What Counts as Knowing?
Is Knowing Free of Culture and Context?
Immaculate Namukasa
University of Alberta
Edmonton, Alberta
In the comedy movie The Gods Must Be Crazy I
(1980) a Bushman in the Kalahari Desert sets out to
return to the gods the evil thing that fell from the
sky, after it has caused upheaval in his once peaceful
clan.[1] Seeking to restore peace in his community, Xi (N!xau)[2] the head of the family, embarks on a journey to the end
of the world to dispose of the evil object. He does
not know that a pilot had tossed the soft drink
bottle from an airplane.
The movie[3] is a story of the adventures of a white teacher, Kate Thompson
who, fed up with city life, takes a teaching job in
rural Botswana, where she meets and falls in love with
a zoologist, Andrew Stein. Stuck with their Land Rover
in the Kalahari, Andrew and Kate meet Xi on his way
to and from the end of the world.
The African producer, Jamie Uys, has been critiqued
for exaggerations in depicting the world of the Bushmen
and for racial insensitivity in the movie, but that
is another matter. What is of interest for us is the
question, “What counts as knowing?”
Is there some knowing—basic[4] or otherwise—that is genuinely shared among the Bushmen,
shared with the white teacher, the zoologist and other
characters including the agro-pastoralist tribes as
well as with the guerilla forces who are retreating
from the war front? Is there a way of knowing
that is free of the locale and day-to-day activities
of the knower? Did the characters’ immediate tools,
materials and interactions, and what they do—other
than being constraints of time and space—add significance
to their basic cognition?
Biologically, humans have bodies that have similar basic
functions; as a species their bodies embody an evolutionary
history. Increasingly, cognitive researchers are emphasizing
the role of our bodies in cognition. But does my body,
for instance, as an African female, add something of
significance to my cognition? And when and how do objects,
propositions or concepts of my knowing happen to be
known the way I do know them? How and where does a transparent,
hollow object that falls from the sky happen to be perceived
as many things but a soft drink bottle?
Using the movie, I would like to point to similes and
analogies to what counts as basic knowing in educational
settings. Historically, the child, the uncivilized other
and the less developed state have been viewed in somewhat
similar ways, thus the use of analogies from the Bushman
for the education of children is not far-fetched. The
particular choice of The Gods Must Be Crazy I
movie is not without reason: the movie attempts to offer
a glimpse into the interface between two people who
appear to know (or not to know) in radically different
manners—the Bushman clan leader and the white teacher.
In the framework I am using, the ecological-complexity
theory, both individuals are seen as learned (competent)
in their respective livelihoods. The movie alternates
between depicting each knowing as not knowing depending
on whose setting is presented—the Bushman’s
world or the urban-western world. By so doing, it brings
a western viewer closer to viewing Kate with the impression
one usually gets when reading or viewing descriptions
of non-western cultures. Thus the movie offers a space
for interrogating the view that only the civilized,
the school-educated (usually white male person) knows,
which the oral and land-based tribes as well as children
do not (yet) know. Such a view, unfortunately, appears
to motivate many curriculum developments: It motivates
the urge to hastily educate the uncivilized and the
children into literate and civilized ways of knowing.
Yet literate and formal ways of knowing are, according
to Abram (1996) and other postmodern scholars, one among
many possible ways of knowing.
I specifically re-read Maturana and Varela’s biological
theory of knowing along side the movie to explore what
counts as basic, operational knowing, given the
possibility of myriad ways of knowing. I also attempt
to relate symbolic and ethical knowing
to basic knowing. Particularly I explore four notions
of embedded-embodied knowing including:
- Basic knowing as operational knowing—all
knowing including the more symbolic, abstract knowing
as grounded in operational knowing.
- Objects, entities, propositions or concepts
of knowing as brought forth rather than necessarily
pre-existing and independent of human activity;
the notion that objects of knowing arise as
humans coordinate actions with the people that they
live together with—inter-objectivity.
- Ignorance as an indicator of differing
ways of knowing and differing domains, systems of
reality or communities of observers, what Maturana
refers to as a domain of inter-objects.
It appears a situated and embodied view of knowing that
is increasingly explored in the non-traditional views
of learning furthers the discussion of what counts as
knowing by foregrounding our bodies, the bodies that we
interact with, and the eras and space (the locales) that
we bring forth. Our situatedness and embodiment are the
primary conditions of as well as (liberating) constraints
for knowing.
