Second-order Learning in Developmental Evaluation by Andrew Mitchell

Author:Andrew Mitchell
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783319993713
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

3.4.5 The Observer and Two Explanatory Paths

In the enactive world view, there are no independent observers , no bird’s eye view from nowhere. Observing, making knowledge claims, drawing distinctions , bringing forth a world are hence inherently political, and ethical, acts. To be clear, this approach is not claiming that the world is all made up. Enactivism does not succumb to solipsism, and even though it has been classified as an exposition of ‘radical constructivism’, this is not a description Maturana and Varela would agree with (Proulx 2008), even though they do challenge the certainty of an independent, or objective world, a real or final reality beyond (direct) human perception. Rather, they hold that the world is the product of interaction between the organism and its medium. These are two sides of the same coin—that is, they are mutually specified (Maturana and Varela 1992). This is illustrated with reference to the Homeric myth of the Odyssey and its endeavour to chart a course between the whirlpool of Charybdis (solipsism), and the sea monster, Scylla (representationalism).

Maturana and Varela offer the analogy of someone who has always lived in a submarine and the perspective of us as observers who stand on the shoreline watching the submariner gracefully navigating reefs and rocks. Upon completion of a particularly tricky manoeuvre, we radio the submariner to congratulate them on the skilful navigation of a difficult passage. The submariner responds in a confused manner, asking ‘what reefs, what rocks? I merely handled some levers and switches to ensure that the relationships between indicators on my instrument panel were kept constant’. As Maturana and Varela (1992: 137) conclude, “[i]t is only for us on the outside, who see how relations change between the submarine and its environment, that the submarine’s behavior exists and that it appears more or less adequate according to the consequences involved”.

This is significant because it means that any claims to behavioural intentionality and adequacy are contingent on the distinctions made by an observer (including the actor her/himself), and rather than attributing any such qualities as inherent or intrinsic to the behaviour itself. Observers determine what constitutes meaningful and purposeful behaviours, and these descriptions belong to the domain of the observer, not to the domain of the observed system . In other words, the observer describes processes as being meaningful, such as the behaviour of an organism relative to its environment, but from the perspective of the observed organism all it is doing is engaging in compensatory measures to maintain homoeostasis—the submariner who is oblivious to the rocks and reefs and only maintains the internal (from the perspective of an observer) conditions of the craft. To elaborate:whenever we say that something exists or that it has existence, we shall mean that that something ‘has presence’ or ‘that it occurs’ as a result of what we do as we distinguish it, and that it arises into existence with the characteristics with which it arises determined by the operation of distinction with which we distinguished it, and, therefore, that it does not occur with independency of what we do as we distinguish it.

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