Biological constructivism

Biological constructivism is the epistemological position, developed by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, that all knowing is doing and all doing is knowing. On this view, cognition is not the representation of a pre-given world by a disembodied mind but the enactment of a world through the structural coupling of a living organism with its environment. The organism does not discover reality; it brings forth a reality through the very processes that maintain its existence. This position is radical because it denies the possibility of objective knowledge in the traditional sense: there is no observer-independent reality against which descriptions can be checked for accuracy. There are only descriptions that coordinate behavior more or less successfully within a consensual domain. Biological constructivism is not a form of relativism, however. It is a claim about the organizational conditions under which knowledge is possible: knowledge is possible because living systems are operationally closed and structurally determined, not despite these conditions. The implications extend to science studies and the philosophy of Artificial Intelligence, where the question becomes whether non-living systems can construct knowledge in the biological sense.