Basic Knowing as Operational Knowing in Domains
of Reality
On the situatedness of knowing, Varela asserts:
Proper units of knowledge are primarily concrete,
embodied, incorporated, lived; that knowledge is about
situatedness; and that the uniqueness of knowledge, its
historicity and context, is not a “noise” concealing
an abstract configuration in its true essence. The concrete
is not a step toward something else: It is both where
we are and how we get to where we will be. (Varela, 1999,
p. 7)
One wonders whether Varela’s assertion applies to
all knowing. Isn’t there a way of knowing, really
basic and universal, that all bodies or members of the
human species, irrespective of their situatedness,
share? Or is it that even the most primitive or biological
knowing is somewhat tainted by our inherited as well as
lived histories? On the other hand, is the more reflective,
abstract (imaginative, cultural) or symbolic knowing
not, in any way, grounded in our immediate and concrete
experiences?
We might talk about tacit knowledge including instinctive,
intuitive and, possibly, habitual knowing—the
wisdom of the body as that basic knowing which
all people seem to be capable of. Part of this knowing—as
a mechanism for survival or pleasure—might even be
existent in animals of a particular species, as well as
at a lower scale of simpler organisms and body systems
or organs. The immune system’s actions and interactions,
for example, could be seen as knowing and learning acts,
of which the traditionally fore-grounded defensive mechanism
is just a part. At a bodily level, when I itch I scratch
without reflecting on the order of the muscles and the
order in which I should scratch, says Maturana to illustrate
body knowing as an example of operational knowing.
Maturana (1988a&b) and Varela (1999) refer to such
behaviors as operational knowing that arise as
the organism continuously
interacts with its environment.
With operational knowing we may just do what we
do, even, without need for conscious awareness of it,
without necessarily attending to the doing itself; just
like functioning organisms or systems interacting with
their environments, we do not ask: the “why”
and the “how” of such actions. To know in this
sense is to act adequately (or knowing to stay alive)
in one’s immediate world. To live, then, is to know,
and to know is to continue in the praxis of living. Immediate
and operational knowing is at times contrasted with second
order, linguistic and symbolic knowing in which humans
are able to reflect on their actions and imagine environments.
With second order knowing humans ask about the why of
their doings so as to symbolically make commentaries on
their own or others’ knowing acts. However, as we
shall see with the Bushmen, even abstract and symbolic
knowing is ground in operational knowing.
After the Bushmen find the bottle, they immediately act
and interact with it. They discover uses for it. They
begin with considering the foreign object as one of the
strangest and most beautiful things, a gift from the gods.
Then, with time, as a labour saving device—carrying
water, making patterns on clothing, and, later, they learn
it could make music when blown into. Yet even as the single
bottle becomes so useful to them, they soon discover that
it evokes among them emotions of anger, dissension and
violence when someone else is using it, emotions that
until then, Uys the movie producer claims, had not yet
been experienced in this hunting and gathering community.
Xi, a clan leader, then immediately recognizes the bottle
as an evil thing to be disposed of. In a simplistic manner,
we may refer to the utilitarian and immediate interactions
with the bottle (such as using it as a vessel) as basic
knowing. The perception of the bottle as an evil thing,
we may refer to, as linguistic, reflective or symbolic
knowing. Symbolic knowing of the bottle results from recursive
interactions with it. Both the Bushmen’s basic and
symbolic knowing appear to be enabled as well as constrained
by their domain of experiences.
Xi and his tribesmen, in the depth of the harsh Kalahari
Desert, have not yet participated in the drinking of Coke
or in ownership of non-replicable, centrally produced
and patented objects. They do not even make pottery[5]. Unlike other characters, they have no grounds, no history
to distinguish the object even as a man-made object. Dependent
on the Bushmen’s livelihood as antelope hunters and
fruits, nuts and root gathers, their particular actions
and interactions, Maturana would say, are chosen at a
deeper level of coherences of experiences. Dependent on
what the Bushmen are, dependent on what they do for a
living and for pleasure, they are compelled on an operational
basis to bring forth a ‘surplus’[6] (although to an external—non Bushman—observer
it appears as a deficit) significance with the bottle
in ways that are adequate at every moment.
