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Annotationen:The Control of Perception and the Construction of Reality: Epistemological Aspects of the Feedback-Control System/Uf9f16stpl +
Human knowledge in general, and science in particular, is not engaged in uncovering certainty, truth, or reality, or any of the bugbears of dogmatic science. +
Annotationen:The Control of Perception and the Construction of Reality: Epistemological Aspects of the Feedback-Control System/Y1fflsoldg +
This part of the loop, however, is not accessible to the organism itself, because, as Powers has said, the organism can perceive nothing but its own sensory signals +
In other words, what the observer calls an “object”, is for the organism an inseparable component of an activity cluster. Nevertheless, at this point the stage is set for a momentous step that opens the way to a new kind of operation. No doubt, this step, like every other in the process of evolution, is fostered by the selective pressure of the environment; but for the functioning of the organism, it constitutes a discrete novelty like the opening of a new pathway in its processor. +
According to the view I am proposing, communicatory behavior is a mode of action, its function is to link concerted activity, and it is indispensable because without these links there could be no unified social action. Thus it is an instrument which is to say, a tool. +
For induction, whether it is conscious in the form of a conclusion we draw, or unconscious in the form of a behavior that becomes established because of its success, springs always from the same root: a more or less regular recurrence in past experience. +
It is in this sense that communication must be considered “instrumental”, “goal-directed”, and therefore “purposive”. +
In order to become a reference item, the object has to be cut loose from its original context where it was a more or less relevant sensory adjunct to an activity cluster, and it must become something very like a “representation”. +
To sum up this discussion of linguistic communication, I would suggest three criteria to distinguish ‘‘language’’, all of which are necessary but individually insufficient:
There must be a set (lexicon) of communicatory signs, i.e., perceptual items whose meaningfulness (SEMANTICITY) is constituted by a conventional tie (semantic nexus) and not by an inferential one.
These signs must be symbols, i.e., linked to representations (SYMBOLICITY) therefore they can be sent without reference to perceptual instances of the items they designate, and received without “triggering” a behavioral response in the receiver. As symbols they merely activate the connected representation.
There must be a set of rules (GRAMMAR) governing the combination of signs into strings such that certain combinations produce a new semantic content in addition to the individual content of the component signs. +
To begin, we may say that there could hardly have been an evolution of speech, or language, if there had not been an origin. +
An activity, thus, will be called “purposive” if it serves to reduce or eliminate the discrepancy (negative feedback) between the value of a sensory signal and the reference value in such a “teleological” unit. +
I would like to submit that it is, indeed, the logic of science and the scientific method that frequently stops scientists from looking outside a specific domain of possibilities. +
Seen in this way, the scientific method does not refer to, nor does it need, the assumption of an “objective” ontological reality—it concerns exclusively the experiential world of observers. +
For many thousands of years the river Nile flooded the Egyptian lowlands near the Mediterranean coast at least once a year. Vast amounts of fresh water seeped into the soil, fertilized it, and created a natural pressure against the water of the sea. The floods were a nuisance and, quite apart from this, using the Nile’s water to irrigate parts of the desert up-stream seemed eminently desirable. So the Assuan Dam was built to solve these two problems. The Nile no longer got out of hand and new land up- stream could be irrigated and cultivated. For a little while the dam seemed a wonderful success of science and engineering. Then it became clear that the salt of the Mediterranean was slowly but steadily seeping into and devastating the lowlands along the coast which had fed Egypt for millennia. +
That is to say, one must define certain experiences so that one can recognize them when one experiences them again. There can hardly be regularity before one has noticed repetition. +
Hence, the seemingly paradoxical assertion that an observer sees only what he or she already knows. This, in fact, is called “assimilation.” +
As Heinz von Foerster put it in conversation, ‘objectivity is the delusion that observations could be made without an observer’ +
The first is usually intended as an item isolated as part of experience; e.g. the chair you sit on, the keyboard in front of you, the hand that does the typing, the deep breath you have just taken. In short, any item of the furniture of someone’s experiential world can be called an object. +
In both cases it clearly is an active experiencer who creates the units. What is not so obvious, is that the discrete entities that are counted, as well as the continuous ones to which units of measurement are applied, are also an experiencer’s creation. +
To know, thus, is to have viable procedures or, as Maturana said “to operate adequately in an individual or cooperative situation” (1988, p.53). +
Thus, what we ordinarily call ‘experience’ has already been ordered and structured into discrete ‘things’ by perceptual and conceptual operations which endless repetition has rendered unconscious, and by assimilation to more complex conceptual configurations that have been formed in past experience. +
