refer to actual processes in it. Thus, the notion of specificity does not imply coding, information or instructions; it only describes certain relations, determined by and dependent on the autopoietic organization..."

(Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. 90)

The most extensive discussion of 'information' (in its usual sense, and as it must be reformulated with respect to a cognitive system's autonomy ) in the literature is to be found in Principles of Biological Autonomy (Varela, 1979). Although much of this discussion covers points which can be found explicitly in, or directly inferred from, (e.g.) Autopoiesis and Cognition (Maturana & Varela, 1980), Varela's solo treatment adheres more closely to a comparative analysis of 'information' per se. A reformulation of 'information' is one of the central foci delineated in the book's Preface, wherein Varela summarily declares:

"...information -- together with all of its closely related notions -- has to be reinterpreted as codependent or constructive, in contradistinction to representational or instructive. This means, in other words, a shift from questions about semantic correspondence to questions about structural patterns."

Phrased another way, the autopoietic account must re-frame the phenomenon connoted by the conventional construct 'information' from something abstract, symbolic, and extrinsic (to the cognitive system) to something grounded and intrinsic to the system which is 'informed'.

"...[W]e are talking literally about in-formare: that which is formed within. In-formation appears nowhere except in relative interlock between the describer, the unit, and its interactions."

(Varela, 1979, p. xv)

Varela (1979) takes the time to delineate what he sees as critical differences between this in-formation and 'information' as that term is conventionally used in everyday conversation.

Naturally, this structural stance has a bearing on the autopoietic account for communication. Maturana's construct of languaging is formulated in direct opposition to the conventional (cognitivistic) account of language as "... a denotative symbolic system for the transmission of information." (Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. 30) The necessity for such a reorientation is motivated by an explanatory or epistemological flaw in the conventional (symbolic processing) account. Such an account "...would demand the pre-existence of the function of denotation as necessary to develop the symbolic system for the transmission of information, but this function is the very one whose evolutionary origin should be explained." (Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. 30)

This reformulation of the phenomena to which the explanatory device of "information" has previously been applied requires a significant amount of reflection to digest (Cf. Stafford Beer's comments in the Preface, Maturana & Varela, 1980, pp. 68-69). The critical point in this digestion process is an acceptance that the relevant behavioral, cognitive, and social phenomena of interest can be comprehensively explained (in the autopoietic account) without recourse to an inferred abstract "information" construct (in the sense in which the term is most conventionally used).

Although the above-delineated critique of conventional notions of 'information' can be found throughout the primary literature (in varying degrees), the reformulation of this problematically biased construct in accordance with autopoietic theory has been pursued by Varela alone -- especially in his 1979 book Principles of Biological Autonomy. The outline of that reformulated construct is found in the Encyclopaedia entry for Varela's name for it -- in-formation.

Cf. : coding, cognition, communication, in-formation, language, languaging, representation

"[T]he domain of all the structural changes that it may undergo with conservation of organization (class identity) and adaptation at that instant; I call this domain the instantaneous domain of the possible changes of state of the composite unity."

(Maturana, 1988b, 6.v.)

Cf. : domain of allowable perturbations, domain of changes of state, domain of compensations, domain of destructive changes, domain of destructive interactions, domain of interactions, domain of ontogenic transformations, domain of perturbations, domain of states, domain of transitions of states

"[T]he domain of all the structural changes that it may undergo with loss of organization and adaptation at that instant; I call this domain the instantaneous domain of the possible disintegrations of the composite unity."

(Maturana, 1988b, 6.v.)

Cf. : disintegration (2.), domain of allowable perturbations, domain of changes of state, domain of compensations, domain of destructive changes, domain of destructive interactions, domain of interactions, domain of ontogenic transformations, domain of perturbations, domain of states, domain of transitions of states

"[T]he domain of all the different structural configurations of the medium that it admits at that instant in interactions that trigger in it changes of state; I call this domain the instantaneous domain of the possible perturbations of the composite unity."

(Maturana, 1988b, 6.v.)

Cf. : domain of allowable perturbations, domain of changes of state, domain of compensations, domain of destructive changes, domain of destructive interactions, domain of interactions, domain of ontogenic transformations, domain of perturbations, domain of states, domain of transitions of states

"[T]he domain of all the different structural configurations of the medium that it admits at that instant in interactions that trigger in it its disintegration; I call this domain the instantaneous domain of the possible destructive interactions of the composite unity."

(Maturana,1988b, 6.v.)

Cf. : domain of allowable perturbations, domain of changes of state, domain of compensations, domain of destructive changes, domain of destructive interactions, domain of interactions, domain of ontogenic transformations, domain of perturbations, domain of states, domain of transitions of states

This has a bearing on an observer's ability to engage and explain subject systems. "Systems that undergo instructive interactions cannot be analyzed by a scientific procedure. In fact, all instructable systems would adopt the same state under the same perturbations and would necessarily be indistinguishable to a standard observer." (Maturana, 1978) Within the perspective of autopoietic theory (and particularly Maturana's version of scientific method), "...any description of an interaction in terms of instructions (or of information transfer) is, at best, metaphorical; it does not reflect the actual operation of the systems involved as objects of scientific description and study. " (Ibid.)

It is important to note that instructive interactions correspond to the characterization of communication espoused by cognitivism (the dominant paradigm underlying cognitive psychology and cognitive science since the 1960's). The "information processing" perspective underlying cognitivistic approaches emphasizes what can only be termed instructive interactions, where the 'receiver' adopts a state determined by the state of the 'sender' as projected via the 'message'. This view of language concentrates on '...a denotative system of symbolic communication, consisting of words that denote entities regardless of the domain in which these entities may exist.'(Maturana, 1978, p. 50) Such an approach overlooks the fact that "Denotation ... requires agreement -- consensus for the specification of the denotant and the denoted." (Ibid.)

Cf. : interaction, languaging, metaphor of the tube, selective interaction, structure-determined system, communication, communicative *

In contrast to the conventional view, Maturana and Guiloff set off to replace the question "What is intelligence?" with the alternative question "How is intelligent behaviour generated?. This replacement derives from their alternative orientation to the entire issue of 'intelligence', which is based on two points:

"... (i), that there is a class of behaviour exhibited by animals in general, and by man in particular, that involves the interactions of two or more organisms or the interactions of an organism and its medium, that an observer calls intelligent behaviour; and

(ii), that the word intelligence is used by the observer to make a connotative reference to the relations and changes of relations that take place between the systems participating in this behaviour, without denoting a particular property or attribute of the individual organisms, or without denoting a particular feature of the individual performances."

(Maturana & Guiloff, 1980, p. 137)

In effect, the entire context of explanation is shifted away from that typical approach in which "...intelligent behaviour is viewed as a manifestation of a property of the acting organism..." and to a position from which "...intelligent behaviour is viewed as a conduct whose peculiarity consists in that it is enacted in a particular context as a result of a particular history of interactions of the acting organism with other organisms or with its medium." (Maturana & Guiloff, 1980, p. 137) This shift of vantage affords the following positions:

"...[T]he behaviour of an organism which entails the establishment of, the expansion of, or the operation within a domain of ontogenic structural coupling already established, is that to which we refer to when speaking of intelligent behavior."

(Maturana & Guiloff, 1980, p. 141)

"Intelligence has to do with consensuality, intelligence is not primarily the capacity to solve problems, but it is the capacity to participate in the generation, expansion, and operation in consensual domains as domains of coordinations of behaviors through living together. Problem solving takes place as an operation in a domain of consensuality already established, so it is secondary to consensuality, not prior to it."

(Maturana & Verden-Zöller, 1996)

This redefinition leads to five summary implications:

1. "Intelligent behaviour is necessarily always contextual, and the context is defined by the consensual domain, or the domain of ontogenic adaptation, in which it takes place."

2. "Any attempt (by an observer) to measure intelligence in an organism would necessarily result in an estimation of the extent of its participation in the domain of consensus, or in the domain of ontogenic adaptation, that he specifies by accepting or refusing its observed conduct as a case of intelligent behaviour."

3. "Anything that an observer may say about the heritability of intelligence is necessarily a function of what he may say about the heritability of the plastic structures that participate in the structural coupling ..."

4. "All the cases in which the word intelligence or its derivatives are used in ordinary daily life in our present western cultural tradition, refer to situations that actually involve the establishment of a domain of ontogenic structural coupling or the operation within such a domain."

5. "All systems that may undergo ontogenic structural coupling are capable of intelligent behavior. Any restriction of the use of the word intelligence and related ones to a subset of these systems, is justified only by human art."

(Maturana & Guiloff, 1980, p. 141)

In a 1996 paper, Maturana and G. Verden-Zöller postulate that the evolutionary expansion of human 'intelligence' (as reformulated above) is intrinsically linked to the concomitant development of love as a defining human orientation of trust and acceptance.

1.

A term for the dynamic holding between two or more mutually-influencing unities. "Whenever two or more unities, through the interplay of their properties, modify their relative position in the space that they specify, there is an interaction." (Maturana, 1978) Such interaction is qualified with respect to the space within which the interacting unities specify (and, hence, in that space in which they can be engaged and observed). "Whenever two or more composite unities are treated as simple, they are seen to be realized and to interact in the space that they specify as simple unities; however, if they are treated as composites unities, then they are seen to interact through the properties of their components and to exist in the space that these specify." (Ibid.)

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2.

A term used more generally to denote a dynamic which does not constitute communication -- i.e., a dynamic characterized by mutually-triggered responses of direct effect, as opposed to mutual orientation in which the participating systems are operating in parallel within their respective domains of interaction or cognitive domains.

In this sense, all behavior is delineated in terms of observed interactions between a unity and its environment. This more general sense of the term is the one entailed in the emphasis on treating a subject unity / system as a 'unit of interactions' in the early literature.

Cf. : behavior, communication, instructive interactions, mutual orientation, orientation, selective interaction, unit of interactions

"Please note that when we speak of organizational closure, by no means do we imply interactional closure, i.e., the system in total isolation. We do assume that every system will maintain endless interactions with the environment which will impinge and perturb it. If this were not so, we could not even distinguish it."

(Varela & Goguen, 1978, p. 294, emphasis in the original)

In fact, the interactional character of autonomous / autopoietic unities such as living systems has been a key explanatory topic from the beginning. It is interesting to note that in the earliest literature, Maturana emphasized a focal composite unity of interest in terms of its being a unit of interactions. Perhaps it is in part because this mode of delineation faded from the literature by the mid-1970's that the accusations of interactional closure have been so common.

Cf. : closed system, closure, interaction, unit of interactions

"Knowing is effective action, that is, operating effectively in the domain of existence of living beings."

(Maturana & Varela, 1992, p. 29)

In contrast with cognitivistic perspectives (wherein "knowledge" is a quantum commodity of symbolizable elements), autopoietic theory defines "knowledge" as a projected evaluation by some observer: "We admit knowledge whenever we observe an effective (or adequate) behavior in a given context, i.e., in a realm or domain which we define by a question (explicit or implicit)." (Maturana & Varela, 1992, p. 174). "The question, 'What is the object of knowledge?' becomes meaningless. There is no object of knowledge. To know is to be able to operate adequately in an individual or cooperative situation." (Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. 53).

"All doing is knowing and all knowing is doing."

(Maturana & Varela, 1992, p. 27)

"...[L]anguage is now used to refer to any conventional system of symbols used in communication. A language, whether in its restricted or in its generalized form, is currently considered to be a denotative system of symbolic communication, composed of words that denote entities regardless of the domain in which these entities may exist. Denotation, however, is not a primitive operation. It requires agreement or consensus for the specification of the denotant and the denoted. If denotation, therefore, is not a primitive operation, it cannot be a primitive linguistic operation, either. Language must arise as a result of something else that does not require denotation for its establishment, but that gives rise to language with all its implications as a trivial necessary result. This fundamental process is ontogenic structural coupling, which results in the establishment of a consensual domain."

(Maturana, 1978, p. 50)

At its most general level, Maturana characterizes natural language as "... the system of cooperative consensual interaction between organisms." (Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. 31) As such, language is reconsidered as connotative (as opposed to denotative), meaning that "... its function is to orient the orientee within his cognitive domain without regard for the cognitive domain of orienter." (Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. 32) The functional role of language, then, is "...the creation of a cooperative domain of interactions between speakers through the development of a common frame of reference, although each speaker acts exclusively within his cognitive domain..." (Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. 57) or "... the creation of a consensual domain of behavior between linguistically interacting systems through the development of a cooperative domain of interactions." (Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. 50)

As Maturana's reformulation of 'language' evolved, the allusions to 'cooperative domain of interactions' and 'structural coupling' faded in preference to the now-familiar 'coordinations of coordinations' (of action or beahvior). The seminal 1978 paper 'Biology of Language' in fact uses the term 'coordination' only once:

"The conditions under which a conversation takes place (common interest, spatial confinement, friendship, love, or whatever keeps the organisms together), and which determine that the organisms should continue to interact until a consensual domain is established, constitute the domain in which selection for the ontogenic structural coupling takes place. Without them, a consensual domain could never be established, and communication, as the coordination of noncreative ontogenically acquired modes of behavior, would never take place."

(Maturana, 1978, p. 55, emphasis added)

By the time another decade had passed, however, 'coordinations' had become the primary explanatory construct underlying 'language':

"...[L]anguage is a biological phenomenon because it results from the operations of human beings as living systems, but it takes place in the domain of the co-ordinations of actions of the participants, and not in their physiology or neurophysiology. Languaging and physiology take place in different and non intersecting phenomenal domains. Or, in other words, language as a special kind of operation in co-ordinations of actions requires the neurophysiology of the participants, but it is not a neurophysiological phenomenon."

(Maturana, 1988a, p. 45)

"Language as a biological phenomenon consists in a flow within recurrent interactions that constitute a system of consensual coordinations of behavior (see Maturana 1978 and 1988). From this results that language as a process does not happen in the body (nervous system) of the participants in the flow, but in the space of recurrent consensual coordinations of behavior."

