60Constructivist Foundations
CONCEPTS
philosophical-epistemological
radical constructivism & biology of cognition
the other hand, as I have previously observed(Kenny 1989), Maturana would seem to pre-empt out any alternative structural compen-sations at the moment of interacting with theperturbation at hand:“Maturana is
not
a constructive alterna-tivist because at the moment of choosingthere are no other alternatives possible.The ‘choice’ made was determined by thesystem’s coherence. It had to be made.Kelly himself would also appear not to bean alternativist with his emphasis on‘choice’ as a form of self-involvement andself-ordering, rather than saying muchabout the ‘objects chosen’.” (Kenny 1989,p. 120).So while for von Glasersfeld the personmay hold several alternative “keys,” for Mat-urana the person
is
the key, and the person’sstructures have
implied
the character of the“lock” – or brought it forth – as part of theircognitive domain in such a way that thereexists an effective structural intersectionbetween the “person-as-key” and the “lock.”The structural autonomy of the system isparamount for Maturana. This means thatthe system can only do what it does at any particular moment of doing.
There are noother choices in the system.
A system is alwaysin its proper place and cannot be mistaken.For Maturana, at the moment of takingaction the system has
no
other choice thanwhat it does. The system does what its struc-ture is set up to do. Unlike von Glasersfeld’simages of “bumping into” the constrainingfeatures of the environment, for Maturana itis as if the system/medium structural coher-ences were “full up-” and every-“thing” wasin its reciprocally complementary position-ing – there being little or no space for new orextra elements to easily enter into the picture.In other words, there
are
no spare compo-nents “hanging around” in the environmentwaiting for us to bump into them.From this point of view, to speak of havinga range of “choices” is misleading. Since theseimplicative construct pathways are already laid down within the ongoing system onecould argue that the “choices” are illusory since the structures of the system already contain the preferential direction of move-ment and action.Even though he has usually avoided label-ling his approach, Maturana once said jok-ingly to me that if Ernst was a “radical con-structivist” then he (Maturana) was a“radical radical constructivist,” because atthe moment of perceiving there
is
no alterna-tive other than what our structure-deter-mined system dictates that we
must
do inorder to compensate effectively to the currentperturbationOn this analysis, the fact of having “nochoice” is a crucial parting of the waysbetween Ernst von Glasersfeld and Hum-berto Maturana. Humberto Maturana’s posi-tion is that our system specifies our mediumin such a way that it is co-existent, co-exten-sive, conterminous with our own embodiedexistence.So in this relationship of knowledge toreality, for von Glasersfeld the notion of “truth” is replaced by that of “viability” and“fit.” For Maturana it is not so much an issueof “fitting” or “viability” as it is an issue of structural coherences of the system in itsmedium. Maturana tries to elaborate this by describing the ways in which the observerbrings forth his own reality, and in doing sogenerates a pattern of structural synchrony orstructural coherences.
The inside–outsidedistinction
In their rejection of “realism” both authorshave been obliged to demonstrate how they avoid the epistemological quagmire of solip-sism. Here there is another difference thatopens up in their various approaches, withvon Glasersfeld taking the road of
denying
that he is saying that “nothing exists outsideof people’s heads,” and repeating that he is
not
saying that reality does not exist. As a wry aside he says that: “In practice, solipsism isrefuted daily by the experience that the worldis hardly ever what we would like it to be”(Glasersfeld 1995, p. 113). For Maturana’spart, his refutation of solipsism takes off along the road of languaging (coordinationsof coordinations of actions) – which seems inmy view to lead him to the area of “structuralrealism.”Ernst von Glasersfeld reminds us thatconstructivists must be unwavering agnos-tics as regards “existence” because whatevermay lie beyond our experience is inaccessibleto our reasoning. He has many timesattempted to clarify that his concern is withwhat can be known rationally; he does notdeny that mystics and artists may access some“ulterior reality” in their own ways but only that such access must not be confused with arational theory of knowing.Among his many refutations of being asolipsist, Maturana refers to his theory of “languaging” which states that languagecomes about through the coordinations of the coordinations of actions among people ina co-ontogenic structural drift. The fact thatlater on we come to use this language toinvent notions such as “solipsism” saying thatthe mind alone creates the world, is a notionsimply refuted by the fact that his (Mat-urana’s) view of language development ispremised on the precedent existence of peo-ple who are coordinating their activitiestogether – clearly not a solipsistic context!Maturana and Varela positioned this prob-lem as part of an epistemological Odyssey,“sailing between the Scylla monster of repre-sentationism and the Charybdis whirlpool of solipsism” (Maturana & Varela 1987, p. 134).As part of his strategy to deal with the“outside world” and not be trapped in accu-sations of solipsism, von Glasersfeld pro-poses the use of the notion of the “black box.”This also helps in the task of avoiding theconfusions of epistemological cheating by pretending that we can compare our “pic-ture” of the world to the “actual reality.” Hecomments:“If it is the experiencer’s intelligence orcognitive activity that, by organizingitself, organizes his experience into a via-ble representation of a world, then onecan consider that representation a model,and the ‘outside reality’ it claims to repre-sent, a black box.” (Glasersfeld 1987,p. 156)This helps emphasise that for von Glasers-feld there is a clear separation of what is“inside” the person and what is “outside” asthe “environment” or “reality.” It means thateverything that is outwith oneself – the envi-ronment, other people, children, dogs, etc. –are all black boxes from the observer’s pointof view. It means we can never “really know”what others are thinking or what they “really mean.” It means that we can never know thatwhat another person is feeling is “really like”what I am feeling. We can never find out whatthe other is “really like” because all we have togo on are our interpretations of what our
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