por Humberto Maturana
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We find ourselves as human beings here and now is the praxis of living, in the happenig of being human, in language languaging, in an a priori experiential situation in which everything that is, everything that happens, is and happens in us as part of our praxis of living. In these circumstances, whatever we say about how anything happens takes place in the praxis of our living as a comment, as a reflexion, as a reformulation, in short, as an explanation of the praxis of our living, and as such it does not replace or constitute the praxis of living that it purports to explain. Thus, to say that we are made of matter, or to say that we are ideas in the mind of God, are both explanations of that wich we live as our experience of being, yet neither matter nor ideas in the mind of God constitute the experience of being that which they are supposed to explain. Explanations take place operationally in a metadomain with respect to that which they explain. Furthermore, in daily life, in the actual dynamics of human interactions, an explanations is always an answer to a question about the origin of a given phenomenon, and is accepted or rejected by a listener who accepts or rejects it according to whether or not it satisfies a particular implicit or explicit criterion of acceptability that he or she specifies. Therefore, there are as many different kinds of explanations as there are different criteria of acceptability of reformulation of the happening of living of the observers that the observers specify. Accordingly, every domain of explanations as it is defined by a particular criterion of acceptability, constitutes a closed cognitive domain as a domain of acceptable statements of actions for the observes that accept that criterion of acceptability. Science, modern science, as a cognitive domain is not an exception to this. Indeed, modern science is that particular cognitive domain that takes what is called the scientific explanation as the criterion of validation (acceptability) of the statements that pertain to it. Let me make this explicit.
i) Scientific explanations. Scientists usually do not reflect upon the constitutive conditions of science. Yet, it is possible to abstract, from what modern scientists do, an operational (and, hence, experiential) specification of what constitutes a scientific explanation as the criterion of validation of what they claim are their scietific statements. Furthermore, it is possible to describe this criterion of validation of scientific statements as a reformulation of what is usually called the scientific method.
A. Different domains of human activities entail different intentions. Thus, as the intention of doing art is to generate an aesthetich experience, and the intention of doing technology is to produce, the intention of doing science is to explain. It is, therefore, in the context of explaining that the criterion of validation of a scientific explanation is the conjoined satisfaction in the praxis of living of an observer of four operational conditions, one of which, the proposition of and ad hoc mechanism that generates the phenomenon explained as a phenomenon to be witnessed by the observer in his or her praxis of living, is the scientific explanation. And, it is in the context of explaining that it must be understood that the scientific explanation is the criterion of validation of a scientific statements. Finally, it is also in the context of explaining that it must be recognized that a modern scientific community of observers (henceforth called standard observers) that use the scientific explanation as the criterion of validation of their statements. Now, the criterion of validation of scientific explanations entails four operational conditions.
- The specification of the phenomenon to be explained through the stipulation of the operations that a standard observer must perform in his or her praxis of living in order to also be a witness of it in his or her praxis of living.
- The proposition, in the domain of operational coherences of the praxis of living of a standard observer, of a mechanism, a generative mechanism, which when allowed to operate gives rise as a consequence of its operation to the phenomenon to be explained, to be witnessed by the observer also in his or her praxis of living. This generative mechanism, that is usually called the explanatory hypothesis, takes place in the praxis of living of the observer in a different phenomenal domain than the phenomenal domain in which the phenomenon to be explained is witnessed, and the latter as a consequence of the former stands in an operational metadomain with respect to it. Indeed, the phenomenon to be explained and its generative mechanism take place in different non-intersecting phenomenal domains in the praxis of living of the observer.
- The deduction, that is, the computation, in the domain of operational coherences of the praxis of living of the standard observer entailed by the generative mechanism proposed in (b), of other phenomena that the standard observer should be able to witness in his or her domain of experiences as a result of the operation of such operational coherences, and the stipulation of the operations that he or she should perform in order to do so.
- The actual witnessing, in his or her domain of experiences, of the phenomena deduced in (c) by the standard observer who actually perfoms in his or her praxis of living the operations stipulated also in (c).
If these four operational conditions are conjointly satisfied in the praxis of living of the standard observer, the generative mechanism proposed in (b) becomes a scientific explanation of the phenomenon brought forth in (a). These four operational conditions in the praxis of living of the observer constitute the criterion of validation of scientific explanations, and science (modern science) is a domain of statements directly or indirectly validated by scientific explanations. Accordingly, it follows that there are no such things as scientific observations, scientific hypotheses or scientific predictions: there are only scientific explanations and scientific statements. It also follows that the standard observer can make scientific statements in any domain of his or her praxis of living in which he or she can make scientific explanations.
