ethical implications

All words in language entail distinctions.  The same word has different meanings according to the domain that it either calls forth or has been established in the context of various antecedents. Antecedents could be at any scale:  in the moment, in the history of any relationship, or in the culture as a whole.  We normally impute the meaning by distinguishing the domain in which the words are spoken (or signed, or written.)  As we become aware of this, we take greater care to listen for the domain in which the words are spoken.

The meaning of a word or phrase, as held by both speaker and listener(s) is made evident by the coordination of doings that follows.  This is why all distinctions have ethical implications.  However, we are not omniscient, so not all the implications that may cascade from an action can be discernible at the time the distinction is created and named, or when it is used.  The way we manage, is to remain aware and adapt what we do.  We can dance with our worlds!

1. metaphors
   

2. stories
   

3. traditions
   

4. slogans
   

5. artifacts
   

6. differences
   

7. levels
   

8. values
   

9. types
   

10. etc.

These all entail distinctions!

Each reveals some regularity, and obscures many others.

your identity

time

We talk as if things existed in the absence of the observer, as if the domain of operational coherences that we bring forth in a distinction would operate as it operates in our distinctions regardless of them. We now know that this is constitutively not the case. We talk, for example, as if time and matter were independent dimensions of a physical space. Yet, it is apparent from my explanation of the phenomenon of cognition that they are not and cannot be. Indeed, time and matter are explanations of some of the operational coherences of the domains of existence brought forth in the distinctions that constitute the ongoing languaging in the praxis of living of the members of a community of observers. Thus, time - with past, present, and future - arises as a feature of an explanatory mechanism that would generate what the observer experiences as successive non simultaneous phenomena; and matter arises as a feature of an explanatory mechanism that would generate what he or she experiences as mutually impenetrable simultaneous distinctions.

Maturana, 1988 Ontology of Observing

language through co-ontogeny

When one or more living systems continue their co-ontogenic structural drift through their recurrent interactions in a consensual domain, it is possible for a recursion to take place in their consensual behavior resulting in the production of a consensual coordination of consensual coordinations of actions. If this were to happen, what an observer would see would be that the participants of a consensual domain of interactions would be operating in their consensual behavior making consensual distinctions upon their consensual distinctions, in a process that would recursively make a consensual action a consensual token for a consensual distinction that it obscures. Indeed, this process is precisely what takes place in our languaging in the praxis of living.

Accordingly, I claim that the phenomenon of language takes place in the co-ontogeny of living systems when two or more organisms operate, through their recurrent ontogenic consensual interactions, in an ongoing process of recursive consensual coordinations of consensual coordinations of actions or distinctions (Maturana, 1978). Or, in other words, I claim that such recursive consensual coordination of consensual coordinations of actions or distinctions in any domain, is the phenomenon of language. Furthermore, I claim that objects arise in language as consensual coordinations of actions that operationally obscure for further recursive consensual coordinations of actions by the observers the consensual coordinations of actions (distinctions) that they coordinate. Objects are, in the process of languaging, consensual coordinations of actions that operate as tokens for the consensual coordinations of actions that they coordinate. Objects do not pre‑exist language.

Maturana, 1988. Ontology of Observing