Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

478 The Praeger Handbook of Education and Psychology
Figure 57.1
Levels of Experience
Reflective
Description
Observation
Unreflective
Thrownness
is close to universal, but takes different forms in different species. What is common to all social
phenomena is that they become the medium in which the autopoiesis of participating organisms
occurs. All social phenomena require the coordination of behavior, which is provided through
the mechanism of structural coupling. All behavioral patterns that are learned and that are stable
through generations are cultural behaviors.
Language. Communication is a form of coordinated behavior. Communicative behavior
that is learned, as opposed to instinctive, is linguistic. Many animal species generate linguistic
domains (use signs). In their coordination of linguistic behaviors, human beings generate language
(recognize that they use signs and communicate about the signs themselves). Language is the
glue that holds human social interaction together. Its development signals the emergence of a
phenomenal domain that is unique to humans and which coevolves with language: the observer.
The Observer. The term observer as used by Varela approximates Heidegger’s term Dasein.
The observer is the human “way of being in the world.” The observer is able to observe and
communicate about its own linguistic states. It is within the domains of language and the observer
rather than in the cognitive domain of the nervous system that representations come into play;
they are a construction that facilitates communication between observers. Language is the glue
that holds human social interaction together.
Social interaction depends upon structural coupling. Structural coupling makes it possible
for the living system to enter a social domain, and eventually to develop the domains of the
observer and language that make the consensual specification of a reality possible. The notion of
structural coupling replaces the notion of the transmission of information. This is important in
understanding experience.
Levels of Experience
The emergence of new phenomenal domains suggest different levels of experience (Figure
57.1). These levels of experience are each organizationally closed domains that do not
intersect, so that what happens in one domain is unknown to the others except through structural
coupling. So, while we can observe ourselves or others engaged in some common unreflective
activity, the observation is an interpretation of that activity and is not isomorphic to it. We can
describe our observations in language, but again this description is not an exact representation of
the observation but an interpretation of it. Through structural coupling these domains perturb each
other and interpret the ways the other perturbs them. Higher levels of experience depend upon, but
do not intersect with, lower levels. The level of observation depends upon unreflective activity,
but within it such activity acts as a perturbation or a trigger for interpretation. Descriptions are
attempts to put observations into language, and again they are not equivalent to the observation.
It is fundamental to the enactive position that everything that is said is said by someone. Actor
cannot be divorced from action, observer from observation, describer from description.