B. According to A a scientific statement is valid as a scientific statement only within the community of standard observers that is defined as such because they can realize and accept the scientific explanation as the criterion of validation of their statements. This makes scientific statements consensual statements, and the community of standard observers a scientific community. That in principle any human human being can belong to the scientific community is due to two facts of experiences: one is that it is as a living human being that an observer can realize and accept the scientific explanation as the criterion of validation of his or her statements and become a standard observer, the other is that the criterion of validation of scientific statements is the operational criterion of validation of actions and statements in daily life, even if it is not used with the same care in order to avoid confusion of phenomenal domains. Indeed, these two experiential facts constitute the fundament for the claim of universality that scientists make for their statements, but what is peculiar in scientists in that they are careful to avoiding confusion of phenomenal domains when applying the criterion of validation of scientific statements in the praxis of living.
C. Scientists and philosophers of science usually belive that the operational effectiveness of science and technology reveals objective independent reality, and that scientific statements reveal the features of an independent universe, of an objective world. Or, in other words, many scientists and philosophers of science believe that without the independent existence of an objective reality, science could not take place. Yet, if one does, as I have done above, a constitutive, an ontological, analysis of the criterion of validation of scientific statements, one can see that scientific explanations do not require the assumption of objectivity because scientific explanations do not explain an independent objective reality. Scientific explanations explain the praxis of living of the observer, and they do so with the operational coherences brought forth by the observer in his or her praxis of living. It is this fact that gives science its biological foundations and that makes science a cognitive domain bound to the biology of the observer with characteristics that are determined by the ontology of observing.
ii) Science. In conclusion, the operational description of what constitutes a scientific explanation as the criterion of validation of scientific statements, reveals the following characteristics of scientific statements in general, and of science as a domain of scientific statements in particular.
A. Scientific statements are consensual statements valid only within the community of standard observers that generates them; and science as the domain of scientific statements does not need an objective independent reality, nor does it reveal one. Therefore, the operational effectiveness of science as a cognitive domain rests only on the operational coherence that takes place in the praxis of living of the standard observers that generate it as a particular domain of consensual coordinations of actions in the praxis of their living together as a scientific community. Science is not a manner of revealing an independent reality, it is a manner of bringing forth a particular one bound to the conditions that constitute the observer as a human being.
B. Since the members of a community of standard observers can generate scientific statements in any phenomenal domain of the praxis of living in which they can apply the criterion of validation of scientific statements, the universality of a particular body of scientific statements within the human domain will depend on the universality in the human domain of the standard observers that can generate such a body of scientific statements. Finally, scientific statements are valid only as long as the scientific explanations that support them are valid, and these are valid only as long as the four operational conditions that must be conjointly satisfied in their constitution are satisfied for all the phenomena that are deduced in the praxis of living of the standard observers in the domain of operational coherences specified by the proposed generative mechanism.
C. It is frequently said that scientific explanations are reductionist propositions, adducing that they consist in expressing the phenomena to be explained in more basic terms. This view is inadequate. Scientific explanations are constitutively non-reductionist explanations because they consist in generative propositions and not in expressing the phenomena of one domain in phenomena of another. This is so because in a scientific explanation the phenomenon explained must arise as a result of the operation of the generative mechanism, and cannot be part of it. In fact, if the latter were the case the explanatory proposition would be constitutively inadequate and would have to be rejected. The phenomenon explained and the fenomena proper to the generative mechanism constitutively pertain to non-intersecting phenomenal domains.
D. The generative mechanism in a scientific explanation is brougth forth by a standard observer from his or her domain of experience in his or her praxis of living as an ad hoc proposition that in principle requires no justification. Therefore, the components of the generative mechanism, as well as the phenomena proper to their operation, have a foundational character with respect to the phenomenos to be explained, and as such their validity is in principle accepted a priori. Accordingly, every scientific domain as a domain of scientific statements is founded on basic experiential premises not justified in it, and constitutes in the praxis of living of the standard observer a domain of operational coherences brought forth in the operational coherences entailed in the generative mechanisms of the scientific explanations that validate it.
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