(Maturana, 1989)

The characterization of language as a matter of reciprocal coupling in a consensual domain to orientational effect requires diminishing (if not denying) the explanatory importance of the symbols and symbolization by which the phenomenon has been most commonly addressed. To equate Maturana's dynamic, behavioral account with elements of this more conventional approach concentrating on the tokens employed (e.g., phonemes, syntactic patterns, etc.) is a categorical error. This is not to say that such tokens are irrelevant -- only that they are corollaries to the manner in which humans interact via language.

"No behavior, no particular gesture or corporal posture constitutes in itself an element of language, but it is part of it only insofar as it belongs to a recursive flow of consensual coordinations of behavior. So, words are only those gestures, sounds, behaviors or corporal postures, which participate as consensual elements in the recursive flow of the consensual coordinations of behavior that constitute language. Words are, therefore, ways of consensual coordinations of behavior."

(Maturana, 1989)

"...[L]anguage is not a domain of abstractions or symbols, it is a concrete domain of coordinations of coordinations of concrete doings, and symbols and abstractions are secondary to language."

(Maturana & Verden-Zöller, 1996)

Maturana has concentrated on the subject of linguistic interaction more so than has Varela. This difference is significant enough that Varela (1989; also Varela, Thompson & Rosch, 1991, p. 7, Figure 1.1) categorize Maturana in terms of his linguistic leaning. The most concentrated and definitive analyses of linguistic interaction from an autopoietic perspective are therefore to be found in the writings of Maturana -- especially Maturana (1978). The most detailed treatment of language with respect to the alternative explanatory paths of objectivity-in-parenthesis and objectivity-without-parenthesis is perhaps that of Maturana (1988a).

The decade intervening between these papers resulted not in disjunct explanations, but in quite discernible differences in the focus, scope, and perhaps the depth of those explanations. The 1978 paper provides a detailed explanation of language as it arises as consensually orientational behavior between / among interacting autopoietic / living systems. The 1988 paper provides a broader contextualization of this account of language that establishes its place within the biologically- focussed purview or stance of Maturana's theories. Phrased another way, the 1978 paper presents an explanation for the 'mechanics' of language, while the 1988 article (and subsequent ones) discuss the broader ramifications of that explanation without detailed review of those 'mechanics.'

In Maturana's later (e.g., post-1985) writings, 'language' has emerged as something of a 'given' - - an explanatory fulcrum upon which many key concepts are leveraged. It could be argued that in this later period, language has effectively supplanted autopoiesis as the primary basis of explanation. This reflects more of a shift in the phenomena being explained (e.g., away from living systems generally to the human praxis of living in particular) than a shift in either the basic explanatory stance or the details of the explanation per se. In the primary literature of the theory's first decade (e.g., Maturana, 1970a, Maturana & Varela, 1980), living systems were the object of explanation, and language was explained as a capacity of a living system operating as an observer. This corresponds to the tone and direction of the earliest theoretical work: to explain living systems in terms of their form with strict regard to a mechanicistic perspective.

This orientation or focus is well-illustrated in the following passages from the best early paper on language:

"Linguistic behavior is behavior in a consensual domain. When linguistic behavior takes place recursively, in a second-order consensual domain, in such a manner that the components of the consensual behavior are recursively combined in the generation of new components of the consensual domain, a language is established."

(Maturana, 1978, pp. 50-51)

"For an observer, linguistic interactions appear as semantic and contextual interactions. Yet what takes place in the interactions within a consensual domain is strictly structure-determined, interlocked concatenations of behavior."

(Maturana, 1978, p. 52)

Note that the mode of explanation proceeds from the general notion of linguistic behavior (a construct defined in terms of the mechanics of structural coupling in a consensual domain) to specify what it is that a 'language' may be.

In Maturana's latter writings, the reader more typically finds that the observer's praxis of living is the main object of explanation, and the observer is defined in terms of language. This reflects a progressive 'opening up' of the explanatory / theoretical work (at least by Maturana) to address salient aspects of 'everyday life.' For example, consider the following passage:

"...[L]anguage is a biological phenomenon because it results from the operations of human beings as living systems, but it takes place in the domain of the co-ordinations of actions of the participants, and not in their physiology or neurophysiology. Languaging and physiology take place in different and non intersecting phenomenal domains. Or, in other words, language as a special kind of operation in co-ordinations of actions requires the neurophysiology of the participants, but it is not a neurophysiological phenomenon."

(Maturana, 1988a, p. 45)

Note that a decade later, the vantage point has shifted somewhat, and that the definition of what a 'language' may be is framed with respect to (observed) coordinations of behavior among participants, without any 'bottom-up' explanatory allusions to the sort of 'mechanics' from which the earlier paper proceeded.

This simultaneously increasing focus on language and decreasing recantation of details on the 'mechanics' has opened up the potential for newcomers to seize on the centrality of language in Maturana's account for our praxes of living without quite grasping the substantial and novel body of explanation (e.g., from the 1970's) of what such 'language' is. This potential has sadly been realized in all-too-common instances where newly-arrived adherents have embraced Maturana's focus on language, while carrying along their previous notions of what language is -- some of which fall squarely within that set of instructive interactions or symbolic 'information processing' that are explicitly refuted by Maturana and Varela.

Cf. : languaging, connotation, cooperative domain of interactions, consensual domain, denotation, orientation

The primary function of linguistic interaction is therefore not conveyance of 'information quanta', but the mutual orientation of the conversants within the consensual domain realized by their interactivity. 'communication' becomes a matter of mutual orientation -- primarily with respect to each other's behavior, and secondarily (only via the primary orientation) with respect to some subject. This is extremely important for delimiting the constraints on an observer's analysis of communicative interactions. In today's conventional (e.g., cognitivistic) approaches, such interaction is described as a semantic coupling -- a process by which each of the observed interactors computes the appropriate response state from some informative input from the other. Maturana warns that this is not warranted:

"(a) because the notion of information is valid only in the descriptive domain as an expression of the cognitive uncertainty of the observer, and does not represent any component actually operant ... and

(b) because the changes of state of a [structurally] determined system, be it autopoietic or not, are determined by its structure , regardless of whether these changes of state are adequate or not for some purpose that the observer may consider applicable."

(Maturana, 1975, p. 322)

This moves linguistic interaction to a conceptual base whose elements apply to a much broader range of actors and interactions than symbolic data. The structural coupling of the participating organisms is the only operative element -- all other items treated in descriptions of linguistic behavior are secondary. How, then, can one account for the seemingly secure framework within which we ordinarily consider conversation to occur -- shared lexicons, objective meanings, and syntactic conventions? Maturana claims: (1) such a question is biased in its presumption that such a framework objectively exists, and (2) such regularities are imposed by an observer:

"If recursion is possible in a particular kind of behavior ... a closed generative domain of behavior is produced. ... What is peculiar about a language, however, is that this recursion takes place through the behavior of organisms in a consensual domain. In this context, the superficial syntactic structure or grammar of a given natural language can only be a description of the regularities in the concatenation of the elements of the consensual behavior. ...This superficial syntax can be any, because its determination is contingent on the history of consensual coupling ... (T)he 'universal grammar' of which linguists speak as the necessary set of underlying rules common to all human natural languages can refer only to the universality of the process of recursive structural coupling."

(Maturana, 1978, p. 52)

This structurally-oriented reformulation of language in terms of consensual behavior is not limited in scope to the observable social interactivity among discursants. In other words, languaging is not some abstract, purely 'social' behavior which occurs 'between' structurally-determined systems; it is instead a phenomenon which is also operationally manifest 'within' each such system:

"To language is to interact structurally. Language takes place in the domain of relations between organisms in the recursion of consensual coordinations of consensual coordinations of actions, but at the same time language takes place through structural interactions in the domain of the bodyhoods of the languaging organisms. In other words, although languaging takes place in the social domain as a dance of recursive relations of coordinations of actions, interactions in language as structural interactions are orthogonal to that domain, and as such trigger in the bodyhoods of the participants structural changes that change as much the physiological background (emotional standing) on which they continue their languaging, as the course that this physiological change follows. The result is that the social coordinations of actions that constitute languaging, as elements of a domain of recursive operation in structural coupling, become part of the medium in which the participant living systems conserve organization and adaptation through the structural changes that they undergo contingent to their participation in that domain. ... As the body changes, languaging changes; and as languaging changes, the body changes. Here resides the power of words. Words are nodes in coordinations of actions in languaging and as such they arise through structural interactions between bodyhoods; it is through this interplay of coordinations of actions and changes of bodyhood that the world that we bring forth in languaging becomes part of the domain in which our ontogenic and phylogenic structural drifts take place."

(Maturana, 1988b, 9.v.)

The reclassification of communicational behavior from conceptual commerce to mutual orientation expands the range of behaviors we may consider as 'communicative'. The autopoietic view of language is not constrained to coded symbols for the manner in which interactors couple. 'The richness attained by a language ... depends necessarily both on the diversity of behaviors that can be generated and distinguished by the organisms that participate in the consensual domain.' (Maturana, 1978, p. 51) By disengaging interaction from lexical reference and grammatical performance, the autopoietic model implicitly allows for all manner of non-verbal or extra-verbal signalling -- a scope more akin to semiotics than mainstream linguistics.

Cf. : communicative *, metaphor of the tube, structural coupling, linguistic domain

" If the structural coupling of the organism to its medium takes place during its ontogeny, and if this structural coupling involves the nervous system, an observer may claim that learning has taken place because he or she observes adequate behavior generated through the dynamics of states of a nervous system whose structure has been specified (selected) through experience. If, in these circumstances, the observer wants to discriminate between learned and instinctive behavior, he or she will discover that in their actual realization, both modes of behavior are equally determined in the present by the structures of the nervous system and organism, and that, in this respect, they are indeed indistinguishable. The distinction between learned and instinctive behaviors lies exclusively in the history of the establishment of the structures responsible for them.

Any description of learning in terms of the acquisition of a representation of the environment is, therefore, merely metaphorical and carries no explanatory value. Furthermore, such a description is necessarily misleading, because it implies a system in which instructive interactions would take place, and such a system is, epistemologically, out of the question. In fact, if no notion of instruction is used, the problem becomes simplified because learning, then, appears as the continuous ontogenic structural coupling of an organism to its medium through a process which follows a direction determined by the selection exerted on its changes of structure by the implementation of the behavior that it generates through the structure already selected in it by its previous plastic interactions. Accordingly, the significance that an observer may see a posteriori in a given behavior acquired through learning plays no part in the specification of the structure through which it becomes implemented. Also, although it is possible for us as human beings to stipulate from a metadomain of descriptions an aim in learning, this aim only determines a bias, a direction, in a domain of selection, not a structure to be acquired. This latter can only become specified during the actual history of learning (ontogenic structural coupling), because it is contingent on this history. A learning system has no trivial experiences (interactions) because all interactions result in a structural change, even when the selected structure leads to the stabilization of a given behavior." (Maturana, 1978, p. 45)

As such, this term is employed to point to those phenomena which have heretofore been analyzed as semantic phenomena, even though the autopoietic analysis of these phenomena is framed from an alternative explanatory perspective. This rhetorical tactic has the advantage of orienting newcomers and other readers to 'linguistic' topics without requiring a major investment in new nomenclature. However, it has the disadvantage of leaving the casual reader with an impression that the character of linguistic phenomena addressed by autopoietic theory is in some sense isomorphic with the manner in which conventional explanations have been framed (e.g., in terms of quantum 'information' transfer). Perhaps this is one basis for the recurring suggestions that communicative networks (from conversations to the Internet) are themselves 'autopoietic'. Examples: linguistic behavior(s); linguistic interaction(s)

Cf. : semantic, semantic coupling

1. [in passing, somewhat colloquial usage...]

Any of those behaviors which are conventionally construed as 'communicative' and explained as semantic phenomena -- i.e., as exchanges of a quantum 'information' commodity or as instances of semantic coupling.

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2. [in more precise usage...]

"Linguistic behavior is behavior in a consensual domain. When linguistic behavior takes place recursively, in a second-order consensual domain, in such a manner that the components of the consensual behavior are recursively combined in the generation of new components of the consensual domain, a language is established."

(Maturana, 1978, pp. 50-51)

In more precise usage, the term 'linguistic behavior' denotes those behaviors which entail consensual coordinations of (coordinations of...) behavior -- i.e., those behaviors whose domain of effectuation is best construed as involving relations within the organizationally / operationally closed nervous system of the observer, as opposed to those behavioral interactions involving structural coupling between the observer and her environment / medium (to which most particular invocations of the term 'behavior' refer). This more focused usage of the term dates back to Maturana's earliest writings on language and languaging. What has changed is that as time has gone on, the term is used more and more in this specific sense (and less for passing denotation of 'that behavior we conventionally treat as communicative').

Phrased another way, linguistic behavior is typically that behavior manifested by the observer recursively coupling with her own states in such a manner as to couple within the 'virtual domain' of her organizationally / operationally closed embodiment. The connection of this notion to that of the 'observer' is illustrated in Maturana and Varela's definition of the observer as:

"A system that through recursive interactions with its own linguistic states may always linguistically interact with its own states as if with representations of its interactions."

(Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. 137)

As such...

"Linguistic behavior is orienting behavior; it orients the orientee within his cognitive domain to interactions that are independent of the nature of the orienting interactions themselves."

(Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. 30)

Just as the foundation for the realization of linguistic behaviors is the organizational and operational closure of the nervous system, the foundation for the mode of operation entailed in linguistic behaviors is recursion. It is recursive linguistic behavior which provides for the progressive 'steps' or 'levels' by which Maturana (1995) outlines the generation of self-consciousness as a higher-order phenomenon predicated on mechanistic operations in a system with closure. (Cf. the entry for self-consciousness for more details on this outline).

Cf. : language, languaging, linguistic, recursion, self-consciousness

1.

In specific usage,this term connotes that consensual domain in which linguistic phenomena are realized between or among observers. In other words, a consensual domain referenced with strict regard to linguistic interactivity.

"[A]... consensual domain of communicative interactions in which the behaviorally coupled organisms orient each other with modes of behavior whose internal determination has become specified during their coupled ontogenies."

(Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. 120)

"[A]... consensual domain in which the coupled organisms orient each other in their internally determined behavior through interactions that have been specified during their coupled ontogenies."

(Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. 136)

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2.

