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1. In the explanatory path of objectivity - without - parenthesis, the observer implicitly or explicitly accepts his or her cognitive abilities, as such, as his or her constitutive properties, and he or she does so by not accepting, or by rejecting, a complete enquiry into their biological origin. In doing this, 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. In this explanatory path, the observer uses a reference to some entity such as matter, energy, mind, consciousness, ideas or God as his or her ultimate argument to validate and, hence, to accept a reformulation of the praxis of living as an

explanation of it. In other words, it 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. Therefore, 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.
 
In this explanatory path, the entities assumed to exist independently of what the observes does, as well as those entities that arise as constructs from these, constitute the real, and anything else is an illusion. In other words, in this explanatory path, to claim that a given statement is an illusion is to deny it reality and to negate its validity. Accordingly, due to its manner of constitution, this explanatory path necessarily leads the observer to require a single domain of reality - a universe, a transcendental referent - as the ultimate source of validation of the explanations that he or she accepts and, as a consequence, to the continuous attempt to explain all aspects of his or her praxis of living by reducing them to it. Finally, in this explanatory path, the assumption by different observers of different kinds of independent entities as the ultimate source of validation of their explanations constitutively leads them to validate with their behaviour different, and necessarily mutually exclusive, universes, realities or domains of objective explanations. Therefore, in this explanatory path, explanations entail the claim of a privileged access to an objective reality by the explaining observer, and in it the observers do not take responsibility for the mutual negation in their explanatory disagreements because this is the consequence of arguments whose validity does not depend on them. It is in this explanatory path that a claim of knowledge is a demand for obedience.
 
2. 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. Let me explain. When we observe animals, we can see that they, in general, commit what we call perceptual mistakes. Furthermore, we use this in our interactions with them when we cheat them in hunting. Thus, for example, in fishing trout we use a hook with feathers that we make fly like an insect hovering on the surface of the water. A trout that sees this fake fly, and jumps to catch it, 'discovers'

only on being hooked that the fly was an illusion. That the observer knows, through his or her design, that he or she has been cheating all the time does not alter this. It is only after being hooked that the previous experience of catching a fly is devaluated for the trout into an illusion. We observers, as living systems, are not different from the trout in this respect. The use that we make in daily life of the words 'mistake' and 'lie' reveal this, and the word 'hypocrisy' shows that we use our inability to distinguish in the experience between perception and illusion for the manipulation of our interpersonal relations. Indeed, regardless of the sensory avenue through which an experience takes place, and 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......

An observer in the domain of transcendental ontologies 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, in order to validate their explanations. Furthermore, 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. Due to
 
 

a) 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.

b) 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.

c) 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.

d) The actual experience by the observer of those additional phenomena deduced in (c), as he or she performs 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.

1. To the extent that science arises as an explanatory domain through the application of the criterion of validation of scientific explanations, science, as a domain of explanations and statements, is valid only in the community of observers (henceforth called standard observers) that accept and use for their explanations that particular criterion. In other words, science is constitutively a domain of reformulations of the praxis of living with elements of the praxis of living in a community of standard observers, and as such it is a consensual domain of co-ordinations of actions between the members of such a community. As a result of this, scientists can replace each other in the process of generating a scientific explanation. At the same time, it is this constitutive interchangeability of scientists that gives rise to the statement that scientific explanations must be corroborated by independent observers. Indeed, when two scientists do not coincide in their statements or explanations, it means that they belong to different consensual communities.
    
   
2. Since the criterion of validation of scientific explanations does not entail or require the supposition of an objective world independent of what the observer does, scientific explanations do not characterise, denote or reveal in an objective world independent of what the observer does. Due to this, as a domain of explanations and statements, as a domain of consensual co-ordinations of actions in a community of standard observers, science takes

place as a system of combinations of explanations and statements in the praxis of living of standard observers that expand their praxis of living according to their operation with those combinations of explanations and statements in their praxis of living as members of a community of standard observers.

3. Since it is not measurement, quantification or prediction that constitutes science as a domain of explanations and statements but the application of the criterion of validation of scientific explanations by a standard observer in his or her praxis of living, a standard observer can do science in any domain of the praxis of living in which he or she applies this criterion.
    
