This small book is very large: it contains the living universe. It is a privilege to be asked to write this preface, and a delight to do so. That is because I recognize here a really important book, both in general and specifically. Before talking about the specific contents at all, I would like to explain why this is in general so.

Excerpt: In this paper I shall report several cross-cultural studies of perception and shall in their light examine two claims put forward by Maturana 1. A more general claim that “all cultures are necessarily successful in the predictive domain that they define and to accuse any one culture of a failure from the perspective of another culture is an error” (Maturana 1979), and 2. A specific claim that the data to hand confute Gregory’s theory of illusions by denying the possibility that misapplied constancy scaling may be responsible for the illusory phenomena (Maturana, Varela & Frenk 1972).

Excerpt: Subjectivity in “knowing” is not new to lawyers. This paper, like the address on which it is based, is designed to demonstrate to non-lawyers that this is the very problem with which lawyers have constantly to grapple, and all that an examination of legal techniques can reveal is the paramount importance to them of consensual domains. How these should be identified is another matter.

The paper explores the distinction between two doctrines, both of which inform theory construction in much of modern cognitive psychology: the representational theory of mind and the computational theory of mind. According to the former, propositional attitudes are to be construed as relations that organisms bear to mental representations. According to the latter, mental processes have access only to formal (nonsemantic) properties of the mental representations over which they are defined. The following claims are defended: (1) That the traditional dispute between “rational” and “naturalistic” psychology is plausibly viewed as an argument about the status of the computational theory of mind. Rational psychologists accept a formality condition on the specification of mental processes; naturalists do not. (2) That to accept the formality condition is to endorse a version of methodological solipsism. (3) That the acceptance of some such condition is warranted, at least for that part of psychology which concerns itself with theories of the mental causation of behavior. This is because: (4) such theories require nontransparent taxonomies of mental states; and (5) nontransparent taxonomies individuate mental states without reference to their semantic properties. Equivalently, (6) nontransparent taxonomies respect the way that the organism represents the object of its propositional attitudes to itself, and it is this representation which functions in the causation of behavior. The final section of the paper considers the prospect for a naturalistic psychology: one which defines its generalizations over relations between mental representations and their environmental causes, thus seeking to account for the semantic properties of propositional attitudes. Two related arguments are proposed, both leading to the conclusion that no such research strategy is likely to prove fruitful.

Excerpt: The question arises whether it is possible in science to assume an observer for whose description geometrical systems of co-ordinates or statistical data do not suffice at all. In fact all social scientists would fall under this category of observers. This is where the description of the observer becomes a problem for cybernetics of social systems. How can one solve this problem of cybernetics of second order without which cybernetics of social systems loses much of its significance (Lorenzen 1978)? How far can Maturana’s theory of autopoietic systems or von Forester’s theory of recursive generation of knowledge offer solutions to this problem?

Key words: philosophy

At the end of my talk at the symposium in Paderborn, Humberto MATURANA raised the question of “goals.” The discussion that followed was not conclusive and the question, I felt, was left hanging in the air. Since it is an important question and particularly relevant to any theory of equilibration, I shall try to begin this written version of my talk by explaining the connections I see between the concepts of perturbation, equilibration, and goal-directedness.

Key words: radical constructivism, cognition

The question of whether or not evolutionary explanations are, in fact, logically of the same type as explanations in, say, mechanics or physics has hardly been touched upon. I shall argue that they are not of the same type, that they are based on a different conceptual framework, and that the relationship between sociobiology and the “remainder of science” is, therefore, a peculiar one.

Key words: radical constructivism, evolution