Abstract
Human language, according to Humberto Maturana, can be seen as existing in the relationality of human organisms who in turn emerge as persons from autopoietic co-constitutive relationships. I propose that this autopoietic conception of language is eminently trans-actional in the Deweyan sense. A trans-actional presentation of knowledge means that everything that we seek to explain as observers exists in continuity with everything else. Such trans-actional continuity is grounded on a physical continuity that I propose is best exemplified by entanglement in quantum physics; which is quite counter-intuitive to our deterministic Newtonian-Cartesian “habits of mind.” This illustrates why we need finer tools, such as trans-actional autopoiesis, to approach our experience. Maturana explains how human language is made possible by our nervous system, embodied in an autopoietic manner; in constant trans-action with human embodiment and other humans and non-humans, as well as embedded in and having an effect on our environment.
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Notes
- 1.
Varela refers to enactment as “embodied cognition” (1991) that produces and sustains this involvement of our bodies through meaning in language, conversations and relationships.
- 2.
In enaction as embodied cognition, cognitive systems do not represent an independent world, rather, they enact a world as a domain of references and distinctions that cannot be separated from the sensory-motor configurations that unfold throughout the lifetime of the cognitive agent (Varela et al. 1991).
- 3.
These refer to the series of experiments that physicists came up with in order to solve the disputes that emerged around the idea of whether quantum indeterminacy and non-locality were possible at all. Starting with the double-slit experiment initially performed by Thomas Young in 1801 that seemed to prove the wave theory of light due to the interference pattern (the expected behaviour of waves). By the end of the nineteenth century, though, anomalies emerged with this theory that Max Planck solved by posing that energy flows in discrete particles or “quanta,” which Albert Einstein confirmed. But these findings made it possible to see light and energy as behaving both as waves and as matter depending on the measurement: the wave-particle duality of energy, which gave rise to indeterminacy and non-locality. This has been confirmed in modern versions of the two-slit experiment: when observed (with a detector), electrons behave as particles (matter), when not observed they display the wave interference pattern. Niels Bohr came up with the complementarity principle in 1927, where he proposes that describing these systems either as waves or as particles is mutually exclusive, but the full description of the system requires both aspects that are then complementary; which is quite counter-intuitive. This led to the famous Bohr-Einstein dispute on whether quantum mechanics was really proof that physical reality was non-deterministic. In 1935, Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen (EPR) published a now classic paper in which they proposed that if quantum mechanics was correct then it had to be incomplete. Bohr’s reply to EPR included a thought experiment that required the particles being measured be seen as “entangled” and not as discrete, but it was thought that there was no way to put these ideas to the test. Until 1964, when John Bell came up with the inequalities theoretical experiment to put to the test whether there was a local hidden variable that could rule out what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance” (that no causal influence can propagate faster than the speed of light). Einstein’s position came to be known as local realism. In 1981, Alain Aspect was able to perform the experiment that confirmed Bell’s inequalities and non-locality. Since then, the Wheeler experiments have included the idea of temporal non-locality (Wendt 2015).
- 4.
Karen Barad (2007) tells us that our theoretical and experimental practices leave their imprint in that which we are trying to know. Barad is a theoretical physicist who also embraces constructivism in her science studies and whose realism is related to a pragmatist understanding of objectivity. In her book Meeting the universe half way (2007), she discusses how the traditional conception of science as the mirror of nature amounts to a realist representation of knowledge that produced classical Newtonian physics; but traditional realism (just like Newtonian physics) is displaced from perceiving the basic entanglement of things, organisms (including human beings) and meaning. With this, she does not defend the opposite equally extreme (constructivist) position, that science is the mirror of culture; but she questions that nature reveals itself through science independently of theoretical and experimental practices. Hers is a pragmatic type of relational constructivism that is congenial with Dewey’s trans-actional presentation, even when she does not describe it that way. Barad poses as real that which can intervene in the world to affect something else, and reminds us that “electrons are counted as real because they are effective experimental tools, not because they have been ‘found’” (2007, p. 41). She proposes that a quantum perspective makes us confront both epistemological and ontological issues and questions the traditional scientific belief that these two are wholly separate and distinct concerns. In doing this, Barad also questions the whole gamut of dichotomous thinking that accompanies scientific practice, such as the traditional subject/object divide and the notion that scientific discoveries correspond to reality and are not marked by the observers performing the discovery. This is in line with Dewey’s trans-actional approach to knowledge that leaves behind observing reality in the form of interactions as in “[i]ndependently formulated systems working efficiently, such as Newtonian mechanics” (1949 [1989], p. 103).
- 5.
Ingold reviews various studies of non-human animal “communicative” behaviour and proposes that symbolic thought is no absolute difference between animal and human communication. Ingold is an anthropologist who looks into biology to explore embodied relationships as essential to the production of persons embedded in their sociality and not as mere individuals (1986). He believes that embodiment for the purposes of knowing is of the essence. Because of this he has developed an anthropology that assumes that “thinking is a form of making and accompanying” (Jackson 2018, pp. 318–319), which entails relationships, and this is in line with a pragmatic view of experience.
- 6.
Human language can be seen as a system of communication with four special features that distinguishes it from non-human animal communication: “1) Duality of patterning, creation of a large number of morphemes by combining a limited number of phonemes. 2) Productivity, i.e., the ability to produce from existing words utterances or sentences that are completely novel. 3) Traditional transmission, the fact that [human] language is not transmitted by genes, but is taught and learned. 4) Displacement, the capability to speak of objects and events remote in space and time” (Wagener 1978, p. 46).
- 7.
But this business of classification is not without its deep and unsolvable paradoxes (see Gould 1977).
- 8.
Language and text, once produced, have also been seen as themselves capable of producing discursive acts with their own kind of agency. This is conceived as a textual agency that resides with the textual entity produced and not with the human producer of such entity (see, Cooren 2008).
- 9.
Five kingdom of living beings have been differentiated: monera, proctitis, animals, plants and fungi (Margulis and Scwartz 1982). ‘Behaviour’ is generally associated to the animal kingdom, but Maturana and Varela find it hard to establish a clear basis for differentiating behaviour from observation of any living organism in its environment (see Maturana and Varela 1987, chapter 7).
- 10.
The transfer functions of the nerve cell involve the communication of impulses from its collector area (dendrites, and in some cases, also the cell body and part of the axon) through its distributive element (the axon, and in some cases, also the cell body and main dendrites) to its effector area (the terminal branching of the axon) (Maturana 1970, p. 18).
- 11.
Otherwise, with no nervous system, as in the behaviour of an amoeba, only the physical-chemical effect of autopoiesis in an environment can be observed. While this example is not without its own vast perspectival complexity, the amount of observable behaviours of an amoeba is comparatively reduced at the level of the observation of its mobility (Maturana 1990).
- 12.
Ontogeny is the term used in evolutionary biology to refer to the study of the lifespan of a single organism (in contrast to phylogeny that looks as species and lineages). Co-ontogeny is used by Maturana to refer to the life of organisms together throughout their lifespan.
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Dr. Ernest Tsui from the Department of Physical Sciences and Engineering in the Faculty of Science of Thompson Rivers University, who read and commented on the quantum physics part of an early draft of this chapter.
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Sánchez-Flores, M.J. (2020). Human Language as Trans-Actional Autopoiesis. In: Morgner, C. (eds) John Dewey and the Notion of Trans-action. Palgrave Studies in Relational Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26380-5_9
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