   
4. Since the criterion of validation of scientific explanations validates as a scientific explanation a mechanism that generates the phenomenon to be explained as a consequence of its operation, the explanatory mechanism and the phenomenon to be explained necessarily belong to different and not intersecting phenomenal domains. Therefore, constitutively, a scientific explanation does not consist in a phenomenic world.
    
   
5. The operations that constitute the criterion of validation of scientific explanations are the same that we use in the operational validation of the praxis of our daily life as human beings. It follows from this that, in a strict operational sense, what distinguishes an observer in daily life from an observer as a scientist is the scientist's emotional orientation to explaining his or her consistency in using only the criterion of validation of scientific explanations for the system of explanations that he or she generates in his or her particular domain of explanatory concerns, and his or her commitment to avoid confusing phenomenal domains in his or her generation of scientific explanations.
    
   
6. A structure determined system is a system in which all that happens happens as a structural change determined in it at every instant by its structure at that instant, regardless of whether this structural change arises in it in the flow of its own internal dynamics, or contingent on its interactions. This means that nothing external to a structure determined system can specify the structural changes that it undergoes as a consequence of an interaction. An external agent that interacts with a structure determined system can only trigger in it structural changes determined in it. The components, plus the static or dynamic relations between them that an observer distinguishes at any instant as composing a structure determined system, are the structure of that system. 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.

7. Although the practice of science entails the application of the criterion of validation of scientific explanations, most scientists are not aware of the epistemological and ontological implications of what they do because for them science is a domain of practice and not a domain of reflections. Something similar happens to many philosophers that do not understand what takes place in science because for them science is a domain of reflections, and not a domain of practice. As a result, both of them usually follow the general trend of our western culture and a) accept scientific explanations as reductionist propositions under the implicit belief that they consist in expressing the phenomenon to be explained in more fundamental terms, and b) do not see the generative character of scientific explanations because they are under the implicit or explicit belief that the validity of scientific explanations rests on their direct or indirect reference to an objective reality independent of what the observer does. Finally, due to this usual blindness about what constitutes a scientific explanation in modern science, both scientists and philosophers frequently believe in our culture that to be objective in the practice of science and philosophy means that the statements or explanations that one makes as such are valid through their reference to an independent reality. In practice however, for an acting scientist to be objective only means not letting his or her desire for a particular outcome in his or her research to obscure his or her impeccability as a generator of scientific explanations in the operational terms that I have presented above.
    
   
8. Together with the implicit or explicit assumption that scientific statements refer to an objective independent reality usually goes the implicit belief (and the emotion of certainty that supports it) that it is in principle possible to find for any dilemma of human life an objective (transcendental) argument that dissolves it, and whose reference to the real constitutively makes it undeniable and rationally valid. However, there is at the same time in our western culture a frequent doubt about the possibility that science may at all be able to explain certain features of the praxis of living like psychic and spiritual phenomena, precisely because of the mechanistic nature of scientific explanations and their assumed reductionistic character. What I have said above, however, shows that this manner of thinking entails a misunderstanding about scientific explanations that, for my purpose in this article, it is necessary to dispel. As I have said, scientific explanations are constitutively not reductionist. On the contrary. Since a scientific explanation is the proposition of a generative mechanism that gives rise as a consequence of its operation to the phenomenon to be explained in a different phenomenal domain than the one in

which it takes place, a scientific explanation constitutes and validates the existence of completely different nonintersecting phenomenal domains that are intrinsically not reducible to each other. So, the mechanistic character of scientific explanations constitutively does not negate the possibility of a scientific explanation of psychic and spiritual phenomena. On the contrary, it opens the possibility to explain them as biological phenomena. Indeed, the mechanistic character of scientific explanations specifies that, in order to explain psychic and spiritual phenomena as biological phenomena, the observer must propose a generative mechanism that applies to him- or herself as a living system giving rise to such phenomena as a consequence of its operation. As such a mechanism would give rise to psychic and spiritual phenomena as a consequence of its operation, it would not negate their particular experiential character because it would constitute the phenomenal domain in which they take place as a phenomenal domain that does not intersect with the phenomenal domain in which it takes place as a generative mechanism.

