July 1997

Dear Mr. Maturana,

1. At the moment there is a tendency in some sociological circles to put big questions about the approach for Constructionist Social Theory from Niklas Luhmann (German Professor, Bielefeld University) in Sociology and before in Law. What is your opinion in the use of the autopoiesis 'tool' in explaining "the total of social live" as based on the 'medium', communication wich is a two-sided, something between mind and the rest of the world.

2. Is it so that your theory has no explanation for feelings, or morality as moving principles,

3. Or even more: in your theory everything seems to happen as an at random, heuristic event between man and mankind.

Thanks for reading & Perhaps for answering

Dear Mr. Paul Samson,

thanks for your question, and please forgive the delay in answereing it.

1. I consider that social systems are not autopoietic systems.
Moreover, I think that even if it were adequate to talk abot them as third orderautopoietic systems, talking that way would obscure what is proper to them which is the dynamics of relations in coexistence of living systems. In my understanding in human social systems the realization of human beings as languaging beings is central. We human beings may exist in social systems that arise as a result of our interactions, and we become human beings by growing in a human social domain.

2. Certainly in what I propose as the biology of cognition there is explanation for feelings and morality as moving human dynamics, but to understand such explanation you must look at what I say about language and emotions. I do not use autopoiesis as an explanatory principle. Autopoiesis is a characterization of aparticular kind of systems. We living systems are molecular autopoietic systems. But the manner that we live arises in the relational dydnamics of our realization as autopoietic systems in an interactional space, and is not a result of our autopoiesis even though it occurs through our realization as autopoietic systems.

3. In what I say randomness is a commentary of the observer about events that arise without him or her being able to claim that they depend on each other. We human beings as all living systems and the medium in which we exist, exist as structure determined systems, so every thing occurs in us and in the medium as aspects of a structure determined dynamics. The confusion arises in the explicit or implicit belief in that structural determinism implies predictability. This is not the case.

Greetings. Humberto Maturana R.

Santiago, July 1997.

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