In more general / casual usage, this term is invoked to connote the realm of linguistic phenomena, particularly as they pertain to a given organism, as in: "...the domain of all its linguistic behaviors." (Maturana & Varela, 1992, p. 209)

Cf. : consensual domain, linguistic.

Cf. : linguistic

"The circular organization in which the components that specify it are those whose synthesis or maintenance it secures in a manner such that the product of their functioning is the same functioning organization that produces them, is the living organization."

(Maturana, 1970b: reprinted as Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. 9)

"The living organization is a circular organization which secures the production or maintenance of the components that specify it in such a manner that the product of their functioning is the very same organization that produces them."

(Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. 48)

Cf. : autopoietic organization, organization , organization of the living

"Living systems as they exist on the earth today are characterized by exergonic metabolism, growth, and replication (and reproduction), all organized in a closed causal circular process that allows for evolutionary changes in the way the circularity is maintained, but not for the loss of the circularity... This circular organization determines that the components that specify it be those whose synthesis it secures. Hence, its circular nature is essential for its maintenance and its operation as a unit."

(Maturana, 1970a, p. 5)

Working from this basis, Maturana and Varela generated the formalisms permitting them to recast living systems in terms of a systemic perspective with a systematic framework. As a result, within the context of autopoietic theory, living systems are composite unities ('systems'), subject to the descriptive and explanatory qualifications entailed in the theory's specific delineation of those constructs:

Living systems, as all systems are, are structure determined composite entities that exist in two non-intersecting phenomenal domains, namely: a) the domain of operation of their components, that is, the domain of their structural dynamics; and b) the domain in which they interact and relate as totalities, that is, the domain in which they are wholes and operate (exist) as such. ... In the particular case of living systems, these two phenomenal domains are the domains of its anatomy and physiology, and its domain of behaviour, respectively (Maturana 1987)."

(Maturana, 1995)

Cf. : autopoiesis , autopoietic machine / system, physical space

"Love consists in opening a space of existence for an other in coexistence with oneself in a particular domain of interactions. As such love is expression of a spontaneous biological congruence and has no rational justification: love takes place because it takes place and lasts as long as it lasts. Also love is always at first sight, even when it appears after circumstances of existential constraints that force recurrent interactions; and this is so because it takes place only when there is an encounter in structural congruence, and not before. Finally, love is the source of human socialization, not a result of it, and anything that destroys love, anything that destroys the structural congruence that it entails, destroys socialization. Socialization is the result of operation in love, and takes place only in the domain where love takes place."

(Maturana, 1985)

'Love' has, since the mid-1980's, become an increasingly focal topic within Maturana's writings. The term is employed by Maturana to connote an attitude or orientation of open acceptance -- particularly as it pertains to another or others. This construct (as Maturana develops it) is grounded in the biology of the organism. The dynamics of ontogenic structural coupling in consensual domains provides the basis for the phenomenon of 'love' among humans, in that the:

"...condition of spontaneous dynamic reciprocal fitting that gives rise to recurrent interactions with conservation of individual organization and reciprocal adaptation along the ontogeny of living systems, while it lasts, is the phenomenon that we call love in the human domain. Or, in other words, I am saying that love is the spontaneous dynamic condition of acceptance by a living system of its coexistence with another (or others) living systems, and that as such love is a biological phenomenon that requires no justification: love is a spontaneous dynamic reciprocal fitting, a happening that either takes place or does not."

(Maturana, 1985)

"...[L]ove is the domain of those behaviours or dynamic body dispositions through which another arises as a legitimate other in coexistence with oneself..."

"Love is a manner of relational behavior through which the other arises as a legitimate other (as an other that does not need to justify his or her existence in relation to us) in a relation of coexistence with oneself."

(Maturana & Verden-Zöller, 1996)

As such, 'love' is given a relatively specific connotation within the scope of autopoietic theory -- one which should not be lightly equated with commonly-associated connotations such as (e.g.) eros or some transcendental passion.

"...[L]ove is not a virtue, or something special, it simply is a biological phenomenon as the domain of those behaviors through which social life arises and is conserved; it is simply the biological dynamics that constitutes trust and mutual acceptance in body and spiritual relations of nearness and intimacy."

"We are not talking about love as a virtue or as something good from a moral, religious, or philosophical perspective. We are talking biology, we are talking about our animal constitution as the particular kind of primates that we are as members of an evolutionary trend centered around the conservation of the biology of love and the expansion of intelligence. Love is the grounding of our existence as humans, and is the basic emotioning in our systemic identity as human beings."

(Maturana & Verden-Zöller, 1996)

Framed with respect to consensuality and acceptance, this delineation of 'love' can be linked to human evolution, particularly as it has manifested a trend toward sociality.

"The evolutionary history of our lineage as a history of the conservation of a neotenic trend in the biology of love, is a history of social life also centered on consensuality and cooperation, not on competition or aggressive strife. As such our evolutionary history is a history of expansion of the capacities for consensuality, and, hence, of expansion of intelligence."

(Maturana & Verden-Zöller, 1996)

This closing allusion to 'intelligence' can be adequately evaluated only with regard to the manner in which that common term is reformulated in autopoietic theory (cf. the entry for intelligence; Maturana & Guiloff, 1980). In this reformulated view, intelligence (to the extent it is relatively metrizable) is proportional to the degree to which an organism is capable of operation in a domain of ontogenic structural coupling. In the case of languaging humans, it is proportional to the degree to which an organism operates (or can operate) in a consensual domain. The emphasis on consensuality provides a point of linkage between intelligence and love (as both are reformulated by Maturana and his collaborators):

"The only emotion that expands intelligence is love, and this is so because intelligence has to do with the acceptance of the legitimacy of the other and the expansion of the possibility for consensuality that such acceptance entails."

(Maturana & Verden-Zöller, 1996)

Furthermore, this 'sociality' which has evolved among humans is not the motivation for 'love', but rather the result of this co-orientational capacity:

"If love occurs, there is socialization, if it does not occur, there is no socialization. Furthermore, I am also saying that as such love is expression of a spontaneous structural congruence that constitutes a beginning that can be expanded or restricted, and even disappear, in the coontogenic structural drift that begins to take place when it takes place. And, since I say that social phenomena are the phenomena that take place in the spontaneous coontogenic structural drift, I am also saying that love is the fundament of social phenomena and not its consequence, and that social phenomena in any domain of interactions last only as long as love lasts in that domain."

(Maturana, 1985)

Cf. : emotion, consensual domain, intelligence, social phenomena

"A unity in the physical space, defined by its organization, which connotes a non-animistic outlook; and whose dynamisms is apparent."

(Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. 136)

In the literature, the term 'machine' is sometimes apparently used as a synonym for 'system' (as that term is colloquially used). However, in Maturana and Varela (1980), the term 'system' is reserved as a general label for any discernible composite unity (Cf. system), and the reader is advised to bear in mind that this apparent synonymity is constrained to the scope of the term 'composite unity' as it is delineated in the literature. The reliance on the notion of 'machine' in the early writings derives directly from Maturana and Varela's stance of mechanicism. The reliance on 'machine' as an explanatory construct is extremely important in the context of establishing and maintaining such a mechanistic perspective.

"In saying that living systems are 'machines' we are pointing to several notions that should be made explicit. First we imply a nonanimistic view ... Second, we are emphasizing that a living system is defined by its organization, and hence that it can be explained as any organization is explained, that is, in terms of relations, not of component properties. Finally, we are pointing out from the start the dynamism apparent in living systems and which the word 'machine' or 'system' connotes."

(Varela, 1979, p. 7)

Cf. : composite unity , mechanical phenomenology, mechanical phenomenon, mechanicism, mechanistic explanation, organization , system

This construct (and its associated constructs) set the stage for analyzing those explanatory paths by which an observer may address living systems' cognitive capacities (including her own). The paths of objectivity-in-parenthesis and objectivity-without-parenthesis represent "...two fundamental kinds or manners of listening for explanations that an observer may adopt according to whether he or she asks or does not ask for a biological explanation of his or her cognitive abilities." (Maturana, 1988a, p. 28)

Cf. : explanation, explanatory path, criterion of acceptability

Cf. : physical space, synthetic (explanatory paradigm)

Cf. : analytic (explanatory paradigm), explanation, materiality, synthetic (explanatory paradigm)

Currently professor of biology at the University of Chile in Santiago, Maturana was awarded the Premio Nacional de Ciencias (Chile's National Science Prize) in 1994. He continues through the date of this writing as a very active scholar, writer, and lecturer considered to be the focal "leading edge" cognitive theorist by (e.g.) Gregory Bateson, James Lovelock, and Fritjof Capra.

Professor Maturana has always emphasized his status as a biologist, and that his work proceeds from a biological perspective.

Cf. : machine, mechanicism, biological phenomenology, phenomenology, statical phenomenology.

Cf. : biological phenomenology, biological phenomenon, mechanical phenomenology

Varela goes somewhat farther in characterizing such an approach as "...nothing more or less than the essence of a modern mechanicism." The problem is that this position is not necessarily isomorphic with the 'mechanism' or 'mechanistic approach' attributed (typically in the course of criticism) to a variety of reductionist, rationalistic enterprises. The term 'mechanism' has a substantial history in philosophy, during which it has fallen subject to multiple nuanced subdefinitions. Neither Maturana nor Varela have explicitly gone beyond the general sort of comments cited above to precisely state which of these philosophical nuances may or may not pertain to their own usage of the term.

Cf. : machine, mechanical phenomenology, mechanical phenomenon, mechanistic explanation

1.

A label for the focal referent generated in a scientific explanation, when operating in accordance with the scientific method (at least as delineated by Maturana).

"We modern natural scientists accept a given proposition as a scientific explanation of a particular situation of our praxis of living as observers (or phenomenon to be explained), only if it describes a mechanism that produces that situation or phenomenon as a consequence of its operation..."

(Maturana, 1988a, p. 34)

On a casual reading, the invocation of 'mechanism' may appear to connote any abstraction of causal or similar influence. However, in circumscribing scientific explanations as being limited to structure-determined systems, Maturana appears to use this term in a very literal sense:

"A dynamic structure determined system, that is, a structure determined system constituted as a system in continuous structural change, is a mechanism. In these circumstances, to claim that the criterion of validation of a scientific explanation is centred around the proposition of a mechanism that gives rise to the phenomenon to be explained as a consequence of its operation is to claim that science can only deal with structure determined systems. Or, in other words, to claim that a scientific explanation entails the propositions of a mechanism that generates the phenomenon to be explained, is to claim that the observer can propose scientific explanations only in those domains of operational coherences of his or her praxis of living in which he or she distinguishes structure determined systems."

(Maturana, 1988a, pp. 36-37)

It is not entirely clear whether: (a) the above-cited passage implies absolute circumscription of an ascription of 'mechanism' to composite unities solely; or (b) the apparent equivalence drawn between 'mechanism' and 'structure-determined system' is itself limited to the case of scientific explanation vis a vis such systems (e.g., living systems). This seeming ambiguity is reinforced by the fact that the explanatory mechanism is necessarily manifest in a phenomenal domain distinct from that in which the explained phenomenon is realized. (Cf. Maturana, 1988a, pp. 36 ff.)

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Cf. : scientific explanation, scientific method

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2.

The more common label for the general philosophical perspective or approach embraced by Maturana and Varela as mechanicism. If there is any basis upon which Maturana and/or Varela distinguish their espoused 'mechanicism' from 'mechanism', it is not detailed in the literature.

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3.

To the extent that it is apparently employed to denote a dynamic structure-determined system (cf. the above-cited passage from Maturana, 1988a), a possible synonym for machine. However, such an apparent equivalence is explicitly discernible only in the above-cited passage.

"In a mechanistic explanation, the observer explicitly or implicitly accepts that the properties of the system to be explained are generated by relations of the components of the system and are not to be found among the properties of those components. The same applies to the mechanistic explanation of a phenomenon, in which case the observer explicitly or implicitly accepts that the characteristics of the phenomenon to be explained result from the relations of its constitutive processes, and are not to be found among the characteristics of these processes."

(Maturana, 1978)

Maturana illustrates mechanistic explanation with the equation of a body's summary weight with the collective weight of its components. "The relation sum, applied to the components as defined by their property weight, determines the property weight of the body." (Maturana, 1978)

The emphasis on relations ties into a corresponding attention to the organization of the composite unity which is being explained. Because the subject's organization is by definition a set of relations (e.g., among components and/or processes) " a mechanistic explanation is an explicit or implicit subject dependent statement that entails, or describes, the organization of a system." (Maturana, 1978)

Because mechanistic explanations rely upon relational delineation, they should be (if properly executed) resistant to the potential pathology of phenomenal reduction -- i.e., the drawing of unwarranted explanatory equivalence between phenomenal domains specified in observation. "The reality described through mechanistic explanations ... implies the possibility of an endless generation of nonintersecting phenomenal domains as a result of the recursive constitution (organization) of new classes of unities through the recursive novel combinations of unities already defined. For epistemological reasons, then, mechanistic explanations are intrinsically nonreductionist." (Maturana, 1978)

Cf. : explanation, phenomenal domain, phenomenal reduction, vitalistic explanations

Cf. : structurally-determined, structure-specified

"Every structure determined system exists in a medium. This condition of existence is, necessarily, also a condition of structural complementarity between system and medium in which the interactions of the system in the medium are only perturbations. If structural complementarity is lost, if there is a single destructive interaction, then the system disintegrates and does not exist. This necessary structural complementarity between structure determined system and medium that I call structural coupling, is a condition of existence for every system. The part of the medium in which a system is distinguished, that is, the part of the medium that is operationally complementary to it, I call its niche. The niche is always specified and obscured by the system which is the only one that can reveal it. Furthermore, I call environment the part of the medium that an observer sees surrounding a system while this obscures its niche."

(Maturana, 1983, Section D.)