1. In being consistent with the basic tenet of objectivity of the explanatory path of objectivity - without - parenthesis, the observers that take this explanatory path cannot avoid taking language as a system of behaviour that they use to communicate with each other about entities that exist independently of what they do. Furthermore, in doing this they cannot avoid the implicit assumption that they have the constitutive ability to grasp the existence and features of such independent entities, and of symbolising both their existence and features with words. That is, in this explanatory path, the observers that want to talk about language cannot avoid talking about words as if they were symbols that stand for the independent entities about which they communicate with each other. This has two basic consequences for the observers who indeed want to talk about language in this explanatory path:
    
   

   
    
   

   a) If language is taken by the observer as one of his or her constitutive properties, then language shows up in his or her discourse as an unanalysable given, and the most that he or she can do is to describe its regularities and conditions of use.
   

   
    
   

   b) If the observer takes language as a result of its operation as a biological entity, and want to give a scientific explanation of it as a biological phenomenon while remaining in the explanatory path of objectivity - without - parenthesis, then he or she must show the operation of a biological structural mechanism through which the living system grasps the features of the independent entities that the words that he or she uses symbolise. That mechanism, however, does not take place in the domain of scientific explanations, and cannot take place because the observer as a scientist must treat living systems as structure determined entities, that is, as entities in which everything that happens is determined by their structure, and not by any external agent that many impinge upon them. In other words, the conception of the observer as a biological entity whose properties result from its operation as such, and the conception of the observer as an entity that can make any kind of statement about an independent reality, either directly through perception, or indirectly through reason, are intrinsically contradictory. Due to this, language, perception, cognition and self-consciousness are abilities, properties or operations of the observer that cannot be explained as biological phenomena in the explanatory path of objectivity - without - parenthesis.
    
   

2. In the explanatory path of objectivity - in - parenthesis, the situation is completely different. As this explanatory path is constituted by recognising that the observer is a living system, and that all its properties result from its operation as such, all the properties of the observer as an observer require a biological explanation. Furthermore, the observer who wants to do this has to satisfy two conditions: a) that the observer must take its own operation as a living system in language (that is, its own praxis of living as an observer) as

its starting point, as its instrument for explaining his or her operation as such, as well as the phenomenon to be explained; and b) that the observer must propose a biological mechanism that gives rise to language as a consequence of its operation in the context of the satisfaction of the criterion of validation of scientific explanations. The first condition is intrinsically satisfied in the explanatory path in the recognition that in it explaining consists of a reformulation of the praxis of living of the observer. The second condition requires a special attention to the manner of existing of living systems as structure determined systems in recurrent interactions that I have presented in other publications (see Maturana, 1978 and Maturana & Varela, 1987), and which I shall repeat here only in its conclusions, but not in its whole justification, in the form of six statements:

 

a) 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. Languaging and physiology take place in different and not 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.
 

 

b) The scientific explanation of language as a biological phenomenon consists in the proposition of a generative mechanism that gives rise to the dynamics of interactions and co-ordinations of actions that an observer distinguishes as languaging. Such an explanation must show how languaging arises in the interaction of living systems as structure determined systems, and how it constitutes, as a domain of co-ordinations of actions, a phenomenal domain in which all that we do in language in the praxis of living can take place, and does take place, when certain historical contingencies occur. Since, as I have shown above, a scientific explanation does not constitute a phenomenic reduction, but on the contrary it constitutes the validation of a generative relation between otherwise independent nonintersecting phenomenal domains, the scientific explanation of language does not constitute a phenomenic reduction of it.

 

c) As an observer distinguishes a structure determined system, he or she brings forth a composite entity and the domain in which it interacts with conservation of organisation. Furthermore, as a structure determined system conserves its organisation while it interacts in a particular medium, and flows in the sequences of structural changes that these interactions trigger in it, it also conserves its structural correspondence or adaptation in

that medium, otherwise it disintegrates. Indeed, conservation of organisation (relations between components that define the class identity of a system) and conservation of adaptation (relation of interactions in a medium that do not trigger the disintegration of the system) are conditions of existence for any system distinguished by the observer. In these circumstances, an observer sees that when two or more structure determined systems interact recurrently with each other in a particular medium, they enter in a history of congruent structural changes that follows a course that arises moment after moment contingent on their recurrent interactions, to their own internal structural dynamics, and to their interactions with the medium, and which lasts until one or both of them disintegrate, or they separate.
 