The Bushmen, at every instant, bring forth a compelling
world (compelling from the stand point of Bushmen)
with the Coke bottle, a world so different from what I
could have brought forth had I seen a bottle drop from
the sky. They had no grounds, no history to distinguish
the bottle, even, as a discarded container dropped by
a stranger. To the Bushmen the bottle could be many things
but a soft drink container dropped by a traveler from
another civilization. For peoples who ‘wander’
in the large expanse of sub-tropical land for generations
living in temporary homes, the operational preferences
with this strange object that was received from the sky
are to perceive it as a gift from the gods and, later,
to reflectively know it as an evil thing, a demon. Each
of the operational preferences, although seemingly contradictory
to each other, is possible and situatedly adequate at
every instant.
The contrast between Xi’s and Kate’s domain
of reality (hence domain of knowing) is so pronounced,
however, it is akin to, albeit at a less elaborate scale,
to what we experience in daily life communication and
interaction, especially in educational settings, even
among people of the same culture and locality. Interactions
between people with compelling worlds that are subtly
different could benefit from the recognition that one’s
world, one’s understanding, one’s view of the
world is necessarily unique. Even though an individual’s
or a community’s domain of reality might have a lot
of family resemblances (to use Wittgenstein’s vocabulary)
with the individuals or communities that they share backgrounds,
experiences, histories, etc with, it is to a larger extent
unique.
The Bushmen’s immediate knowing is not only
embedded in their way of living and in their immediate
surrounding but it also seems to change from moment to
moment. What is a gift from the gods soon becomes a demon
to be discarded. Varela (1999) refers to these changing
worlds as micro-worlds or micro-identities
that shift with our actions and interaction. Indeed our
actions and interactions change the world for us. Herein
lies our agency or intentionality—our actions and
interactions including the vast non-consciously deliberated
upon actions on a moment-to-moment basis shift our worlds,
which in turn nuance our knowing. In a word, knowing
is fluid. At every moment the Bushmen find themselves
in a somewhat different way with the bottle. In the praxis
of living, Maturana and Varela would say, the Bushmen
continually bring forth, sometimes subtly and other times
totally different worlds, each world requiring different
actions and interactions, each world conducive for enacting
different knowledge. The Bushmen’s bodies, their
immediate tools, materials and interactions, add significance
to their conception of the Coke bottle. In a recursive
manner, our perceptions (which are inseparable from our
conceptions) of, say, the Coke bottle guide our actions
with it, and our actions with it in turn further guide
our later perceptions of it. Thus in teaching, it might
be crucial to attend to the possible and changing worlds
of children and how their actions guide their perceptions.
In the foregoing discussion, an educational question would
be: What would be required for Xi to see the Coke bottle
the way Kate (a teacher on a run away from the busy and
crammed city life) sees it? Or would he ever? Better still,
why would an educator desire that the Bushman views the
Coke bottle the way the teacher—who has participated
in the drinking of bottled soft drinks—does?
Traditionally, educators have unquestionably privileged
a single perspective usually stipulated in curriculum
documents. Maturana refers to the vision of single perspective
as a universa—a single and a static reality.
A universa guided education system demands obedience from
the child. Rather than inviting the child to participate
in the drinking of bottled drinks, and by doing so, to
bring forth a world in which a container with a narrow
opening is commonly, mainly and usefully perceived as
a bottle, we have unfortunately required the child or
the tribal people to repeat after us that it “is
a Coke bottle.” The point is, a child’s ongoing
interactions and actions, his/her situatedness is not
mainly a limitation to knowing; rather as Varela puts
it, the concrete and lived is “where we are and how
we get to where we will be.” Our situatedness is
the ground as well as the horizon of our knowing. Our
biological structures, our bodies embody our lived and
inherited experiences and histories. Therefore what we
know as well as what we will ever know is constrained
by our structures.
The moral for education is, every organ, every child and
every human being acts adequately, albeit in his or her
own domain of reality, a domain that might be subtly or
drastically different from other organs’, other children’s
or other peoples’ worlds. To educate then has more
to do with inviting others into common domains of reality
that we as educators or policy makers think are, for some
reason, better fitting than those domains of reality that
children or adult students are participating in at a particular
moment in a particular place. Educating may have to do
with attending to children’s domains of reality as
well as structuring children’s interactions and ecologies
in ways that are generative of worlds that, we think,
are more useful. For education to be focused on the explicit
instead of focusing on the richer experiences of participation,
living and bringing forth relevant worlds is problematic
in many ways, such as in considering every different view
to be inferior to the view stipulated by the curriculum.
Error or Ignorance as Indicators of Differences
in Signification Spheres
While the Bushman in the movie and I (the presumably
more civilized other) share the physiology of the body,
there is a lot we do not have in common, both in terms
of the environment, history, experiences, language, etc.