It is important to bear in mind that 'medium' is employed to connote something which may or may not correspond to ambience (in its strict definition), and that as the venue for perturbation 'medium' has connotations which are often colloquially ascribed to an 'environment' (a term which has a more restricted meaning in the context of Maturana and Varela's theories). For example, in discussing structural plasticity and structural determination, Maturana and Guiloff (1980, p. 138) write of a system maintaining its autopoiesis that "...structural changes are compensated in such a manner that the system continues its life (autopoiesis) in the perturbing medium..." In this passage, it is unclear (a) whether the ambience / environment distinction is important, and (b) if so, to which side of that terminological divide the phrase "perturbing medium" refers. This becomes still more confusing when, in the section immediately following, these authors speak of an autopoietic system having "...recurrent plastic interactions with entities of its external medium, living or not, and with its own states (its internal medium)..." (Maturana & Guiloff, 1980, p. 138)

To give another example, in explaining the critical notion of organization , Maturana (1978) states "...nothing is said about the medium in which an autopoietic system may exist, or about its interactions or material interchanges with the medium..." As was the case for the above-cited passages, it is unclear whether in this case 'medium' connotes 'ambience' or (more probably) 'environment'. This potential ambiguity persists in more recent literature, as in the following passage concerning systems:

" The elements that do not belong to a system but with which the elements of the system may interact and relate, form an operational medium in which the system exists as a composite unity."

(Maturana, Mpodozis & Letelier, 1995)

Occasionally, it would appear a colloquial usage of 'medium' is treated as equivalent with another construct, such as domain of interactions (Cf. Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. xxi). For example, in discussing the boundary constraint of disintegration on structural coupling, Maturana and Guiloff (1980, p. 139) refer to "...the medium (system of perturbations) within which a system operates..." Finally, in later writings Maturana has tended to employ the term 'medium' as an apparent synonym for the environing realm with which a unity couples -- i.e., as an apparent analogue for environment.

To summarize, 'medium' is a key construct with some arguably fluid occurrences in the literature base. As an analogue for 'ambience', the term 'medium' is used with a generality that approximates that of a 'space.' As an analogue for a given ' domain', the term's usage would seem to be subject to those features distinguishing a domain from a space. Finally, as an analogue for 'environment', the term comes closest to being the sort of descriptive construct of a given observer as is context (as that term is specifically used in Maturana and Varela, 1980).

As such, one can invoke different occurrences in the literature to support distinct connotations of the term 'medium.' Such contradictory connotations raise a risk in invoking the term at all. This is most potentially problematical where this term is employed as analogue to both ambience and environment -- two constructs specifically differentiated for the purpose of maintaining clear referential segregation between (a) reference to the ontic context of a unity (ambience) and (b) the observer's observed context for the unity and its operations (environment). To profligately use 'medium' without clearly stating it as implying 'ambience', 'environment', or something else simply blurs the distinctions between at least two very important frames of reference.

In discussing Maturana's general principles, Winograd and Flores (1986) make a specific qualification of their usage of 'medium':

"...[W]e use the term 'medium' rather than 'environment' to refer to the space in which an organism exists. This is to avoid the connotation that there is a separation between an entity and its 'environment.' An entity exists as part of a medium, not as a separate object inside it."

(Winograd & Flores, 1986, p. 43, footnote 7)

This definitively makes 'medium' a synonym for the more strictly delineated term 'ambience' (as used in Maturana & Varela, 1980). Allusion to Winograd and Flores' version, therefore, affords an opportunity to clarify one's intent in employing these terms.

On the other hand, reliance upon Winograd and Flores (regarding this issue) also entails risk. Owing to the fact that many folks' initial introduction to autopoietic theory is through Winograd and Flores, there is a substantial potential for newcomers to carry these authors' own qualification forward as if it were isomorphic with Maturana and/or Varela's usage. Although this qualification parallels those places where Maturana and Varela equate 'medium' with 'ambience', it must be borne in mind that this is only one of the connotations to be found in the primary literature. As such, considerable caution should be employed in using 'medium' without explicit qualification of the author's connotations.

Figure AmbEnv graphically illustrates the variant delineations of 'ambience', 'environment', and 'medium' as discussed here. The figure is located within the entry for 'environment'.

It is also interesting to note that in those cases where the extent or "corpus" of the unity is being distinguished from its environs (regardless of that 'medium' or 'ambience' subsuming both), no one has seen fit to introduce a label for the complement of 'environment'. If the 'environment' lies outside the extent of the given unity, what is the label for the 'negative space' occupied by the unity itself? Is such a label needed? Is it even of any possible use?

Cf. : ambience, domain, environment, space

"...characterizes a unity by stating the conditions in which it exists as a distinguishable entity, but he cognizes it only to the extent that he defines a metadomain in which he can operate with the entity that he characterized."

(Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. xxiii)

An even more specific allusion (with respect to composite unities) occurs in the following passage:

"A composite unity is a unity distinguished as a simple unity that through further operations of distinction is decomposed by the observer into components that through their composition would constitute the original simple unity in the domain in which it is distinguished. A composite unity, therefore, is operationally distinguished as a simple unity in a metadomain with respect to the domain in which its components are distinguished because it results as such from an operation of composition."

(Maturana, 1988b, 6.iii.)

Perhaps the most extensive reference to metadomains occurs in discussing explanations. For example, Maturana writes:

"[W]hatever we say about how anything happens takes place in the praxis of our living as a comment, as a reflection, as a reformulation, in short, as an explanation of the praxis of our living, and as such it does not replace or constitute the praxis of living that it purports to explain. Thus, to say that we are made of matter, or to say that we are ideas in the mind of God, are both explanations of that which we live as our experience of being, yet neither matter nor ideas in the mind of God constitute the experience of being that which they are supposed to explain. Explanations take place operationally in a metadomain with respect to that which they explain."

(Maturana, 1988b, 4.0.)

Cf. : domain, distinction, explanation

Cf. : the "conduit metaphor" of Michael Reddy (The conduit metaphor: A case of frame conflict in our language about language, in Ortony, A. (ed.), Metaphor and Thought, Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 1979, 284-324).

Cf. : emotion, emotioning

Cf. : universum, explanation, explanatory path, objectivity-in-parenthesis, constituted objectivity, objectivity-without-parenthesis, versum

Cf. : linguistic behavior, languaging, orientation

"The origin of knowledge (and the making of sense) therefore does not resemble the design of a system which is optimized to match a given external standard. We could say it resembles, rather, a tinkering, a dynamic sculpting, a building of structures from the materials available to an organism that it puts together as they appear in a drift which follows one of many possible paths. In this process, any actual path of tinkering will arise from the process of natural drift. The key to this process is that the consequences of any interactions are to be found, not in the nature of the perturbation that triggered them, but in the way the structure compensates for such interactions according to its dynamic landscape ... A path of natural drift is a history of internal validations of interactions by an autonomous entity ..."

(Varela, 1984b, p. 219, italics in the original)

The above-cited example is of drift with respect to ontogeny. More broadly, Maturana and Varela applied the notion of natural drift to phylogeny in explaining their non-optimizational view of evolution. They use the metaphor of water drops falling upon a peaked hill (cf. Maturana & Varela, 1992, pp. 107-108), and the ongoing variation in the courses of those drops' flow down the hillside, to illustrate how natural drift -- although determined solely by the character of the drops themselves as presented with affordances for flow -- appears to an observer as a phenomenon of increasing variation.

Whether invoked for explanation of ontogenic or phylogenetic change, 'natural drift' is essentially a shorthand way of stating that local conditions of the subject system (e.g., its autopoietic / autonomous features) determine under environmental perturbation a course of proliferation which to an observer may appear to be a process determined or optimized with respect to a more global frame of reference.

Cf. : ontogenic drift, structural drift

Based on the qualification with respect to a domain of interactions, "niche" is a construct distinct from environment, which denotes the observer's delineation of the medium in which an organism is observed to operate.

"Niche and environment, then, intersect only to the extent that the observer (including instruments) and the organism have comparable organizations, but even then there are always parts of the environment that lie beyond any possibility of intersection with the domain of interactions of the organism, and there are parts of the niche that lie beyond any possibility of intersection with the domain of interactions of the observer."

(Maturana & Varela, 1980, pp. 10-11)

Cf. : cognitive domain, domain of interactions, environment, phenomenological domain

Cf. : explanation, operational explanations, symbolic explanations

As such, Varela ascribes to autopoietic theory the nature of a nonmaterially synthetic explanation: "The definitory element of living unities is a certain organization (the set of interrelations leading to a given form of transitions) independent of the structure, the materiality that embodies it; not the nature of the components, but their interrelations." (Varela, 1979, p. 10)

Cf. : analytic (explanatory paradigm), explanation, materially synthetic (explanations), organization , structure nonmaterially synthetic (explanations)

"... [W]e bring forth a world of distinctions through the changes of state that we undergo as we conserve our structural coupling in the different media in which we become immersed along our lives, and then, using our changes of state as recurrent distinctions in a social domain of coordination of actions (language), we bring forth a world of objects as coordinations of actions with which we describe our coordinations of action. Unfortunately we forget that the object that arises in this manner is a coordination of actions in a social domain, and deluded by the effectiveness of our experience in coordinating our conducts in language, we give the object an external preeminence and validate it in our descriptions as if it had an existence independent from us as observers.

(Maturana, 1983, Section H.)

"...[O]bjects arise in language as consensual coordinations of actions that operationally obscure for further recursive consensual coordinations of actions by the observers the consensual coordinations of actions (distinctions) that they coordinate. Objects are, in the process of languaging, consensual coordinations of actions that operate as tokens for the consensual coordinations of actions that they coordinate. Objects do not pre-exist language."

(Maturana, 1988b, 8.ii.b.)

"Objects arise in language as consensual coordinations of actions that in a domain of consensual distinctions are tokens for more basic coordinations of actions, which they obscure. Without language and outside language there are no objects, because objects only arise as consensual coordinations of actions in the recursion of consensual coordinations of actions that languaging is. For living systems that do not operate in language, there are no objects; or in other words, objects are not part of their cognitive domains."

(Maturana, 1988b, 9.iv.)

As such, the predication of descriptions and explanations on discrete 'objects' in the world -- our typically manner of describing and explaining -- has proven so 'effective' in mutually orienting and operationally coordinating ourselves in our praxis of living (individually and collectively) that we overlook the processual character of their discernment and formally embrace the 'shorthand' of treating such 'objects' as if they 'existed' in some ontically absolute sense.

The linkage of 'objects' with the observer outlined above parallels and reinforces the observer-dependent aspects of explanations given (particularly in the core literature) for the construct of 'unity' (both simple and composite). It also provides evidence that Maturana's personal tendency to use the term 'entity' rather than 'unity' does not connote anything violating the observer-contingent character attributed to the latter, which must be considered a synonym (or at least a subset) of 'object'.

Cf. : distinction, entity, self-consciousness, language, languaging, linguistic behavior, unity, recursion

"Objects arise in language as consensual coordinations of actions that in a domain of consensual distinctions are tokens for more basic coordinations of actions, which they obscure. Without language and outside language there are no objects, because objects only arise as consensual coordinations of actions in the recursion of consensual coordinations of actions that languaging is. ... Since we human beings are objects in a domain of objects that we bring forth and operate upon in language, language is our peculiar domain of existence and our peculiar cognitive domain. Within these circumstances, objectivity arises in language as a manner of operating with objects without distinguishing the actions that they obscure. In this manner of operating, descriptions arise as concatenations of consensual coordinations of actions that result in further consensual coordinations of actions which, if performed without distinguishing how objects arise, can be distinguished as manners of languaging that take place as if objects existed outside of language."

(Maturana, 1988b, 9.iv.)

It is important to note that this sense of 'objectivity' (as 'propensity for discrete referentiality') differs from more common usages of the term (e.g., as 'an independent and unbiased manner'). Yet it is this sense which properly serves as the basis for (e.g.) 'objectivity-in/without-parenthesis'.

Cf. : distinction, entity, self-consciousness, language, languaging, linguistic behavior, unity, recursion, object

Maturana's own approach to this apparent paradox is to qualify existence with respect to the observer and her operations of observation (i.e., her biological constitution as the fundament for her cognitive and linguistic processes). This contravenes the objectivistic presumptions of conventional enquiry (i.e., objectivity without parenthesis), on the grounds that if such an alternative explanatory stance "... questions the properties of the observer, if it asks about how cognition and language arise, then it must ... take as constitutive that existence is dependent upon the biology of the observer." (Maturana, 1988b, 5.i.) This, then, is Maturana's espoused vantage for addressing cognition and language:

"...I shall proceed without using the notion of objectivity to validate what I say; that is, I shall put objectivity in parentheses. In other words, I shall go on using an object language because this is the only language that we have (and can have), but ... I shall not claim that what I say is valid because there is an independent objective reality that validates it. I shall speak as a biologist, and as such I shall use the criterion of validation of scientific statements to validate what I say, accepting that everything that takes place is brought forth by the observer in his or her praxis of living as a primary experiential condition, and that any explanation is secondary."

(Maturana, 1988b, 5.ii.)

The explanatory path of objectivity-in-parenthesis entails commitment to 3 primary or axiomatic positions on the part of the observer:

"a) that he or she is, as a human being, a living system;

b) that his or her cognitive abilities as an observer are biological phenomena because they are altered when his or her biology is altered; and

c) that if he or she wants to explain his or her cognitive abilities as an observer, he or she must do so showing how they arise as biological phenomena in his or her realisation as a living system."

(Maturana, 1988a, p. 29; vertical spacing added for readability)

As a secondary or corollary commitment in this path, the observer must accept any and all constitutive features of living systems -- most particularly their imputed inability to distinguish (within the scope of their experience) between perception (i.e., apprehension of something objectively existent) and illusion (a misapprehension of something objectively existent). This has the effect of opening the doors for multiple -- even infinite -- viable or valid explanations, as well as an equivalent diversity of explanatory domains. As such, this explanatory path allows for a multiversum instead of a unary universum.