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'. If the interacting structure determined systems are living systems, what the observer sees along the flow of their recurrent interactions is that their congruent structural changes take place embedded in the realisation, and sometimes in the expansion, of a domain of co-ordinations of actions or behaviour between them that was already allowed by their initial structures at the beginning of their recurrent interactions. If what takes place along a particular course of recurrent interactions between two or more living systems is the expansion of an initial domain of co-ordinations of actions, and the observer can claim that the new co-ordinations of actions would not have arisen in a different history of recurrent interactions between those living systems, then those living systems have established what I call a domain of consensual co-ordinations of actions. Domains of consensual co-ordinations of actions are, normally, the spontaneous outcomes of the operations of living systems under recurrent interactions. All that is needed for them to arise is that the participant living systems should already have at their first encounter the necessary structural disposition for their recurrent interactions to take place, structural plasticity in the domain of their interactions, and the initial structure that allows them to conserve organisation and adaptation while their structures change under their recurrent interactions. All living systems satisfy these three structural conditions to some extent, and they do so as a result of the evolutionary history to which they belong.

 

d) There are circumstances in which an observer can see that under the expansion of a consensual domain of co-ordinations of actions there is a recursion in the co-ordinations of actions of the organisms that participate in it. When this happens, what an observer sees is, on the one hand, organisms that interact with each other recurrently in consensual

co-ordinations of actions, and on the other hand, a phenomenal domain in which all the phenomena that we distinguish as phenomena of praxis of living in daily life take place. Due to this, I claim that when this occurs, language happens, and that the phenomenon of language takes place in the flow of consensual co-ordinations of consensual co-ordinations of action between organisms that live together in a co-ontogenic structural drift. Furthermore, I also claim that with languaging observing and the observer arise; the former as the second-order recursion in consensual co-ordinations of actions that constitute the phenomenon of distinction and the latter in a third-order recursion in which there is the distinction of the operational realisation of observing in a bodyhood. Indeed, when languaging and observing take place, objects take place as distinctions of distinctions that obscure the co-ordinations of action that these co-ordinate. Finally, when languaging, observing and objects take place, the phenomenon of self-consciousness may take place in a community of observers as a fourth-order recursion of consensual co-ordinations of actions in which the observer distinguishes his or her bodyhood as a node in a network of recursive distinctions.

 

e) Language as a domain of recursive consensual co-ordinations of action does not operate with symbols, yet symbols arise in language as distinctions of relations of distinctions. Also, according to this, words are not symbolic entities, nor do they connote or denote independent objects. They are distinctions of consensual co-ordinations of actions in the flow of consensual co-ordinations of actions. This is why sounds, marks or movements do not constitute words by themselves, and sequences of groups of sounds, marks or movements do not constitute languaging. Language occurs only in the flow of recursive consensual co-ordinations of actions between organisms in recurrent interactions, or, in the operation of a single organism, in the flow of actions that an observer may see in it as belonging to an implicit domain of consensual co-ordinations of actions with other organisms because they arise in that single organism in its structural dynamics under circumstances in which its structure in that moment is the result of its participation in a history of languaging with other organisms. In daily life we know that this is the case, and we usually say that a human being is eccentric, mad or alienated when we see him or her performing the actions proper to languaging outside a domain of recursive consensual co-ordinations of actions.

 

f) Although language takes place in a domain of co-ordinations of actions, it results as such through the co-ontogenic structural drift of organisms in recurrent interactions. That is, language takes place in the flow of consensual co-ordinations of actions of organisms whose actions co-ordinate because they have congruent dynamic structures that have

arisen or are arising through their recurrent interactions in a co-ontogenic drift. Due to this, interactions in language are structural interactions that trigger in the interacting organisms structural changes contingent on the course of the consensual co-ordinations of actions in which they arise. As a result, even though the domain of languaging does not intersect with the structural domain of the bodyhoods of the interacting organisms, the structural changes of the organisms that interact in language are a function of what takes place in their languaging, and vice versa. Although we are usually unaware of this, we in daily life show that we know that this is the case with the adjectives that we usually use to characterise the languaging of a conversation in terms of what happens to us as body encounters. Thus we say that the words were smooth, caressing, hard, sharp, and so on; all word that refer to body touching. Indeed, we can kill or elate with words as body experiences. We kill or elate with words because, as co-ordinations of actions, they take place through body interactions that trigger in us body changes in the domain of physiology.