We participate in different activities and interact with
different people and within different ecologies. Thus
what knowing is including symbolic knowing to the Bushmen,
from an embodied and embedded view of knowing, is inevitably
distinct from what knowing is for me (except if I participated
in a considerably similar domain of reality as the Bushmen’s,
which may amount to being a Bushman). In the bushman’s
and in my domain of reality what counts as knowing is
acting coherently in our own realities, realities in which
each of us arises. Knowing is adequate doing in a particular
body and particular world. And that is the common principle
to what counts as knowing, Maturana and Varela would maintain.
Xi’s action of seeking to dispose of the bottle that
is disrupting his community at the end of the world is
an act of knowing. It is only to us, observers from a
different world, or perhaps even to Xi at a later time
(in a different domain of reality) that the trekking of
a very long distance on bare feet to and from the end
of the world just to throw the bottle away could be considered
an act of ignorance, an illusion or primitiveness. But
again this classification of a knowing act as an act of
ignorance is made by an observer through reference to
another domain of experiences that could again be classified
as a mistake through reference to another domain of experiences
(Maturana, 1988a&b). Such a view is not total relativism.
Given the fact that the physical bottle had specific forms
that the human perceptual-motor system, the human body
could interact with in given ways, the domains of experience
although infinitely many are not arbitrary.
Lakoff (1991) asserts that in between arbitrariness and
predictability is motivation. The domains of reality we
bring forth are motivated by our experiences. The notion
of motivation provides a way in the middle of solipsism
and absolute objectivity. Unlike a single versum, in a
plural or multiversa we anticipate myriad domains of reality.
This is indeed not a scary thought to ecological-complexity
theorists. Only motivated domains of reality are possible.
By way of embodying our histories, by projecting our bodily
and basic experiences into the more imaginative ways of
being, and by happening in language, our knowing is concrete
and local through and through. However, this realization
calls for ethical and social knowing. Living in mutual
acceptance, say, with the Bushmen or the ‘ignorant’
child or others who know in different ways requires more
than operational and symbolic knowing.
In what ways can curriculum have an explicit place for
embodied knowing, especially, if such knowing is contextually
dependent and fluid and suggests multiple domains of reality?
We have seen that an education system that is oriented
by a view which entails multi-domains of reality does
not in any way invite a relativistic anything goes
mentality. However, does such a view justify the tendency
of curriculum, especially with current trends toward globalization,
to focus mainly on the abstract and general that are seemingly
less context dependent? These are broader questions that
von Foerster (2003) refers to as, undecidable questions.
Such questions we can only decide by choosing a conceptual
framework in which they are rendered decidable. Ecological-complexity
theorists have interacted in one way or another across
cultures and their interactions have made the traditional
stance that privileges a single domain of reality seem
highly implausible for them. Many people that have interacted
across cultures by ways ranging from watching movies casting
lives of other cultures, reading anthropologically based
texts to culture immersions might find a universum world
implausible. But what we learn from interacting with people
of other cultures may have to do with whether we find
it comfortable to bracket the objectivity of our own cultures
(objectivity-in-parenthesis); otherwise we will
view other cultures as less legitimate.
The Bushman’s immediate and concrete experiences
motivated such distinctions as the gods, gifts from the
gods, evil objects and the spatial end of the world. Their
behaviors in which they brought forth these objects were,
in fact, adequate doing and knowing from the perspective
of Bushmen. In the Bushmen’s domain of reality you
and I are ignorant, akin to the way the Bushmen are when
seen from the some agricultural and animal herding African
tribes and from western-urbanized people. In a way, this
is ignorance for all that all might know that others know.
With the acknowledgement of multi domains of reality,
illusion or errors could only be seen as just indications
of—adequate actions and interactions in—different
domains of reality: Domains of realities that we can consensually
co-participate in when we interact and act in mutual acceptance.
Maturana and Varela challenge us to view differences in
stance as invitations to participate or appreciate yet
another domain of reality which when juxtaposed with ours
might expand our domains of reality or hopefully lead
to hybrid domains of reality (Davis, forthcoming). In
a hybrid domain of reality, for instance, the Coke bottle
is transcendently seen as neither a soft drink container
nor a gift from god, but as … who knows what?