The inability to distinguish between perception and illusion derives from the observer's unary domain of interactions, including those interactions with her own states within her closed nervous system. Phrased another way, if all operations of the observer in her cognitive domain are of a uniform type or character, there would be no a priori method by which she could discern those (purportedly) externally-impelled from those internally-impelled. As a result, any experience's "...classification as a perception or as an illusion is a characterisation of it that an observer makes through a reference to another different experience that, again, can only be classified as a perception or as an illusion through reference to another one..." (Maturana, 1988a, p. 30)

Where the path of objectivity-without-parenthesis predicates "valid cognition" upon achievement of congruence between some internal state or conceptualization and the presumptively "objective" external world, objectivity-in-parenthesis situates the focus of congruence within the ongoing experience of the observer. As such, "...existence is constituted with what the observer does, and the observer brings forth the objects that he or she distinguishes with his or her operations of distinction as distinctions of distinctions in language." (Maturana, 1988a, p. 30)

This in turn means that discrete referents (e.g., "objects" in the observer's environing medium) are not so much indexicable subcomponents of something "out there" as congruent intersections among the domains and operations immersing the observer coincident with their discernment. "[T]he objects that the observer brings forth in his or her operations of distinction arise endowed with the properties that realise the operational coherences of the domain of praxis of living in which they are constituted." Insofar as this "constitution" is contingent upon the observer's acting in language, those "objects" which are presumed to evidence "perception" [receipt and re-presentation of something entirely extrinsic to the cognizing observer] instead evidence the coherences precipitating from that observer's state and stance.

According to Maturana (Cf. 1988a), these points lead to three conclusions:

1. "Each configuration of operations of distinctions that the observer performs specifies a domain of reality as a domain of operational coherences of his or her praxis of living..." (Maturana, 1988a, p. 31) For such a domain of reality, the particular "objects" populating it are brought forth in terms of such coherences, which establish the contextual basis for engagement. "[F]or example, the domain of physical existence is brought forth as a domain of reality through the recursive application by the observer in his or her praxis of living of the configuration of operations or distinctions constituted by measurements of mass, distance, and time." (Maturana, 1988a, p. 31)

2. "Each domain of reality constitutes a domain of explanations of the praxis of living of the observer as this uses recursively the operational coherences that constitute it to generate explanatory reformulations of his or her praxis of living." (Maturana, 1988a, p. 31) In other words, the manner of constitution of the domain of reality in turn specifies or prescribes that set or range of explanations which the observer may potentially acknowledge as relevant to the given circumstance. This occurs through the linkage between (a) the operational coherences within an observer's praxis of living by which she brings forth the given domain of reality and (b) those coherences which pertain to the observer's reformulation of her praxis of living by way of explanation. Maturana illustrates this linkage by noting "...the recursive application of the operational coherences of the praxis of living of the observer that constitute the physical domain of existence [Cf. : 1) above -- Ed.] as the criterion of acceptability for the explanatory reformulation of the praxis of living of the observer constitute the domain of physical explanations." (Maturana, 1988a, p. 31)

3. "Although all domains of reality are different in terms of the operational coherences that constitute them and, therefore, are not equal in the experience of the observer, they are all equally legitimate as domains of existence because they arise in the same manner as they are brought forth..." (Maturana, 1988a, p. 31) This affords a multiplicity of legitimation or validation in explaining experience, and it claims a uniform "face validity" for the multiversa which the path of objectivity-in-parenthesis portends.

NOTE: The ontological diagram (Cf. Maturana, 1988a, p. 32) illustrates the relationships between the two explanatory paths.

Cf. : explanatory path, objectivity-without-parenthesis, praxis of living, constituted objectivity, transcendental objectivity, multiversum, universum, perception, illusion, domain of reality, ontological diagram, parenthesis

In this explanatory path, "...the observer implicity or explicitly accepts his or her cognitive abilities, as such, as his or constitutive properties, and he or she does so by not accepting, or by rejecting, a complete enquiry into their biological origin." (Maturana, 1988a, p. 28) By denying or avoiding this enquiry into the nexus at which the subjects of interest (cognitive capacities) and the instruments by which they are pursued (cognition and language) meet, the observer must look somewhere else for the fundament upon which to base analysis. Under the rubric of transcendental objectivity, the observer "...implicitly or explicitly assumes that existence takes place independently of what he or she does, that things exist independently of whether he or she knows them, and that he or she can know them, or can know of them, or can know about them, through perception or reason." (Ibid.)

Phrased another way, within the path of objectivity- without-parenthesis the observer prioritizes the extrinsic over the intrinsic, and projects the status of ultimate 'reality' onto that which environs her. explanations framed within this path therefore point or refer to something "out there": "...some entity such as matter, energy, mind, consciousness, ideas or God..." (Ibid.) "[I]t is the listening by the observer with a criterion of acceptability that entails a reference to some entity that exists independently of what he or she does for a reformulation of the praxis of living to be accepted as an explanation of it that constitutes this explanatory path and, in fact, defines it." (Maturana, 1988a, p. 29)

Such a perspective "...entails the assumption that existence is independent of the observer, that there is an independent domain of existence, the universum, that is the ultimate reference for the validation of any explanation." Within this universum, entitative elements (i.e., objects, entities) "...exist with independency of the observer that distinguishes them, and it is this independent existence of things (entities, ideas) that specifies the truth." This perspective is based on a presumption of holistic unity for the universum -- i.e., that it is essentially undifferentiable with respect to its mode of existence. This in turn sets the stage for simplistic reductionism as a mode of explanation, insofar as a unary mode of existence would seem to preclude gross categorial error in linking explanations for differentiable phenomena at separate levels of granulation or composability. (The quoted passages are taken from Maturana (1988b), section 5.iii)

In addition to its epistemological biases, objectivity without parenthesis entails a particular mode of explanatory validation -- one which affords the potential for a referential exclusivity which in turn may be leveraged so as to claim authority or power. "He or she who has access to reality is necessarily right in any dispute, and those who do not have such access are necessarily wrong. In the universum, coexistence demands obedience to knowledge." (Maturana, 1988b, 5.iii.) By virtue of this, "...this explanatory path is constitutively blind (or deaf) to the participation of the observer in the constitution of what he or she accepts as an explanation." (Maturana, 1988a, p. 29)

The last point cited is very important, because it sets the stage for social or even political ramifications of this explanatory path. Maturana has since the mid-1980's increasingly emphasized that objectivity without parenthesis tacitly underlies an explanatory power game. The invocation of an "objective [i.e., objective without parenthesis] rational argument" to persuade someone else carries a presumptive force, owing to "...the implicit or explicit pretense that the other cannot refuse what our argument claims because its validity as such rests on its reference to the real." (Maturana, 1988a, p. 26) This in turn relies on "...the additional explicit or implicit claim that the real is universally and objectively valid because it is independent of what we do, and once it is indicated it cannot be denied." (Maturana, 1988a, p. 26) As such, in this explanatory path "...a claim of knowledge is a demand for obedience." (Maturana, 1988a, p. 29) This is the basis for social leverage in this explanatory path; the invocation of 'objectivity' affords advantage by insinuating a "...privileged access to the real that allows us to make our rational arguments." (Maturana, 1988a, p. 26)

Because this explanatory path aspires to (and demands) adherence or consistency with regard to the objective universum, it affords a basis for distinguishing between perception (apprehension of some objective referent) and illusion (misapprehension of some objective referent). This distinction in turn allows observers in this path to denigrate divergent orientations as "illusion" and discount them out of hand.

NOTE: The ontological diagram (Cf. Maturana, 1988a, p. 32) illustrates the relationships between the two explanatory paths.

Cf. : explanation, explanatory path, objectivity-in-parenthesis, praxis of living, illusion, perception, ontological diagram, parenthesis

1.

One of the key constructs in autopoietic theory, denoting a cognitive system capable of linguistic behavior -- most definitively with respect to itself by virtue of its closure (e.g., of the nervous system).

"A system that through recursive interactions with its own linguistic states may always linguistically interact with its own states as if with representations of its interactions."

(Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. 137)

Through this recursive internal interaction, the system's own linguistic states serve as sources of perturbation / deformation for the system itself. Phrased another way, such a system is self-coupling.

A "... living system who can make distinctions and specify that which he or she distinguishes as a unity, as an entity different from himself or herself that can be used for manipulations or descriptions in interactions with other observers. An observer can make distinctions in actions and thoughts, recursively, and is able to operate as if he or she were external to (distinct from) the circumstances in which the observer finds himself or herself. "

(Maturana, 1978, p. 31)

As a consequence:

"[O]bserving is both the ultimate starting point and the most fundamental question in any attempt to understand reality and reason as phenomena of the human domain. Indeed, everything said is said by an observer to another observer that could be him- or herself."

(Maturana, 1988, p. 27)

In later (e.g., post-1985) writings, Maturana has increasingly tended to introduce and define the observer with less strict regard to the earlier formalisms. Specifically, the latter-day definitions offered for "observer" tend to emphasize "language" (typically absent elaboration of its connotations as laid out in Maturana (1978)) within a context more colloquial than that of the 1970's-era literature. Where the earlier definitions (e.g., in Maturana & Varela, 1980) emphasized closure and internal dynamics as constitutive of the "observer", the latter-day Maturana definitions emphasize referential / indexical openness and interactions with the environment. Phrased another way, the earlier mode of definition focused on the internal relationships which afforded a composite unity the capacity to operate as an observer. The later mode of definition instead focuses upon the manner in which that observer operates in language. For example:

"We human beings operate as observers, that is, we make distinctions in language."

(Maturana, 1988a, p. 26)

"An observer is, in general, any being operating in language, or, in particular, any human being, in the understanding that language defines humanity. In our individual experience as human beings we find ourselves in language, we do not see ourselves growing into it: we are already observers by being in language when we begin as observers to reflect upon language and the condition of being observers. In other words, whatever takes place in the praxis of living of the observer takes place as distinctions in language through languaging, and this is all that he or she can do as such."

(Maturana, 1988b, 6.i.)

While there is no demonstrable conflict between the earlier and later foci in defining "observer", there is similarly little demonstrable overlap (unless one is conversant enough with the literature base to "fill in the blanks"). In the earlier literature, the observer is constituted by virtue of a particular mode of organization permitting recursive structural coupling with itself. In the later literature, the observer "arises" by virtue of her operation in "language." The benign interpretation is that these are nothing more than complementary perspectives on one subject. However, the preponderance of the colloquial / language-arisen version in the literature of the last decade (i.e., Maturana's papers) has demonstrably resulted in some newcomers being unfamiliar with (and/or wholly overlooking) the mechanistic, structure-oriented theoretical elements (in the earlier literature) for which the latter expositions sometimes seem a popularized shorthand.

---

2.

The term used more generally to denote one or another cognitive system (operating as an observer 1.) in its interactions. At the extreme, the term sometimes occurs in near-colloquial usage to denote someone who watches or apprehends a given phenomenon or event. This usage, though distinguishable from 1., is not entirely distinct; it essentially addresses the operation of an observing system presumed to be constituted in accordance with the connotations of the more formal specifications given above.

Varela (1976) illustrates that even in this (more allusive) frame of reference, the observer is still subject to rigorous specification:

"Three main properties (at least) characterize an observer:

(i) capacity for indication: to decide boundaries, to come up with nodes, systems, to have criteria for stability.

(ii) capacity for time: to chop a net and start a sequence, to compute through a process, to approximate the stability of a whole.

(iii) capacity for agreement: to externalize, to synchronize with other observers, to re-produce other's distinctions and follow corresponding time patterns.

Let us call an observer anything possessing these properties. I am taking a conscious mind to be characterizable, for the present purpose, as observer-able.

...For an observer [it] is necessarily the case that whatever he describes (sees, perceives, understands) is a reflection of his actions (perception, properties, organization). There is a mutual reflection between described and describer. They are mutually revealing." (Varela, 1976, p. 65)

The construct of the observer is perhaps the most crucial nexus in the explanatory web of autopoietic theory. The observer is the subject of explanation, in the sense that the biology of cognition builds up a progressive set of explanations serving to delineate her operations. Similarly, the observer is the subject explaining, in the sense that all theories, statements, etc., are the product of an observer (2.) whose operations in this role are (within the scope of the theory) circumscribed by her status as an observer (1.). Phrased another way, the observer's explaining (as an act) is addressed with strict regard to the observer explanations (devised and elaborated by Maturana and Varela).

In one sense, this requisite interrelationship was presumed to be one of the starting points for the theory. This is well illustrated by Maturana's comments on the status of science and scientific explanations:

"...[W]e are seldom aware that an observation is the realization of a series of operations that entail an observer as a system with properties that allow him or her to perform these operations, and, hence, that the properties of the observer, by specifying the operations that he or she can perform determine the observer's domain of possible observations."

(Maturana, 1978)

In other words, conventional Western science (operating in the explanatory path of objectivity- without-parenthesis) treats 'observation' as controlled access to a presumably objective world, whose character and characteristics are available for unequivocal inspection. Maturana has spent decades looking into that which has been overlooked in this attitude -- that perhaps it is the character of the observer which specifies (or at least qualifies) her observations. In the early stages of developing the biology of cognition, it was the observer which was the focal subject of analysis, and this analysis was pursued from a stance of mechanicism and with primary regard to cognition as a biological phenomenon.

Once the characteristics and constraints of a subject observer had been laid out, the stage was set for elaborating how such an observer could operate in everyday life (i.e., in her praxis of living). The reciprocal status of the observer noted above (as both explainer and explained) has unfortunately become blurred in later writings which (although consistent with the earlier, more detailed analyses) begin with the observer (2.) and proceed to describe her operations in an ordinary setting. Without attention to the background to these later writings (e.g., attention to the notion of observer 1.), newcomers have been known to overlook the particulars of the stance, the method, and the explanations from which Maturana's latter (and most popular) writings derive.

Cf. : consensual distinction, metadomain, observer-community, phenomenology, phenomenological domain

Cf. inquiring community

Where structural coupling between / among organisms is realized in a generated consensual domain, Maturana and Guiloff (1980, p. 141) label ontogenic adaptation's analogous construct a domain of ontogenic adaptation.

Cf. : adaptation, domain of ontogenic adaptations, evolutionary adaptation, ontogeny, structural coupling

"...history of structural changes of a system in its domain of existence, that follows a course configured instant by instant following the path in which, in its interactions, it conserves organization and adaptation. The drift is a process of "all or nothing", that is, either the system conserves its organization and adaptation and remains in drift, or it disintegrates. Therefore, in ontogenic structural drift and in conserving adaptation, system and circumstance change together, so that a system will never find itself out of place or incongruent with the medium."

(Maturana & Mpodozis, 1992, Appendix)

As illustrated in the above-cited passage, this term is also invoked as ontogenic structural drift.

"The history of the structural transformation of a unity."

(Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. 137)

Put another way (and with specific regard to living systems), ontogeny is "...the history of maintenance of [the system's] identity through continuous autopoiesis in the physical space." (Varela, 1979a, p. 32)

Staying with the specific example of autopoietic systems, this 'continuous autopoiesis' necessarily entails a continuity of the organization which exemplifies the given system. This central role of organization in delineating 'maintenance of identity' is reflected in a similar central role in qualifying the manner in which ontogeny (as defined herein) may proceed. Varela (1979a, p. 32) states that for an autopoietic system "...all the changes that it may undergo without loss of identity, and hence with maintenance of its defining relations, are necessarily determined by its invariant organization." Although organization, then, specifies the manner or range of dynamics operant in the system's ontogeny, it does not specify the precise course of ontogeny. Instead, "...the sequence of such changes is determined by the sequence of these deformations." (Ibid.)

Combined with the indistinguishability of internal vs. external perturbations, this intertwining of structural determination (synchronic state transformation) and ontogenic coupling (diachronic course of coupling) into a single ontogeny induces: (1) a complexity or richness of potential behaviors; and (2) a complexity of potential descriptions for those behaviors. As such, structural / ontogenic determinism cannot be equated with strict causal determinism unless the observer has full and unequivocal access to both the structural state and ontogenic history of the observed in addition to access to unequivocal predictive rules governing the observed's transformations. For a more detailed explanation of these points, the reader is referred to Varela (1979, pp. 32-33).

Cf. : structural coupling

This diagram divides the possible explanatory paths with respect to the dichotomy between objectivity-in-parenthesis (the right half) and objectivity-without-parenthesis (the left half). In all cases, an observer is explaining phenomena she engages in her experience (praxis of living). The two explanatory paths are differentiated according to whether or not the observer / explainer ascribes 'objectivity' (independence from observer and observation; i.e., 'without parenthesis') or '(objectivity)' (dependence upon observer and observation; i.e., 'in parenthesis'). In the case of objectivity-without-parenthesis (the prevailing worldview of the Enlightenment and, hence, modern enquiry), there is assumed to be one all-subsuming reality (a universum). This universum is explained in terms of discrete (presumably objective) elements (e.g., 'matter', energy', 'mind', 'God'), and the criterion of acceptability for an explanation is one of 'truth' (i.e., adherence to the presumed model / element(s)). In the case of objectivity-in-parenthesis, observer-dependency of explanation opens up a realm of multiple explanations and, hence, multiple 'realities' (a multiversum) explained in terms of operations of distinction, and the criterion of acceptability for an explanation is one of 'operational coherence.'

Cf. : explanatory path, objectivity-in-parenthesis, objectivity-without-parenthesis, parenthesis

Cf. : explanation, explanatory path, objectivity-in-parenthesis, objectivity-without-parenthesis, domain of constitutive ontologies, domain of transcendental ontologies, parenthesis

Autopoietic systems exhibit operational closure because "...their identity is specified by a network of dynamic processes whose effects do not leave that network." (Maturana & Varela, 1992, p. 89) Operational closure is exemplified by the nervous system, which "... functions as a closed network of changes in relations of activity between its components... [where]...every change of relations of activity leads to further changes of relations of activity" (Ibid., p. 164).

As a species of 'closure', operational closure provides one of those points upon which critics have accused Maturana and/or Varela of espousing closed systems (as that label is used in classical cybernetics). Most such criticisms target the construct of organizational closure, upon which operational closure is contingent. In refuting the notion of autonomous systems being closed systems, the following passage come closest to illustrating the status of operational closure in this debate:

"Please note that when we speak of organizational closure, by no means do we imply interactional closure, i.e., the system in total isolation. We do assume that every system will maintain endless interactions with the environment which will impinge and perturb it. If this were not so, we could not even distinguish it."

(Varela & Goguen, 1978, p. 294, emphasis in the original)

This does not, however, completely close the issue. Both the system's engagement with its environment / medium and its constitutive components' engagement with each other are 'interactions' (in the specific sense of that term in autopoietic theory). As such, one might still question the grounds for differentiating interactional closure with respect to the environment / medium (i.e., seen from the 'outside in') from 'operational closure' (as a variety of interactional closure seem from the 'inside out').

"This openness to interaction, of course, raises an important objection to the ... [Closure Thesis -- Ed.] : where do we draw the line to separate those interactions that participate in the system's organization [i.e., 'operation's, as used here -- Ed.], and those that are environmental disturbances? This is admittedly fuzzy. But this fuzziness is a result of the fact that there are many alternative criteria of distinction ... [invocable in adducing a system's boundary and organizational closure -- Ed.]. Once a criterion of distinction (and hence some procedure to testing stability) is given and fixed, the boundaries of a system are perfectly clear."

(Varela & Goguen, 1978, p. 294)

In other words, the explanatory reliance on (a) what might be called an autonomous system's internal interactivity among components (i.e., its 'operations'); and (b) the 'closure' of the network of processes and transformations constituting these operations does not conflict with that system's being open and subject to external interactivity with its environment (or 'medium', as Maturana prefers). Summarily stated: operational closure does not mean interactional closure. The real issue is the delineation of the set of system dynamics into the categories of operation / internal and 'interaction' / external -- something which is itself contingent on the particular domain and manner of engagement through which the given observer distinguishes the system in the first place.

It is, then, the cognitive point of view which provides the basis for differentiating operational closure from interactional closure. For a given composite unity (system) S addressed from the behavioral view, S's internal operations are obscured behind / beyond that system's boundary. From this view, S is not interactionally closed (e.g., by virtue of being observable), but its operational closure is unavailable for inspection (except to the extent it is evidenced in S's organizational closure). From a recursive view, S's operational closure can be observed (on the basis of S's components being observable), but the system's interactional status with the environment / medium is obscured by the boundary, through which exogenous 'interactions' are discernible only in terms of their perturbatory projections within the system. Finally, S's components are themselves subject to evaluation on the same terms -- meaning that a recursive view of S still leaves S's components individually addressable as simple unities (as was S from a behavioral view). The operation / interaction distinction upon which the respective closures are framed is therefore an a priori distinction contingent upon the cognitive point of view from which the system is observed. Because 'operation' and 'interaction' are therefore manifest in distinct domains of observation, any evaluation of their respective closures must remain similarly distinct.

Cf. : autopoietic closure, closure, Closure Thesis, interaction, interactional closure, organizational closure

Cf. : objectivity-in-parenthesis, explanation, explanatory path

"... the terms of such reformulations and the categories used are assumed to belong to the domain in which the systems that generate the phenomena operate. ... A characteristic feature of an operational explanation is that it proposes conceptual (or concrete) systems and components that can reproduce the recorded phenomena. This can happen through the specification of the organization and structure of a system, as in the mechanistic framework adopted here."

(Varela, 1979, p. 66)

This last quoted passage indicates at least some measure of correspondence between Varela's operational explanations and Maturana's later delineation of scientific explanations. Both require the provision of a model / system (in Maturana's terms, an explanatory hypothesis) which, as a mechanism, can (re-)produce the phenomenon of interest. On the other hand, the above-cited passage clearly states an isomorphism of domains in which (a) the subject system operates and (b) the reformulations / mechanism(s) proffered in explanation. Maturana's characterization of scientific explanation explicitly claims these two domains are distinct.

A more detailed summary of the operational / symbolic explanation dichotomy is given under the entry for explanation.

"The relations between components in a composite unity that make it a composite unity of a particular kind, specifying its class identity as a simple unity in a metadomain with respect to its components, constitutes its organization. In other words, the organization of a composite unity is the configuration of static or dynamic relations between its components that specifies its class identity as a composite unity that can be distinguished as a simple unity of a particular kind."

(Maturana,1988b, 6.iv.)

Maturana notes 'organization' comes from the Greek and means 'instrument'. By using this word for the essential, defining character of a system he focuses attention on '...the instrumental participation of the components in the constitution of the unity.' (1975, p. 315) Phrased another way: "by making reference to the instrumental participation of the components in the constitution of a composite unity, [organization] refers to the relations between components that define and specify a system as a composite unity of a particular class, and determine its properties as such a unity." (Maturana, 1978)

"The organization of a machine (or system) does not specify the properties of the components which realize the machine as a concrete system, it only specifies the relations which these must generate to constitute the machine or system as a unity. Therefore, the organization of a machine is independent of the properties of its components which can be any, and a given machine can be realized in many different manners by many different kinds of components. In other words, although a given machine can be realized by many different structures, for it to constitute a concrete entity in a given space its actual components must be defined in that space, and have the properties which allow them to generate the relations which define it."

(Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. 77)

This delineation ascribes a measure of generality or abstraction to the attribution of organization. This 'measure', however, is of limited magnitude. "If is important to realize that we are not using the term organization the in definition of an autopoietic machine in transcendental sense, pretending that it has an explanatory value of its own." (Varela, 1979, p. 13) Organization is qualified with respect to a particular composite unity (or a particular class of such unities) identified or apprehended by virtue of its realization, as engaged by an observer. "...[A]utopoietic organization simply means processes concatenated in a specific form: a form such that the concatenated processes produce the components that constitute and specify the system as a unity." (Varela, 1979, p. 13)

This (qualified) generality results in the association of organization with a class of systems, as opposed to being limited to individual systems:

"...[T]he organization of a composite unity specifies the class of entities to which it belongs. It follows that the concept or generic name that we use to refer to a class of entities points to the organization of the composite unities that are members of the class."

(Maturana, 1978)

"The organization of a system, then, specifies the class identity of a system, and must remain invariant for the class identity of the system to remain invariant: if the organization of a system changes, then its identity changes and it becomes a unity of another kind."

(Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. xx)

"The relations among components, whether static or dynamic, that constitute a composite unity as a unity of a particular kind, are its organization. Or, in other words, the relations among components that must remain invariant in a composite unity for it not to change its class identity and become something else, constitute its organization."

(Maturana, 1980a, p. 48)

This allusion to organization in terms of class identity becomes more prominent in the later literature -- most particularly in The Tree of Knowledge's popular account of the theories:

"'Organization' signifies those relations that must be present in order for something to exist."

(Maturana & Varela, 1992, p. 42)

"Organization denotes those relations that must exist among the components of a system for it to be a member of a specific class."

(Maturana & Varela, 1992, p. 47)

At this juncture, organization is most intimately linked with cognition (and hence observation) relative to the earlier literature:

"This situation, in which we recognize implicitly or explicitly the organization of an object when we indicate it or distinguish it, is universal in the sense that it is something we do constantly as a basic cognitive act, which consists no more and no less than in generating classes of any type."

(Maturana & Varela, 1992, p. 43)

The following example illustrates the distinction between organization and structure :

"...[I]n a toilet the organization of the system of water-level regulation consists in the relations between an apparatus capable of detecting the water level and another apparatus capable of stopping the inflow of water. The toilet unit embodies a mixed system of plastic and metal comprising a float and a bypass valve. This specific structure, however, could be modified by replacing the plastic with wood, without changing the fact that there would still be a toilet organization."

(Maturana & Varela, 1987, p. 47)

A considerably more incisive statement of this organization / structure interplay (with specific reference to the class-oriented connotation(s) of organization) is found in Maturana (1980a, p. 48), where he states:

"...[T]he relations among components that constitute the organization of a composite unity represent a subset of the relations included in describing its structure. It follows that the structure of a composite unity may change without it changing its class identity as long as the relations proper to its organization remain invariant. If, as a result of its structural changes, the relations of the organization of a particular composite unity change as well, the composite unity loses its class identity." (emphasis in the original).

Related terminology includes: autopoietic organization, living organization, organization of the living

Cf. : class, structure

"Question: What have we learned from the descriptions of system-wholes in the last decade? Answer: That in order to account for the coherence of the observed systems, their constitutive interactions must be mutual and reciprocal, so as to become an interconnected network.

...

In terms of organization, then, empirical observation reveals that the system-wholes are organizationally closed: their organization is a circular network of interactions rather than a tree of hierarchical processes.

Conversely, then, if we are trying to make more precise our notion of a whole, we propose to make these empirical results a guideline. That is, we propose to take the circular and mutual interconnectedness of organization, or organizational closure, as the characterization of system-wholes."

(Varela & Goguen, 1978, pp. 292-293, emphasis in the original)

The last sentence points to the centrality that Varela gave to organizational closure in his solo work of the 1970's. In fact, organizational closure was declared to be the definitive characteristic of autonomous systems, of which autopoietic systems are a subset. The importance of this construct is reflected in Varela's multiple essays on the Closure Thesis, which postulates that all system-wholes are organizationally closed.

Cf. : autopoietic closure, circularity, closure, Closure Thesis, feedback, operational closure

"'Languaging', as Maturana occasionally explains, serves, among other things, to orient. By this he means directing the attention and, consequently, the individual experience of others ..."

(Glasersfeld, 1997)

The verb 'orient' occurs frequently in the core literature of the 1970's, where it connotes (a) the manner in which one system may effect a coordination of behavior with another system, and/or (b) the manner in which a single system may coordinate its own behavior or attitude with regard to some discriminable aspect of its environment. It is a key term in the original expositions of interactivity within consensual domains, which laid the foundation for autopoietic theory's delineation of 'languaging'. As such, it provided much of the explanatory linkage weaving together elements such as: (e.g.) description vs. Description, the observer, the cognitive activities of an individual, and anything having to do with 'consensuality'. Most particularly, the original explanations of languaging were predicated on continual allusions to 'mutual orientation' between / among interacting systems. This is well-illustrated by passages such as: "Linguistic behavior is orienting behavior; it orients the orientee within his cognitive domain to interactions that are independent of the nature of the orienting interactions themselves." (Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. 30)

For whatever reason, this term essentially disappears from the literature by the end of the 1970's. Gone with it are several important connotations regarding indexicality, description, consensual descriptive activity, etc., whose loss has made it progressively more difficult (particularly in Maturana's solo papers) to link linguistic behavior to its underlying biological base.

See orientation.