1. All animals have different domains of internal operational coherences that

constitute dynamic body postures through which their actions and interactions in their respective domains of existence take place. This we recognise in daily life to be similar to what happens in us by calling moods or emotions the different manners of interacting that we may observe in other animals.

2. The observer distinguishes different emotions and moods through the distinction of the different domains of actions in which the observed organisms move. Furthermore, as I have already said above (in 'Rationality'), biologically, that which we distinguish when we distinguish emotions in daily life are dynamic body dispositions for actions (of course involving the nervous system) that specify at any moment the domains of actions in which the organisms move. Thus, all animal behaviour takes place in a domain of actions supported and specified at any moment by some emotion or mood. Indeed, all animal life takes place under a continuous flow of emotions and moods (emotioning) that changes the domains of actions in which the organisms move and operate, and they do so in a manner that is contingent on the course of their interactions. We human beings are not an exception to this. Moreover, in us human beings emotioning is mostly consensual, and follows a course braided with languaging in our history of interactions with other human beings. Thus, even for the recurrent interactions through which languaging occurs to take place between two or more human beings, it is necessary to occur in these a particular flow of body dispositions that moment after moment leads them to remain in recurrent interactions. When this flow of body dispositions for recurrent interactions ends, when in the course of this emotioning the emotion that leads to recurrent interactions in language ends, the process of language (the conversation) ends. In other words, languaging flows in the co-ordinations of actions of human beings in a background of emotioning that constitutes the operational possibility of its occurrence, and specifies at any instant the consensual domains in which it takes place. Still in other words, the operational coherences of languaging have the universality of the operational coherences of the co-ordinations of actions of the observers in the praxis of living, and the flow of changing emotion under which languaging occurs does not change this, it only changes the domain of actions in which languaging takes place.
    
   
3. When an observer distinguishes the operational regularities of the recursive consensual co-ordinations of actions in the praxis of living that constitute languaging, he or she speaks of logic. As such, logic is independent of the content in terms of the domains of actions involved; it is specified by the operational coherences of the praxis of living of the observer, and has the universality of the operational coherences of the consensual co-ordinations of actions to which human beings can give rise as living systems. Due to this, emotioning, as I have already said above (in 'Rationality') does not constitute a flow through different logics, but only a flow through different domains of

co-ordinations of actions, and rationality is not constituted by the contents of languaging, but by its operational coherences.

4. When an observer distinguishes a flow of co-ordinations of actions in language in a group of observers, he or she speaks of a conversation. As such, a conversation takes place as the operation of a group of observers within an already established domain of consensuality, or as an expansion of it, or as a process through which a new domain of consensuality arises. It is our emotioning that determines how we move in our conversations through different domains of co-ordinations of actions. At the same time, due to the consensual braiding of our emotioning with our languaging, our conversations determine the flow of our emotioning. Finally, it is at every instant the circumstances of our interactions in the domain of actions in which our conversations take place in the conservation of the particular kind of human being that we are continuously becoming in the praxis of living that generates the path of consensuality of our emotioning, and determines the course of our conversations. So, strictly speaking, human life is always an inextricably braided flow of emotioning and rationality through which we bring forth different domains of reality. And we live our different domains of reality in our interactions with others, explicitly or implicitly, in objectivity - in - or - without - parenthesis, according to the flow of our emotioning.
    
   
5. We modern western human beings usually claim to be rational animals in order to distinguish ourselves from other animals that we claim move only under emotional drives. That we are animals who use reason, there is no doubt. Reason moves us only through the emotions that arise in us in the course of our conversations (or reflections) within the braided flow of our languaging and emotioning. Indeed, what makes us human beings the peculiar kinds of animals that we are is not the operational coherence of our rationality, which is the operational coherence of our praxis of living as living systems in co-ordinations of actions, but our living in language in the constitutive braiding of languaging and emotioning.
    
   
6. Our emotioning also braids with our consensual co-ordinations of actions as we operate in first-order linguistic domains in our interactions with other human beings and with non-human animals. Indeed, it is this braiding of emotioning and first-order consensuality that constitutes the richness and complexity of our co-ordinations of actions with domestic animals that prompts us to call them intelligent.

