The idea of circularity was also picked up by Humberto Maturana and Francisco
Varela in their work on autopoietic systems (or “biology of cognition”). What began as
an answer to the question, “What is life?” has become a fully encompassing explanatory
network that includes living, cognition, languaging, and emotioning (cf. special
issue of Constructivist Foundations , Riegler & Bunnell, 2011 ) . At the focus of their
work is the biological individual, who is a particular type of self-organizing system, a
so-called “autopoietic system” (cf. Maturana & Varela, 1980 ) . It obeys the following
criteria: (1). Its components take part in the recursive production of the network of production
of components that produced those components. (2). An entity exists in the
space within which the components exist by determining the topology of the network
of processes. (A system that does not fulfi ll these criteria is called allopoietic, e.g., it is
a machine that serves a different purpose than maintaining its own organization.) Due
to its circular organization, an autopoietic system is clearly “an inductive system and
always functions in a predictive manner: what occurred once will occur again. Its organization
(both genetic and otherwise) is conservative and repeats only that which
works.” (Maturana & Varela, 1980 , pp. 26–27). It should therefore come as no surprise
that science, carried out by autopoietic living systems, works inductively, too.
Many have criticized Maturana and Varela on the grounds of being self-contradictory
due to their emphasis on biology: How can biology of cognition explain its own axioms,
i.e., the biological a priori of cognition? 8
As will be pointed out below, the biological
link can be considered superfl uous, which makes the idea of autopoietic systems a formal
rather than biological theory, thereby avoiding the criticism.