Objects and Concepts as Ever Brought Forth by
Communities of Observers
The Bushmen appear to have brought forth objects or
concepts—whether material or mental—of knowing
in action and interaction. As Xi continues to coordinate
actions with fellow Bushmen (virtual—ancestors and
acquaintances—or present family members and colleagues)
the bottle arises at first as a gift from the gods. Knowing
in a way appears not to refer to coming to know more about
an independent reality or the reality of the dominant
other (Maturana, 2000). Knowing is considered as a manner
of living by bringing forth objects, descriptions and
explanations dependent on what we do and what we are with
others and within the spaces where we live. The Bushmen
bring forth a compelling meaning of the bottle with what
Varela refers to as a ‘surplus of signification’,
a surplus[7] between what we the non-Bushmen observers see when
we see a bottle fallen from the sky and what we would
have seen if we had the opportunity to stand where Xi
as a harsh Kalahari desert intergeneration, resilient
survivor stood in relation to the bottle (Merleau-Ponty,
1964; Varela, 1999).
Objects of scientific study are usually distinguished
as natural and/or physical objects whereas objects studied
in domains such as mathematics are increasingly recognized
as cultural, social or mental objects. The latter are
increasingly distinguished as objects that arise in a
community of observers and as such are expected not to
be universal. However in the ecological complexity perspective
it is possible and helpful to view all objects as ever
arising in the flow and dynamics of peoples’ actions
and interactions in their locales within a collective
that has a particular manner of languaging. The distinction
between material-natural objects and symbolic-cultural
objects thus condenses. To the Bushman the bottle—a
physical object—takes on a form very different from
the one it has for Kate. For the Coke bottle to be universally
known as soft-drink container, as it currently appears
to be the case, only means that all peoples have in one
way or another participated in the Coke culture. It would
be misleading to interpret it to be because a Coke bottle
is tangible and can be verified as a Coke bottle. What
is evidently a material object—an, old style, glass
coke bottle—is a cultural, discursive object. Material
objects in their appearances seem to be independent of
perception, actions and interactions. The stability of
things touched, seen, felt, smelled, nonetheless, co-arises
with continuous and large numbers of actions and interactions
given our human bodies and the communities that we language
in. Naturalness of an object is, to adopt the complexity
science terminology, the dynamical stability across given
communities of observers and describers.
A Coke bottle arises as a Coke bottle among observers
that have consensually participated in the drinking of
Coke. Otherwise it could virtually be any thing depending
on the consensual domain of observers which arises with
it. Here Maturana and Varela interrupt our traditional
view of objects and concepts—either physical or mental—as
pre-given. They assert that objects and concepts are brought
forth in action and interaction with others, given our
histories and structures. Thus when it comes to knowing
it is not the objects, the facts, the concepts or the
knowledge that are primary. It is the actions and interactions
in our niche and with consensual observers given our bodies
that are primary. Physical and mental objects are not
as primary to knowing as is our embodiment and our situatedness
in environments and in cultures and the co-participation
in the collectives which we are compositionally part of.
In our acting, interacting and living together we continuously
bring forth objects that constitute our domains of reality.
Moreover our domains of reality are fluid—they change
with further knowing; Witness the bottle arising first
as a gift from the gods and turning into an evil thing
not much later.
The objects and relation and patterns among them (as well
as who we are) arise from the webs of interactions we
find ourselves coordinating our behaviors in. A Bushman
arises as a Bushman in as far as he identifies a bottle
with the other Bushmen (fellow doers, observers and describers)
as a gift from the gods. We can hardly if ever, even as
anthropologists know the Bushman’s world explicitly,
except if we become Bushmen. The Bushman will always obscure
his world since he arises with it and it arises with him.
Put differently, it is impossible for an outsider to distinguish
the Bushmen’s culture and environment without referring
to the Bushmen, who do not merely inhabit it but also
bring it forth. In a similar manner it would be impossible
to distinguish the Bushmen without specifying the Bushmen’s
domain of reality, what Maturana sometimes refers to as
the ecological niche. When, for example, the Bushmen participate
in the drinking of centrally manufactured foods and drinks
(as is increasingly the case with governments resettling
the Bushmen and saying government is modernizing the stone
age people) the community of Bushmen might structurally
change, or, what we refer to as, learn. In some cases
through such actions and interactions particular Bushmen
might cease to be members of the Bushmen community. Or
worse still, the community of Bushmen might disintegrate.
Whether the Bushmen tribes learn to live in ways that
the policy makers may desire them to or whether their
cultures disintegrate, Maturana (1988a) explains, depends
on how the community of Bushmen structurally changes (the
plasticity of their community) to maintain its interaction
with its environment that recently has grown to include
other communities. This might explain why some particular
tribes of Bushmen are now extinct after only a few hundred
years of interacting with the Bantu farmers and cattle
herders, with the white settlers, with the colonialists
or with the post-colonial governments.