1. Conversations as operations in language are operations in domains of consensuality that may become expanded, restricted or disappear with or without the appearance of new ones. This is apparent in our daily life as we experience an increase, a diminution or a change in our intimacy with those with whom we converse as something that occurs while the conversation takes place. In every case, however, the bodyhoods of the participants unavoidably change in a congruent manner, even when the result is separation with loss of consensuality. In other words, although the dynamics of consensuality and bodyhood change take place in different and non-intersecting phenomenal domains, they braid along a conversation as a result of their manner of constitution as biological processes. That is, the changes in the bodyhoods of the participants follow a path contingent on the co-ordinations of actions and emotions that take place along a conversation, and the co-ordinations and actions and emotions that constitute the conversation follow a path contingent on the bodyhood changes that occur in the participants along it while generating it. This is again part of our daily life experience, and we can notice it if in a conversation we attend to the dynamics of our bodyhood in relation to our flow in it.
    
   
2. There are several classes of conversations that an observer can distinguish in the domain of human relations and interactions. These differ in the kinds of co-ordinations of actions and emotions involved, and each class of conversation is defined by a particular pattern or configuration of co-ordination of actions and emotional flow. Furthermore, all classes of conversations can take place in many different domains of actions and in many different emotional contexts, regardless of the operational domain, or domain of reality, in which the actions take place. Finally, every human being usually participates in many different conversations, simultaneously or successively, that intersect each other through their realisation in his or her bodyhood. Indeed, we human beings live in communities that exist as networks of crisscrossing non-intersecting conversations of different kinds that couple with each other in their flow through their intersections in our bodyhoods. Let me mention some of them:

   
   

   
    
   

   a) Conversations of co-ordinations of present and future actions. These conversations consist in the actual co-ordinations of actions that occur

while languaging in a particular domain, and that the observer sees as taking place in an emotional flow in which the participants only listen for co-ordinations of actions. Two examples: "If you set the table, I'll prepare dinner./I shall do that with pleasure." "Do you know how to calculate the length of the diagonal of a rectangle?/Yes, you must use Pythagoras' theorem./Ah! Of course! Many thanks."

 

b) Conversations of complaint and apology for unkept agreements. These conversations consist in a flow of co-ordinations of behaviour that an observer sees as taking place under the emotions of righteousness and guilt in an interplay of demands, promises and expressions in which complaints and apologies are lived as legitimate actions even when the apologies are not accepted. Two examples: "Why did you say that you would come if you were not coming?/Oh! At the time I said I was coming I was sure that I could. It was only afterwards that I discovered that my mother was ill and that I would rather stay with her./I did not know that. Well, do not worry, we shall arrange another meeting." "I am ready now. Are you ready?/I am sorry, I cannot do it now./But you promised..../Yes, but my mother is calling me. Can you wait until I come back?"

 

c) Conversations of desires and expectations. These conversations consist in co-ordinations of actions that the observer sees as taking place in a domain of discourse while each one of the participants has his or her attention in his or her description of a future, and not in the actions through which he or she is constituted as a human being in the present. Two examples: "After the presidential election, I shall be able to push my programme of reforestation./That will be the case if your candidate wins. I think however that she will not./I am sure that she will win; she has the support of the working people." "Eat your food and you will grow as big as your uncle./I do not want to eat. I do not want to be like my uncle because he is very old."

 

d) Conversations of command and obedience. These conversations consist in co-ordinations of actions that an observer sees as taking place in an emotional background of mutual- and self-negation in which some of the participants obey, that is, do under the request of others what they do not want to do, and others command, that is, accept a condition of superiority and feel confirmed in it when their commands are carried out. Those who obey negate themselves by doing what they do not want to do, and negate the one who commands by ascribing to him or her, as a property, a condition of superiority that is constituted as a relation of order by their obedience. He or she who commands negates those who obey by accepting their self-negation as legitimate, and negates him- or herself by accepting as valid his or her characterisation as superior by those who obey. Two examples: "John, come and solve this problem on the blackboard./But I

haven't finished the exercise in my copybook yet./It does not matter. I am asking you to come to the blackboard./Grrr...(John comes)." "You will have to go to Valparaiso./Now? I have some friends coming to dinner tonight at home./I am sorry, but I need you to go to Valparaiso today and stay there until tomorrow./Okay....you're the boss."

