In this essay, we propose to present and discuss the epistemology of the Chilean biologist Humberto Maturana, by means of the concepts of perception, autopoiesis and cognition and, accepting this explanatory path, comment on its implications for our understanding of three relational phenomena in the context of living: the domain of molecular interactions, in the scope of immunology, the domain of interspecific interactions, in the scope of domestication, and the domain of human relations, in the scope of education. While visiting these three relational domains, we reflect how the phenomenon of learning will inevitably arise, generated in the very dynamics of living, without the need to resort to the notion of instructive interactions, which we sometimes connote, at least in the context of human relations, as teaching.

Key words: humberto maturana. learning. immunology. domestication. education.

Context: Maturana’s published corpus is vast, and his publications span multiple venues, formats, and languages. For these and other reasons, the corpus is as complex as it is daunting in its scale. Problem: Over the last two decades, bibliographic data on Maturana’s publications had proliferated in terms of available resources, scope of coverage, and accessibility. However, as of 2011 the degree of accessibility was not matched by the inclusiveness, detail, and accuracy of the relatively few dedicated bibliographies upon which most such resources relied. It had become time to update, consolidate, and better validate the core bibliographic data. Method: The five most comprehensive electronic bibliographies were merged and collated. The merged listing was then validated using the available evidence and a three-tiered set of evaluation criteria. Finally, the resultant merged and validated listing was augmented with previously unrecorded entries and data, subject to the same evidentiary constraints and evaluation criteria pertaining to the validation phase. Results: None of the five bibliographies in the starting set was comprehensive. All five contained ambiguities, missing details, discrepancies, and outright errors. The updated and consolidated listing presented here is the largest, most comprehensive, and most accurate compiled to date. Implications: The resultant bibliography offers a more complete and more reliable reference resource to both veteran Maturana scholars and newcomers to his work than previously existing bibliographies.

Key words: Humberto Maturana, biology of cognition, autopoiesis, bibliography, publications

Abstract: The commentators pose questions and note issues arising within multiple contexts invoked in the target article. In this response, I endeavor to address as many of the points and queries as I can within the prescribed space afforded me. The responses are organized with regard to the three main topical areas within the target article: engaging with and learning Maturana’s BoC; employing BoC orientations and tenets to practical effect; and the prospects for continuing to refine and extend Maturana’s work.

Context: Humberto Maturana’s biology of cognition (BoC) represents a novel analysis of cognition grounded in biology and neuroscience. While BoC has facilitated demonstrable improvements in research and development results, it contrasts with prevailing mainstream viewpoints, models, and terminology. Accordingly, effort is required to develop a working knowledge of Maturana’s work before one can reasonably apply it or contribute to BoC’s ongoing conceptual advancement. Problem: The effort required in learning BoC increases the risk of misrepresenting or misinterpreting BoC and overlooking its value. Applying BoC requires both a working knowledge and creative adaptations. These adaptations can prove difficult and obscure recognition of credit due BoC for positive outcomes. Finally, the BoC community of interest faces challenges in absorbing lessons learned and refining the BoC conceptual framework to facilitate future researchers in benefiting from Maturana’s legacy. These issues reflect three areas of concern: (a) effectively understanding BoC; (b) usefully applying BoC; and (c) elaborating and extending BoC. Method: I identify key issues underlying these areas of concern, review lessons learned regarding the understanding and application areas, and offer recommendations for elucidating some of the most important issues for constructively advancing BoC. Using examples from successful professional experience, I illustrate the issues involved in applying BoC in research and development projects, the benefits obtained, and the problems in assigning credit for such benefits to BoC. Results: Access to fundamental BoC resources has improved over the last three decades. The specific points of difficulty in developing a working knowledge of BoC remain much the same as they were for Maturana’s university students decades ago. The four issues I consider most important for clarification or conceptual development are: A - the role and scope of autopoiesis, B - ontological and epistemological entailments of BoC, C - the entitative bias, and D - the new orientation that shifts from entities to relations. Implications: The core of biology of cognition risks increasing obscurity unless (a) its tenets are more clearly established and widely disseminated and (b) the means for applying its insights for practical benefit are developed and tested via experience. These results are offered to aid in progressing Maturana’s version of constructivism toward increased recognition of the potential value BoC - and constructivism in general - offers. Constructivist content: Maturana’s work entails a focus on an observer’s subjective experience of its life world, and therefore entails an epistemology consistent with the constructivist perspective. Key words: Applied constructivism, autopoiesis, biology of cognition, epistemology, languaging, Maturana, observer, ontology, Varela.

Excerpt: In the current social and critical moment, perhaps no project is more overdue than the articulation of a posthumanist theoretical framework for a politics and ethics not grounded in the Enlightenment ideal of “Man.” Within postmodern theory, that humanist ideal is critiqued as forcefully as anywhere in the early and middle phase of Michel Foucault’s career, whose “genealogical” aim is to “account for the constitution of knowledges, discourses, domains of objects, etc., without having to make reference to a subject which is either transcendental in relation to the field of events or runs in empty sameness throughout the course of history” by virtue of his – and it must be “his” – privileged relation to either the presence or the absence of the phallus, language, the symbolic, property, productive capacity, toolmaking, reason, or a soul. In Foucault, however, this call for posthumanist critique is more often than not accompanied, as many critics have noted, by a dystopianism that imagines that the end of the humanist subject is the beginning of the total saturation of the social field by power, domination, and oppression. And the later Foucault, as if compensating for his early dystopianism, evinces a kind of nostalgia for the Enlightenment humanism powerfully critiqued in his early and middle work but approached much more sympathetically in the History of Sexuality project.

Non-compliance is not only an epistemological error but a biological impossibility. This profound statement arises from the influence of Humberto Maturana’s revolutionary meta-theory of cognition. The definitions and significant implications of two major theoretical concepts of this meta-theory of cognition, namely structural determinism and objectivity-in-parenthesis, are discussed. These radical concepts challenge the approved North American Nursing Diagnostic Association’s nursing diagnosis of non-compliance Maturana’s theory reveals the impossibility of instructive interaction, leading the authors to conclude the non-existence of non-compliant families.