The symbolic and more reflective knowing, the abstract
significance of the bottle arises only in ways that are
operationally preferred by the Bushmen’s domain of
experience. Therefore, basic and symbolic knowing, although
distinct ways of knowing do not differ in their realization
in the braiding of bodyhood
and languaging of humans (Maturana, 1991). With
the notion of inter-objects, traditional notions of objectivity
and universality are only indicators of widely shared
domains of operational coherences (that result from our
bodily functioning and interactions environments) and
nothing more.
Varela and Maturana draw heavily on philosophical work
such as that of Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein. They also
draw from their own biological and neurological research
and from some work in artificial intelligence. They view
perception as participation with the world that we perceive.
For Varela and Maturana, our actions are perceptually
guided in a perceiver-dependent world. Similar notions
are echoed in the work of others such as Spence-Brown’s
mathematical work, Lakoff and Johnson’s cognitive
semantics and Von Foerster second-order cybernetics. In
all this work the co-implicitness of observations, descriptions,
explanations and measurements (Davis, forthcoming) are
foregrounded. Everything said is said by an observer
to another observer who could be him/herself and cognition
is life are the central adage in these discourses.
The view of cognition as living and of observer-dependent
observations is now widely elaborated upon under the umbrella
discourses of ecological-complexity. This approach to
knowing and observation is increasingly embraced, even
in the traditional sciences. It offers alternatives to
the assumption of objective observations as well as to
disembodied knowing. Maturana refers to this view as one
of objectivity-with-parentheses (as opposed to
objectivity-without-parentheses). Ecological-complexity
appears to have radical implications and consequences
for the understanding of learning and teaching. In the
ecological-complexity framework, would be undecidable
questions such as “how come the Bushmen could not
see the Coke bottle as such?” could be decided.
Who is the observer or community of observers when I say
that the object that the Bushman disposed at the end of
the world was just a Coke bottle? To which observer
could I meaningfully say so? Or, to ask a more education
related question, how can the Bushman act with the Coke
bottle in ways that we see as appropriate? Or, better
still, how can we collectively participate with the Bushmen
(with the students and with the others we wish to participate
in our domains of reality), to the extent that it is possible,
in their domains of reality? In what ways is a Coke bottle
indeed an evil thing? Such questions, from the eco-complexity
view of cognition, can be surmised in one question: In
what domains of experience is it the case that the Coke
bottle is viewed as such?
Herein lies a parallel for teaching. In our daily lives
as we interact within cultures and micro-cultures, we
are blind to the origin of the objects, entities and propositions
of our knowing. It is only when we travel to live in another
culture, with another community of observers and actors,
that the universality and objectivity of our knowing is
challenged. Yet even in our day-to-day activities in which
we closely interact within our community of observes as
urbanized people, for instance, such challenges exist,
albeit on a contained magnitude. When the differences
become discernible we are quick to dismiss them as ignorance,
primitivism or insanity on the part of the other. Varela
(1999) refers to the kind of knowing that would allow
us to bracket our common knowing as ethical or
mindful knowing.
We do not only enact different domains of experiences
but we also constitute varied cognitive domains and collectives,
such as at work, at home, at a club, etc. We are “actual
body-nodes of a dynamic intercrossing network of discourses
and emotions that continuously move us from one domain
of actions to another in a continuous flow of many changing
conversations.” (Maturana, 2000, p. 43) A teacher
in a classroom is a matrix of operational coherences and
of all the collectives she or he participates in and constitutes,
and so are her students. The teacher and the students
each participate in varied cognitive domains some of which
are shared but most, especially in areas of escalating
cultural and economic diversity, are not. Some objects
together with their domains of existence obviously exist
and so make sense for the teachers but not for some of
the students, and vice versa. And those that might appear
to be common might have a surplus of significance added,
a surplus that is contingent to the operational coherences,
histories, and sensory-motor coherences of individual
students.
Our restricted view of human interaction and co-existence,
thus, could benefit from this eco-complexity view in which
educating has ethical obligations. Teaching could benefit
from attending to learners as complex agents and individuals
who are inter-nodes of the communities that they participate
in. Students in classrooms could be viewed as a collective
of people that has the potential, with continued and guided
interactions, of arising as a learning community of observers.