 

c) Conversations of characterisations, attributions and valuing. These conversations consist in co-ordinations of actions in a domain of discourse, descriptions and opinions that the observer sees as taking place in a braided emotioning of acceptance and rejection, pleasure and frustration, according to whether the participants who listen perceive that they are properly seen or not by the participants who speak. Three examples: "Here you are! I thought of you as a person who always arrived on time./What? Do you mean that I am unpunctual? This is the first time that I have been late." "I shall not look into your computations. You are so intelligent that you are always right./But sometimes I commit mistakes..../I have never found one./It is nice to hear that." "Look at your shirt. It is dirty./But mother, you know I was playing.../Oh! Come! You are sloppy. You are always dirty".

 

f) Conversations of complaint for unfulfilled expectations. These are conversations that consist in co-ordinations of actions in a domain of descriptions that the observer sees as taking place in an emotional background of frustration in which the speaker perceives the listener as dishonestly not fulfilling a promise that he or she did not make. Two examples: "You are late again and the food is over-cooked./But you know that at this time of the year I cannot arrive earlier!" "I had so much hope in the work of this committee./Well... but you knew that I did not have enough experience in the subject to chair it? Yes, but I could have helped you if you had had confidence in me."
 

There are still other kinds of conversations that could be added to this list, but I shall stop here. Yet, what I want to emphasise now is that as we human beings participate in many different conversations simultaneously or in succession, our actual community coexistence courses as the changing front of a network of conversations in which different crisscrossing co-ordinations of present and future actions braid with different consensual emotional flows. Indeed, the different systems of coexistence, or kinds of human communities that we integrate, differ in the networks of conversations (consensual co-ordinations of actions and emotions) that constitute them, and therefore in the domains of reality in which they take place. Whichever the case, however, as our present as human beings is always a node in a network of conversations, we frequently find ourselves in situations that we live as emotional contradictions because they arise as the intersection in our
 
 

1. As a structure determined system, the nervous system does not and cannot operate with representations of an environment; indeed, nothing external to it can specify what happens in it. It is due to the structural determinism of our nervous system, or, better, it is due to our structural determinism as living systems, that we cannot distinguish in the experience between perception and illusion. The operational congruence between any natural system with a nervous system and its medium is the result of the conservation of the structural congruence between the system (its nervous system included) and its medium through its history of interaction (see Maturana, 1983).
    
   
2. The states of a nervous system as a composite entity are relations of interactions between its components, yet, and at the same time, it is through the operation of the properties of its components that a nervous system interacts as a composite entity. Furthermore, the structure and the domain of states of a nervous system change as the properties of its components change as a result of the structural changes triggered in them by their interactions. Due to this, as the structure of the components of a nervous system changes as a result of their interactions, the structure and the domain of the states of the nervous system integrated by the changing components changes too, and does so following a course contingent on the history of their interactions.
    
   
3. As a nervous system integrates a larger system, let us say an organism, it exists as a whole, that is, as a composite entity, in the domain of existence of the organism that it integrates, and its components interact through this in the domain of interactions in which this interacts. As a result, the structure of the

components of a nervous system, the structure of the nervous system that they compose as well as its domain of states, and the structure of the organism that the nervous system integrates, all change congruently, following a path contingent on the history of interactions of the organism. In other words, the structure of the nervous system and its dynamics of change are dynamically coupled to the structure of the organism and its dynamics of change. To the extent that the changes of state of the nervous system result in changes of state of the organism, and the changes of state of the organism result in changes in its interactions, that is, in changes in its behaviour, the nervous system participates through its dynamics of state in the generation of behaviour of the organism that it integrates. Due to all this, the structure of a nervous system is necessarily always, and at any moment, the present in a flow of structural changes arising contingent on the history of interactions of the organism that it integrates, and its dynamics of states is necessarily always, and at any moment, operationally correspondent with the historical features of the behaviour of the organism that it generates.

