Dear Terry and colleagues,
In the Biology of Language and Knowledge, Maturana (1978, pp. 56 ff.)
considered the biologist using biological discourse a super-observer,
analytically to be distinguished from the languaging animals under
study. He formulated as follows:
Human beings can talk about things because they generate the things
they talk about by talking about them. That is, human beings can talk
about things because they generate them by making distinctions that
specify them in a consensual domain, and because, operationally,
talking takes place in the same phenomenic domain in which things are
defined as relations of relative neuronal activities in a closed
neuronal network.
From a biological perspective, not language itself, but “languaging”
behavior is considered the system of reference. Language, however, is
generated and reproduced by languaging and therefore a second-order
domain attributable not to individual agents, but to their
interactions—that is, their languaging as a first-order domain.
Different from languaging, language is no longer biological. Cultural
phenomena emerge on top of the biological ones and then take over
control. Construction is bottom-up, but once constructed control can be
expected to operate top-down.
Best,
Loet
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Loet Leydesdorff
Professor emeritus, University of Amsterdam
Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR)
l...@leydesdorff.net <mailto:l...@leydesdorff.net>;
http://www.leydesdorff.net/
Associate Faculty, SPRU, <http://www.sussex.ac.uk/spru/>University of
Sussex;
Guest Professor Zhejiang Univ. <http://www.zju.edu.cn/english/>,
Hangzhou; Visiting Professor, ISTIC,
<http://www.istic.ac.cn/Eng/brief_en.html>Beijing;
Visiting Fellow, Birkbeck <http://www.bbk.ac.uk/>, University of London;
http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ych9gNYAAAAJ&hl=en
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