Educators, teachers, curriculum developers and other people
in positions that, in traditional ways, have been looked
upon as positions of authority require more than basic
and symbolic knowing. They require a third order knowing
that Varela, drawing heavily from the Eastern meditating
and teaching tradition, proposes. Ethical knowing
as co-participatory knowing promotes responsibility while
diminishing absolute authority. Davis (forthcoming) asserts
that such knowing does not only involve know-how and know-why,
but enters the level of deep ecology and spirituality,
a level of knowing to act and interact adequately in the
moment and with the human and the more-than-human others.
Knowing as Adequate Co-Participation in Worlds
of Mutual Significance
In what domains of experience would it be the case
or make sense that the Coke bottle is an evil thing? To
bring the argument more closely to teaching of school
disciplines such as mathematics, in what micro-domain
of experiences does it make sense to multiply two amounts,
only to get a smaller amount? Indeed a half multiplied
by a half is a quarter only in the fractions micro domain
which arises:
- In a particular functioning body (a
body that has informally shared a pie with siblings,
formally folded paper and cut fraction pieces, for
instance),
- When a student acts with particular
tools and mediums (fraction strips and kits, paper,
egg cartons etc.),
- When students interact with particular
others (the mathematics teacher and other students)
in a particular emergent domain of fractions reality,
a reality usually brought forth through participation
in communities of mathematical observers (school mathematics
observers).
What counts as knowing thus could not essentially be expressed
in terms of what Xi the head of a Bushman family knows
about the Coke bottle. Knowing is adequate actions, interactions
and imaginations within a community of observers. It is
a specific community of observers in which Xi continuously
coordinates his actions (of ‘wandering’, hunting,
gathering, painting, and doing ritual ceremonies together)
in an expansive remote part of Africa that objects such
as the end of the world and gods arise. From the eco-complexity
perspective it would mean less to explain to the Bushman
that the object that fell from the sky was not a gift
from the gods but rather a Coca Cola bottle that a pilot
threw from the sky. In a similar manner it would be a
fruitless endeavor to explain to the Bushmen that there
is no end of the world. Abstract explanation and explicit
formulation of knowledge, as evidenced in the work of
earlier anthropologists, most missionaries, colonial educators
and some present-day policy makers, are severely limited
in such cases.
Herein lies a fundamental parallel to teaching mathematics,
sciences, poetry etc., domains
in which the pedagogy of ‘telling’ has unfortunately
continued to marginalize some strands of students such
as the non-white, the non-middle class and the non-male
student. Maturana and Varela’s biological theory
of cognition offers the pedagogy of co-participation and
co-existence. With the pedagogy of co-participation, teachers
invite students in common sensical domains of reality
as well as accept invitations by children to participate
in other domains of reality. It is in these ways that
teachers attempt to generate a common domain of reality,
what Maturana and Varela refer to as a world of significance
and relevance; rather than claiming access to a privileged
independent mathematical, chemical or poetic reality.
Co-existence and co-participation with the ones we live
with as teachers appears to be a more appropriate and
especially more ethical and social way of being in spaces
of knowing and learning.
In consensually generated worlds, such as worlds of mathematical
significance in a given classroom, as it were, children
are not only invited to think about dividing fractions
by inverting the divisor, for instance, but also it makes
sense for the children to divide one fraction by a fraction
to get a bigger quantity—a world that is not only
mathematical, but a particular domain of mathematics and
a specific sense of division that is somewhat different
from that one of dividing as subtracting repeatedly. Our
worlds of significance are dynamic and nuanced, thus they
require more attention than focusing on explicit and formulated
knowledge.
Concluding Thoughts
Using the movie, I have done a preliminary exploration
of Maturana and Varela’s biological theory of knowing.
I have elaborated on notions of domains of reality, operational
knowing, community of observers, objectivity-in-parenthesis
and inter-objects, in ways that appear to be generative
for teaching. Maturana and Varela’s theory of knowing
in particular and ecological-complexity theory in general
elucidate an attitude to knowing that compels educators
and teachers to act in ways so as to co-participate with
learners in generation of worlds of mathematical, scientific,
literacy, etc. significance—worlds in which unique
micro-worlds of significance could also be nested. As
we interactively generate these spheres of signification,
moreover, we ourselves arise as learners, teachers, researchers
or educators. It is in such doings, descriptions and observing
with the people we repeatedly interact with from which
communities of observers or collectives (such as classroom
collectives) and sub collectives arise.