Orientation is most commonly invoked with respect to those behaviors among cognitive systems such that each of the interacting systems obtains or accomplishes similar stance. To an external observer, the degree of consonance in what we conventionally term "communicative" interactions is a function of the degree of behaviorally-manifest (or -apparent) congruence of orientation observed (by that external observer) among the participants. The appearance of behavioral congruence to an observer external to the interaction is not, however, the most important issue. That would be the reciprocal or mutual co-orientation occurring among structurally coupled cognitive systems, as it is observed by the participating systems themselves. Congruence of behavior among interactors -- most commonly termed coordinations of behaviors -- comprise the essence of what is conventionally described as communicative interaction entailing a transfer of "information". This process, termed mutual orientation, is the most common invocation of "orientation" in the primary literature. As Maturana puts it: "Herein lies the basis for communication: the orienting behavior becomes a representation of the interactions toward which it orients, and a unit of interaction in its own terms." (Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. 14)

Later, Maturana provides a more detailed explanation of how 'orientation' sets the stage for behavior that constitutes "communication", as opposed to simple or automatic "interaction" wherein interactors are basically triggering each other's responses. In the case of communication (in this sense), one organism orients "...the behavior of the other organism to some part of its domain of interactions different from the present interaction, but comparable to the orientation of that of the orienting organism." (Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. 27) Note that the orientation of interest is not necessarily to some external referent, but to some distinguishable subregion of the domain of interactions. "This can take place only if the domains of interactions of the two organisms are widely coincident; in this case no interlocked chain of behavior [i.e., no "interaction" in the simple sense -- Ed.] is elicited because the subsequent conduct of the two organisms depends on the outcome of independent, although parallel, interactions. (Maturana & Varela, 1980, pp. 27-28)

Cf. : description, linguistic behavior, mutual orientation

Cf. : orientation

Cf. : orientation

The result was to invoke 'parenthesis' to surround, and hence qualify, the objective-style language in which Maturana was yet obligated to present his theories. In its original invocation (Maturana, 1983), 'parenthesis' primarily denoted a predilection for scientific explanation (as delineated by Maturana) as the exclusive mode of theorization:

"...[B]y putting objectivity in parenthesis, that is, by using the operational generation of scientific explanations and not the object as the criterion of validation of my statements ... I show that the phenomenon of perception arises in the description of an observer as a manner of referring to the operation of an organism in congruence with the particular environment in which it is observed."

"...[T]he object described in a coordination of actions (and distinguished in language) cannot be used to validate statements about it in the domain of science. ... I shall proceed putting objectivity in parenthesis. That is, although I must use a language of objects (the only language we have) ..., I shall not use the object as an argument to validate my statements, which will be founded only on scientific explanations."

(Maturana, 1983)

It should be clear from the above-cited passages that the invocation of 'parenthesis' was primarily rhetorical in the context of a specific discussion. Furthermore, a case could be made (albeit only figuratively) that this invocation was 'epistemologically-oriented' in the sense that it focused upon the manner in which 'valid knowledge' of the subject phenomenon (in the first case, perception) could be generated, debated, and made acceptable in the scientific observer community.

By 1988, 'parenthesis' had become a stock component of Maturana's lexicon. It was in this year that two landmark papers were released -- each of which not only invoked 'parenthesis', but frankly relied upon the construct as one of the bases for their explanatory substance. In the lesser-known of these (Maturana, 1988b: Ontology of observing), the connotations of 'parenthesis' derive straight from their 1983 introduction:

"The assumption of objectivity is not needed for the generation of a scientific explanation. Therefore, in the process of being a scientist explaining cognition as a biological phenomenon I shall proceed without using the notion of objectivity to validate what I say; that is, I shall put objectivity in parentheses. In other words, I shall go on using an object language because this is the only language that we have (and can have), but although I shall use the experience of being in language as my starting point while I use language to explain cognition and language, I shall not claim that what I say is valid because there is an independent objective reality that validates it."

(Maturana, 1988b, 5.ii.)

In the other (better-known; more widely read) paper of that same year (Maturana, 1988a: Reality:...) 'parenthesis' is never mentioned in and of itself as a discursive device or tactic. Instead, it appears only in the sense of a gloss on the two explanatory paths which serve as the basic (and sole) dichotomy upon which Maturana's discussion proceeds. The incorporation (and occlusion) of the 'parenthesis' tactic within the nominalized paths of objectivity-in-parenthesis and objectivity-without-parenthesis is not really a problem per se. The text of Maturana (1988a) clearly covers all the points by which the other (above-cited) discussions delineated the parentheses' connotations. However, by never illustrating these connotations explicitly, Maturana leaves only the following passage by which a new reader can deduce them:

"In the explanatory path of objectivity-in-parenthesis, the observer system explicitly accepts: a) that he or she is, as a human being, a living system; b) that his or her cognitive abilities as an observer are biological phenomena because they are altered when his or her biology is altered; and c) that if he or she wants to explain his or her cognitive abilities as an observer, he or she must do so showing how they arise as biological phenomena in his or her realisation as a living system. Moreover, by adopting this explanatory path, the observer has to accept as his or her constitutive features all constitutive features of living systems, particularly their inability to distinguish in experience what we distinguish in daily life as perception and illusion."

(Maturana, 1988a, p. 29)

In addition, this paper never explicitly addresses 'objectivity' in the same sense as it had been done in the other above-cited essays (i.e., in terms of the presumption of quiddity for languaging-derived referents). Instead, the term is employed so as to allude to the 'reality' which is the stated focus of the paper's discussion (most particularly with regard to a parenthesis-less explainer demanding acceptance of her explanations on the basis of privileged access to an 'objective reality'). In contrast to the 'rhetorical / epistemological' context of the 1983 and 1988b papers, this essay thus leaves wide open the reader's potential for interpreting parenthesis as an ontological qualification of the 'world', rather than an explanatory qualification pertaining to the scientific observer in general and Maturana (as discursant) in particular.

This is not to say that Maturana has contradicted himself or demonstrably changed positions on 'objectivity'. The point is that the manner in which 'parenthesis' is invoked and framed in the 1988a paper, as distinct from the 1983 and 1988b papers, insinuates that it is ontology (in its conventional sense) that is at issue rather than explanatory / rhetorical clarity. Ontology, of course, is a volatile issue which has always been an obstacle in presenting and promoting autopoietic theory to audiences not familiar with its perspective and terminology. It is no surprise, then, that Mingers' (1995, pp. 110 ff.) critique of Maturana's ontology from a 'realist perspective' takes this last-cited essay (1988a) as its target.

Naturally, one may respond that all this is merely nuance. It is, however, at such a 'nuance-granularity' that many philosophical battles continue to rage. To overlook such 'nuances' (or worse, to sweep them under the carpet) only invites understandable criticism from the scholarly community into which Maturana and Varela's adherents seek to present their theories.

Cf. : explanation, explanatory path, object, objectivity-in-parenthesis, objectivity-without-parenthesis

Cf. : component

The word perception is currently heard as if it connoted an operation of capture of an external reality, through a process of reception of information of this reality. Nevertheless, this is constitutively impossible, because living beings are structurally determined dynamic systems, and everything that happens in them is determined at every moment by their structure. ... In these circumstances, the phenomenon connoted with the word perception consists in the association - by the observer - of the regularities of behavior that he or she distinguishes in the observed organism to the conditions of the medium that he or she sees triggering. The observer uses such behavioral regularities to characterize perceptual objects."

(Maturana, 1987, p. 319)

The above-cited passage illustrates that 'perception' is not so much a valid construct which autopoietic theory might explain (in terms of how it is conventionally addressed) as it is a construct whose viability is limited to an explanatory path against which Maturana stands in opposition. "The word 'perception' comes from the Latin expression per capire, which means 'through capture' and carries with it the implicit understanding that to perceive is to capture the features of a world independent of the observer." (Maturana, 1988b, 5.i.)

Maturana (e.g., 1988a) characterizes the conventional usage of this term as denoting that mode of engagement characterized by apprehension of features assumed associated with things possessed of existence independent of the observer. This specific usage is linked to the explanatory path of objectivity-without-parenthesis, in which such independently-existing things are presumed by an observer to "...exist independently of whether he or she knows them, and that he or she can know them, or can know of them, or can know about them, through perception or reason." (Maturana, 1988a, p. 28) In other words, "perception" in this sense is an explanatory construct which is predicated upon a tacit assumption that the role of cognition is to obtain, adduce, or apprehend things which are already and unequivocally "out there" (i.e., beyond the scope of the observer's embodiment).

The foundation for this conventional view is linked to the more general conditions under which an observer observes 'behavior' on the part of a given organism or system:

"...[T]he behavior of an organism is only a description that the observer does of a sequence of postural changes (structural) that the organism exhibits in relation to the medium in which it is observed. These postural changes are expressions of the structural dynamics of the organism, and they appear with the participation of the nervous system when it exists. Since the observer distinguishes the organism as a system that moves in a medium, conserving necessarily its structural correspondence with it (adaptation) ..., the observer can distinguish behaviors that appear in the organism associated to its interactions."

(Maturana, 1987, p. 322)

In other words, a observer needing to generate an explanation of the subject organism's ongoing actions is constrained by the fact that she has no direct apprehensional access to that subject's intrinsic structural configuration(s) and structural dynamics which actually determine the course of the trajectory of actions to be explained. The only evidence readily available upon which to base her explanation consists of (a) apparent transformations in the environment; (b) apparent transformations in the subject organism (in and of itself); and (c) apparent transformations in the relationships between the subject organism and the environment. It is not surprising, therefore, that the resultant explanation is commonly derived from simplistic associations drawn between elements of these evidentiary sets. Neither is it surprising that these associations (being framed with respect to these elements abstracted from observation) typically end up referentially based not upon the subject organism's structure, but upon a reification of the abstracted associations themselves. Continuing from the last cited passage:

"It is in this context of the association between behavior and medium configured by this distinction that the word perception is habitually used, supposing that such behaviors emerge from the determination of the organism (or of its nervous system), in the level of the sensorial encounter, by an external object. Nevertheless, by what we have already said, it is clear that the phenomenon that we connote with the word perception can not consist in such a determination, but it consists, indeed, in a regularity of behavior exhibited by the organism in its operation in structural correspondence with the medium, which the observer indicates as if he or she distinguished an object, associating it to the environmental circumstance that triggered it."

(Maturana, 1987, p. 322)

Cf. : behavior, explanation, explanatory path, objectivity-without-parenthesis, illusion

Cf. : compensatory change, deformation

Given the brevity of treatment, there is no clear differentiation made between perturbational agent and perturbational object. Such differentiation must be left to the reader in the context of the short passage in which these terms appear.

Cf. : perception, perturbation, perturbational object

"...[I]t is only through changes in behavior distinguished by an observer in an organism during the contingencies of a given perturbation, that the observer can characterize such a contingency as an "perturbational object" and describe it as an object to (something independent of) the organism. Finally, it is this association that the observer makes between the "perturbational object" - characterized by the behavior of the organism that configures it - and such behavior independently distinguished by the observer, that constitutes the phenomenon that one connotes daily with the word perception."

(Maturana, 1987, p. 322)

Given the brevity of treatment, there is no clear differentiation made between perturbational agent and perturbational object. Such differentiation must be left to the reader in the context of the short passage in which these terms appear.

Cf. : perception, perturbation, perturbational agent

1.

A term used somewhat colloquially to connote the domain of (e.g.) operations or (inter-) activities determined by a specific structurally-delineated entity. In this sense, the term appears intermittently in the early papers of the 1970's.

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2.

By the time of Autopoiesis and Cognition, this term had come to be somewhat more specifically delineated to connote the domain of operations and interactions defined by the specification of a unity (Cf. Maturana & Varela, 1980, pp. xviii ff.). Further elaboration on this can be found under the entry for unity. This term is typically used as a generic rhetorical device, as when Varela (1979, p. xvi) invokes it in separating and contrasting (a) the domain of maintenance of a system's identity and (b) the domain of that system's operations through interaction.

For most intents and purposes, the term (as employed in the early papers) can safely be construed as a synonym for phenomenological domain.

This term is heavily invoked in Maturana (1980a), where he delves into the notion that "...living systems generate nonintersecting phenomenal domains..." (p. 46)

Cf. : phenomenological domain, unity

"The relation of correspondence between the phenomenal domain generated by a system and the phenomenal domain generated by its components, ...[is]... established by the observer through his or her independent interactions with the system and with its components and does not indicate a phenomenal reduction of one domain to another. If it appears as if there were a phenomenal reduction, it is because in the description all phenomena are represented in the same domain, and, unless care is taken to preserve it, the relation established through the observer is lost."

(Maturana, 1978)

Phenomenal reduction, then, is primarily addressed as a pathology in which the role of the observer as the intersectional nexus spanning two or more phenomenal domains is obscured, blurred, or ignored. In such situations, the result would be that an explanation employs referents and/or ascriptions of the same type (e.g., indexicality) to render synonymous elements which in fact are properly allocated to disjunct domains of interaction (vis a vis the observer).

Cf. : phenomenal domain

In effect, the notion of phenomenological domain serves as the closest thing to an "ontological foundation" for a system of interest, and therefore provides the basis for addressing that system. This fundament, however, is not given a priori; rather, it is contingent upon the observer or observer-community addressing the system of interest.

"The criteria of distinction used by an observer-community establish the kinds of entities to be studied, and thus the phenomenologies that are considered relevant. Once a class of entities is specified through a criterion of distinction, a phenomenology is concomitantly born, and this is all that is necessary for the existence of a phenomenological domain."

(Varela, 1979, p. 107)

A phenomenological domain is more general than a domain of interactions (defined primarily with respect to coupling) or a cognitive domain (defined primarily with respect to interaction as an observer).

Cf. : ambience, cognitive domain, domain of interactions, phenomenal domain, phenomenology (1.; 2.)

1.

"The domain of all the phenomena defined in the interactions of a class of unities."

(Maturana & Varela, 1992, p. 259)

"The formation of a unity always determines a number of phenomena associated with the features that define it; we may thus say that each class of unities specifies a particular phenomenology."

(Maturana & Varela, 1992, p. 51)

A construct circumscribing the manifestation and scope of a unity's potential engagement with its "world". The phenomenology of a given unity is affected by that unity's manifestation:

"The criteria of distinction used by an observer-community establish the kinds of entities to be studied, and thus the phenomenologies that are considered relevant. Once a class of entities is specified through a criterion of distinction, a phenomenology is concomitantly born, and this is all that is necessary for the existence of a phenomenological domain."