4. What I have said above is also applicable to us in our operation in language. Languaging takes place in the flow of recursive co-ordinations of consensual behaviours. Operationally, a recursion takes place only in reference to a succession of events that the repetition of an operation is a recursion. That is, a recursion is the repetition of a circular process that an observer sees coupled to a historical phenomenon in a manner such that he or she can claim that, in the historical flow of that phenomenon, that repetition results in the reapplication of that process on the consequences of its previous occurrence. It is due to this manner of constitution of the phenomenon of recursion that not all circular processes are recursive processes. At the same time, it is due to this that, although the nervous system is a circular network of interconnected circular processes of different time constants, there are not recursive processes in it until languaging arises. Or, in other words, the nervous system as a closed network of changing relations of interactions between its components only generates circular processes regardless of whether the organism that it integrates participates in language or not, yet, in the context of the flow of the recursive co-ordinations of actions of languaging, and only with respect to such flow of co-ordinations of actions, some of these circular processes constitute recursive processes.
    
   
5. Since the structure and operation of a nervous system always embodies the behavioural present of the history of interactions of the system that it integrates, and therefore generates the dynamics of states that gives rise to that behavioural present, the nervous system of an organism that participates in language can generate a dynamics of states proper to languaging as a feature of its closed dynamics. Due to this, an organism that participates in a domain of languaging in which observing, reflection and self-awareness have arisen can

operate in a soliloquy, that is, in a flow of internal dynamics that an observer sees as reflecting an internal dialogue in self-consciousness of self-awareness.

 

a) An observer can speak of genetic determination only if he or she is implying a total epigenetic repetition as a standard and unavoidable phenomenon in the development of a particular organism. In other words, if the initial structure repeats, and the history of relevant interactions repeats, then the outcome repeats. This, of course, every biologist knows, but it is not always clear in his or her discourse. Furthermore, that this is the case is a consequence of the structural determinism of living systems.

 

b) We call learning that part of the ontogeny of an organism that we as observers see as occurring as if this were adapting itself to some novel and unusual circumstance of the environment. Furthermore, we usually see the phenomenon that we call learning as if the organism were adapting to the features of the environment, and therefore, handling them through the process of making a representation of them. Nothing of this happens or can happen. The living system is a structure determined system and, as such, nothing external to it can specify what happens to it; indeed, for the operation of a living system, there is no inside or outside, and it cannot make a representation of what an observer sees as external to it.

 

c) All that happens in the life of a living system arises through its ontogenic structural change under an epigenetic mode. Along the epigenetic transformations of an organism, the structure of an organism and the structure of the medium that it encounters (its niche) change congruently as an unavoidable result of their recurrent interactions. As we observe the conservation of the operational congruence between organism and medium that results from this, we call learning that part of the ontogeny of a living system that, due to its complexity, we do not see as an epigenetic process. From the perspective of the explanatory path of objectivity - without - parenthesis, we speak of the phenomenon that we call learning as if what

happened to the organism along it had become a process directed to its adaptation to its final circumstances. In this explanatory path, learning is a commentary that an observer makes about two moments in the epigenesis of an organism in which he or she does not see the historical process that connects them and assumes an active mechanism of accommodation that does not take place. From the perspective of the explanatory path of objectivity - in - parenthesis, the phenomenon connoted by the word 'learning' takes place as an epigenetic process, and as such does not entail accommodation or the making of a representation of an environment.

 

a) The observer is necessarily always in structural correspondence in its domain of existence. Due to this, the observer constitutively cannot make distinctions outside the domain of operational coherences of his or her praxis of living. As a result, the observer necessarily finds itself in the praxis of living making distinctions that are operationally never out of place because they pertain to the operational coherences of his or her realisation as a living system constitutively in structural congruence with the medium.

 

b) When an observer who operates in the explanatory path of objectivity - in - parenthesis claims that a mistaken distinction has been made, what he or she claims is that a distinction has been made in an operational domain different from the one that he or she expected, and not that the operation of distinction is at fault. And this is so because in this explanatory path the observer is aware that the object is constituted in the operation of distinction. It is only in the explanatory path of objectivity - without - parenthesis, in which the object distinguished is assumed to exist with independency of what the observer does, that the observer can claim that, in a mistaken distinction, the fault is in the operation of distinctions and not in the appreciation of the observer about what took place.

 

c) Since all the conversations