In a given collective, objects and concepts of knowing
do arise as people coordinate behavior. This is a recursive
process. What were actions of yesterday generate objects
of today to facilitate further actions, generating other
objects, relations between and patterns in objects. In
turn, with recursive doing and recursive coordination
of actions a way of languaging and living with stabilities
(with a culture) or a cognitive domain arises. We find
ourselves as human beings happening in this praxis of
living with others. Von Foerster (2003) in, more mathematical
languaging, observes that even though we behave as though
objects and concepts existed prior to our iterative actions
and interactions, prior to our languaging, the objects
themselves are tokens, dynamic equilibriums, eigen values
for our actions and interactions. When objects arise they
obscure the behaviour for which they arose to coordinate,
and as such they coordinate further behaviour without
explicitly referring to the initial behaviour. In this
way, these emergent objects and concepts appear to us
to be objective.
Our bodies, our manners of languaging, and the ecologies
we continuously structurally interact, the individuals
that we socially interact with as well as the collectives
we compose motivate our ways of knowing. It is in this
perpetual action and interaction in our coherences of
experiences that knowing does count.
References
Abram, D. (1996). The spell of the sensuous: Perception
and language in the more-than-human world. New York:
Vintage Books.
Davis, B (forthcoming). Inventions of teaching: A genealogy.
Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Lakoff, G. (1991). Women, fire and dangerous things:
What categories reveal about mind. Chicago: Chicago
University Press.
Maturana, H. (1987). Everything is said by an observer.
In W. I. Thompson (Ed.), Gaia a way of knowing
(pp. 65-82). Hudson, NY: Lindisfarne.
Maturana, R. H. (1988a). Reality: The search for objectivity
or the quest for a compelling argument. The Irish Journal
of Psychology, 9(1), 25-82.
Maturana, R. H. (1988b). Ontology of observing: The
biological foundations of self-consciousness and the physical
domain of existence. Also available on line http://www.inteco.cl/biology/ontology/ooo-c6.htm.
Maturana, H. (1991). Science and Daily life: The ontology
of scientific explanations. In F. Steier (Ed.), Research
and Reflexivity (pp.30-52). London: Sage.
Maturana, H. (2000). The nature of the laws of nature.
Systems Research and Behavioral Sciences, 17, 459-468.
Maturana, H. R. & Varela, F. J. (1987/1992). The
tree of knowledge: the biological roots of human understanding
(Rev. ed.). Boston: Shambhala.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964). The primacy of perception.
Edited by J. M. Edie. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University
Press.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1974). The Primacy of perception and
its philosophical consequences, translated by J. M. Edie.
In J. O’Neil, Phenomenology, language and sociology.
Envanston, II: Northwestern University Press.
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published in 1972). New York: E. P. Dutton.
Uys Jamie (Producer) & Uys, J. (Director) (1981/1984).
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[1]
African Bushmen (the San people) live in the
deep isolation of the Kalahari Desert, they gather and
hunt for a living. They are believed to be the ‘original’
inhabitants of Southern Africa. Bushmen were ‘hunted’
almost to extinction by the Bantu-agro-pastoralists,
the White settlers and the colonialists.
[2]
Pronounced Chi; Bushmen’s languages incorporate
'click' sounds represented in writing by symbols such
as !.
[3]
There are a couple of reviews of the movie that
pop up when you do a search e.g. one by Daniel Leary
http://cspar181.uah.edu/RbS/job/gods1.html
[4]
Dating as far back as Aristotle, scholars have
differentiated between kinds of knowing: A more recent
distinction is that of ethical or mindful knowing by
Varela (1999). I attempt to maintain the distinction
between operational/concrete/basic knowing and symbolic/reflective/abstract
knowing.
[5]
Bushmen traditionally did not make pottery; rather
they used ostrich eggs and other animal parts as vessels.
They painted on flat rock walls, engaged in ritual and
myth ceremonies that involved singing and dancing, and
some proto-mathematical activities such as calendar
marking on bones.
[6]
When we think with objectivity-without-parenthesis
it is only seen as a deficit, since we privilege ours
as the only possible world. But with objectivity-with-parenthesis,
it is a surplus that only that particular knower, given
his/her experiences, his/her interactions and his/her
history, could add.
[7]
Varela limits the connotation of surplus to the
imaginative capacity that, he says, human beings have
whereas animals do not. Humans bringing forth different
meaning from what animals do in the same situation.
I have elaborated on this connotation to differences
in worlds of reality brought forth by people.
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