(Varela,1979, p. 107)

With regard to engagement, this is a label for the "... domain of all the phenomena defined in the interactions of a class of unities." (Maturana and Varela, 1992, p. 259) This also implies that the range or scope of the phenomenology thus defined parallels the range or scope of interactions through which the given unity may maintain its identity. As Varela (1979, p. 32) puts it: "...the phenomenology of an autopoietic system is necessarily always commensurate with the deformations that it suffers without loss of identity, and with the deforming environment in which it lies..."

In keeping with the principle of structural determination, the phenomenology of a given unity is circumscribed by its organization and structure . In the case of organization, this is illustrated by the claim that the "... phenomenology of an organism as a unity is the phenomenology of its autopoiesis." (Maturana & Varela, 1980, 124) In the case of structure, Varela (1979, p. 31) states: "The establishment of a unity defines the domain of its phenomenology, but the way the unity is constituted -- its structure -- defines the kind of phenomenology that it generates in that domain."

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Cf. : phenomenal domain, phenomenological domain, domain of interactions

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2.

An analytical application of 1. as an explanatory tool -- particularly in the case where one or more such phenomenologies are invoked as exemplars of given approaches or perspectives with respect to an object of study. Such an application occurs in Autopoiesis and Cognition, where the point is to demonstrate the viability of autopoiesis as a comprehensive definition for living systems. Within the physical space, two classes of such explanatory phenomenologies are claimed possible -- statical phenomenology and mechanical phenomenology. biological phenomenology (the explanatory phenomenology of living / autopoietic systems) is a specific instance of a mechanical phenomenology. (Cf. Maturana & Varela, 1980, pp. 112 ff.; Varela, 1979, pp. 31 ff.)

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Cf. : statical phenomenology, mechanical phenomenology, biological phenomenology

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3.

Generic reference to that area of philosophy concerned with essential experience and (in the West) associated with the work of (e.g.) Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty.

Cf. : scientific method, scientific explanation

A detailed exposition comparing philosophical and scientific theories (as delineated by Maturana) is offered under the entry for theory.

Cf. : explanation, philosophical explanation, scientific method, scientific explanation, theory

"In the system of biologic lineages there are many paths that have lasted millions of years with few variations around a fundamental form, many that have given rise to new forms, and, lastly, many that have become extinct without leaving a branch reaching to the present. In all these cases, however, it is a matter of phylogenetic drifts in which are conserved the organization and adaptation of organisms that make up the lineages..."

(Maturana & Varela, 1992, p. 112)

"The nervous system (or the organism), however, has not been designed by anyone; it is the result of a phylogenic drift of unities centered on their own dynamics of states."

(Maturana & Varela, 1992, p. 169)

Cf. : drift, natural drift, structural drift

Cf.: The Tree of Knowledge (Maturana & Varela, 1992, p. 51), biological phenomenon, phenomenology, physical space

"The physical space is defined by components that can be determined by operations that characterize them in terms of properties such as masses, forces, accelerations, distances, fields, etc."

(Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. 112)

"...[T]he ultimate and basic space that a composite unity can describe in a consensual domain is the space in which its components exist; the space in which its components exist determines the ultimate domain of interactions through which a composite unity can participate in the generation of a consensual domain.... [This]... ultimate space that the components of a composite system define is for such a system its ground space. Men, in particular, specify their ground space, the space which they define as composite unities by describing their components through their interactions through their components, as the physical space."

(Maturana, 1978, p. 57)

Cf. : ground space, living system, space

Cf. : structure , structural determination, interaction

"...[O]ne can say that the phenomenon of intelligence takes place as an expression of the anatomical and physiological plastic structures that make possible for each organism its participation in the establishment of, and in the operation within, ontogenic domains of structural coupling in general."

(Maturana & Guiloff, 1980, pp. 141-142)

This "out of nowhere" character of experience makes it elusive or subtle as an object of reflection, description, and explanation. The praxis of living is asymptotically beyond grasp, and whatever means are employed to attempt such a grasp must necessarily stop short of fully capturing it:

"We find ourselves as human beings here and now in the praxis of living, in the happening of being human, in language languaging, in an a priori experiential situation in which everything that is, everything that happens, is and happens in us as part of our praxis of living. In these circumstances, whatever we say about how anything happens takes place in the praxis of our living as a comment, as a reflection, as a reformulation, in short, as an explanation of the praxis of our living, and as such it does not replace or constitute the praxis of living that it purports to explain. "

(Maturana, 1988b, 4.0.)

Such an explanation not only cannot replace the praxis upon which it is focused, it is necessarily secondary to that praxis (Maturana, 1988a, p. 27) This leads to the conclusion that "...if explanations and descriptions are secondary to the praxis of living of the observer (our human praxis of living), they are strictly unnecessary for it, even if the praxis of living of the observer changes after his or her listening to them." (Maturana, 1988a, p. 27)

Cf. : observer, description, explanation

Zeleny starts with Bronislaw Trentowski's (1843) Cybernetyka -- a vision of unified human activities guided by the transdisciplinary finesse of a manager. His cautions concerning the inability of single unary disciplines to capture the range of knowledge requisite to such management is based on the subjectivity of an observer. A. A. Bogdanov's tektology (1912) was the first broad theoretical framework emphasizing organization as a key systemic feature. Bogdanov recognized a system's unity depends on an observer, and that an observer is inherently constrained in her ability to perceive the relations comprising a unity. Finally, Jan Smuts is cited for his concept of holism and his recognition of the observer-dependency of descriptions. Additionally, Zeleny suggests links to Vico, Menger, Leduc, von Hayek, and Weiss. Zeleny (1979a) offers a summary review of Trentowski, Bogdanov, Smuts and Leduc, and he has discussed these precursors in some detail elsewhere (Zeleny, 1978; 1979b).

The reference to Vico brings to mind constructivist philosopher Ernst von Glasersfeld, who is linked to Maturana and Varela with respect to epistemological orientation. Von Glasersfeld is the most explicit of the constructivists in naming predecessors, and one might well consider his stated precursors as historically relevant. (Cf. constructivism, epistemology, radical constructivism) Von Glasersfeld is a well-known adherent of the work of Jean Piaget, to whom Varela (e.g., 1979) made isolated allusions. In a 1992 conversation, Varela confided he had found Maurice Merleau Ponty to be the most important prior philosopher of relevance to his own work.

No listing of 'lineage' would be complete without citation of those scholars within the 'cybernetics movement' whose work paralleled, if not nourished, Maturana and Varela's theories. Primary among these would have to be Heinz von Foerster, whose publications on self-organization and constructivistic epistemology predate autopoietic theory. He has been a long-time colleague in direct interaction with Maturana and Varela. Finally, the parallels between certain aspects of autopoietic theory and the work of Gregory Bateson have fostered much 'mutual admiration' among folks interested in either.

This illustrative usage should not be taken to connote a metrically-circumscribed (e.g., a statistical) prediction. Nor should it be taken to imply that a prediction is tightly specified.

"...[T]hese predictions can be successful only if the environment does not change in that which is predicted. Accordingly, the predictions implied in the organization of the living system are not predictions of particular events but of classes of interactions. Every interaction is a particular interaction, but every prediction is a prediction of a class of interactions that is defined by those features in its members which will allow the living system to retain its circular organization ... This makes living systems inferential systems."

(Maturana, 1970a, p. 6)

Although the specific descriptive construct 'prediction' faded from the literature, the points made for the first time in the above passages would later be amplified as more detailed comments on (e.g.) class and inference. This descriptive gambit also stands as the earliest (and in some ways the most telling) explication of how it is that an autonomous system specifies its domain of interactions.

Cf. : class, interaction, inference, domain of interactions, circularity

In those other traditions (e.g., the cognitivism underlying AI research), "...intelligence denotes a distinct property or attribute that some organisms have as individuals, and which can be detected, grasped or abstracted, by observing the form of what an observer would call their intelligent behaviour." (Maturana & Guiloff, 1980, p. 136) This position entails that "...the attempt to explain how an intelligent system operates must go through the specification of what constitutes a problem to be solved as the object of an intelligent action, and through the specification of what constitutes a procedure to solve it as the realization of the intelligent action." (Maturana & Guiloff, 1980, pp. 136-137) In other words, this (the currently conventional) perspective relies on the observer's elaborated explanations for multiple phenomena (properties of the organism, 'problem', 'procedure') describable only in terms of distinct phenomenal domains. Maturana and Guiloff take an alternative view:

"...[T]he living system necessarily operates specified by its structure and not by the features of the medium that the observer calls 'the problem to be solved'. Accordingly, then, a behaviour that appears to an observer as solving a problem can only be an expression of a previous history of structural coupling (ontogenic adaptation), and not a manifestation of the properties that would have to be admitted if ...[the conventional perspective outlined above -- Ed.] ... were chosen."

(Maturana and Guiloff, 1980, p. 140)

Cf. : behavior, conduct, intelligence, learning

"A property is a characteristic of a unity specified and defined by an operation of distinction. Pointing to a property, therefore, always implies an observer."

(Maturana, 1978)

Properties are an observer's focus in developing vitalistic explanations, as opposed to the relations emphasized in mechanistic explanations. The specification of space is often linked to properties of the unity being educed, and this in turn makes properties relevant in delimiting the context for discerning interaction among unities. This is well illustrated by the following passage:

"Space is the domain of all the possible interactions of a collection of unities (simple, or composite that interact as unities) that the properties of these unities establish by specifying its dimensions. It can be said, of a composite unity on the one hand, that it exists in the space that its components specify as unities because it interacts through the properties of its components, and, on the other hand, that it is realized as a unity in the space that its properties as a simple unity specify."

(Maturana, 1978)

Cf. : component, interaction, mechanistic explanation, space, unity, vitalistic explanations

"As human beings we exist in a multidimensional interactional and relational space in which most dimensions remain outside our awareness. So we humans exist in a partially conscious and partially unconscious interactional and relational space in which most dimensions are unconscious. We (the authors) call this conscious and unconscious interactional and relational space our psychic domain of existence. Everything that we do takes place in us through our operation in our psychic domain of existence, or better, in our psychic existence, and as we change in the course of our living, our psychic domain of existence changes. The psychic identity that a human being has as he or she exists in the systemic dynamics in which he or she conserves his or her particular identity as such, arises in the relational space in which he or she lives as his or her self."

(Maturana & Verden-Zöller, 1996)

Insofar as this 'domain' is equated with a 'space' (cf. comments elsewhere on apparent equivalences drawn between these two terms), and the majority of this space's dimensions are not available to awareness, it is difficult to link this construct to anything in the primary literature. This construct is also anomalous in referring to 'conscious vs. subconscious' -- a distinction not developed in the primary literature. These issues are addressed in Maturana's 1995 paper "Biology of Self-Consciousness", in which he provides an introduction to the construct psychic space (which at least helps to explain the connotations of that in which the psychic domain of existence is realized).

The ambiguities of this construct are further amplified by the fact that it is nowhere explicitly employed beyond the point of its definition (cited above). The closest thing to such an allusion occurs later in the article, where the authors state:

"We humans exist in the psychic space that we create in our living in our childhood, and our identity as humans of one kind or another, is defined by our psychic existence in conservation of the self that we become."

(Maturana & Verden-Zöller, 1996)

Cf. : domain, psychic space, space

"I claim that that which we connote in daily life when speaking of the mind, the psyche, or the soul, is the relational domain, both conscious and unconscious, which an animal lives. Such a domain has the richness and fluidity of the manner of living of the animals involved, and changes as this manner of living changes. At the same time, the words mind, psyche, and soul, connote different shades or aspects of the relational domain in which an animal lives. I wish to use the expression psychic space to avoid connotations that make objects of the mind and the soul. Humans and apes live different psychic spaces, that is, they live different domains of relations and as a result handle most aspects of their living differently even when it seems that there are resemblances. And, in the human domain, different cultures as different networks of conversations entail living in different psychic spaces."

(Maturana, 1995)

"We humans exist in the psychic space that we create in our living in our childhood, and our identity as humans of one kind or another, is defined by our psychic existence in conservation of the self that we become."

(Maturana & Verden-Zöller, 1996)

Cf. : domain, psychic domain of existence, space

"The nervous system enlarges the domain of interactions of the organism by making its internal states also modifiable in a relevant manner by 'pure relations', not only by physical events..."

(Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. 13)

Phrased another way, a cognitive system (in this case, an organism with an operationally closed nervous system) pursues its behavioral trajectory by virtue of its internal responses to the 'pure relations' holding among its apprehensible states, not by virtue of direct or automatic responses to physical phenomena impinging upon it (e.g., via its sensory surfaces). Maturana illustrates this distinction with respect to a cat that reacts to the sight of a bird:

"The sensors change through physical interactions: the absorption of light quanta; the animal is modified through its interactions with the relations that hold between the activated sensors that absorbed the light quanta at the sensory surface."

(Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. 13)

According to Maturana (Ibid.), the capacity for engaging 'pure relations' sets the stage for:

1. evolution with respect to this additional domain of engageable 'pure relations';

2. recursive expansion of the cognitive domain via this additional domain;

3. 'abstract thinking' as the result of the aforementioned recursive expansion of the cognitive domain; and

4. non-physical orientational behavior among organisms -- the basis for linguistic behavior and languaging.

Cf. : cognition, cognitive domain, linguistic behavior, languaging

The ongoing determination of a dynamic unity's course of transformations is often described and explained as purposeful. The 'purpose' thus ascribed to the unity is not a feature of the unity itself -- it is an explanation contrived by a given observer. In other words, purpose is always delineated icogdo some observer:

"The use to which a machine can be put by man is not a feature of the organization of the machine, but of the domain in which the machine operates, and belongs to our description of the machine in a context wider than the machine itself."

(Varela, 1979, p. 11)

"Purpose or aims, however, are not features of the organization of any machine (allo- or autopoietic): these features belong to the domain of our discourse about our actions, that is, they belong to the domain of communicative descriptions, and when applied to a machine, or any system independent of us, they reflect our considering the machine or system in some encompassing context."

(Varela, 1979, p. 64: italics in the original)