The fact that the responses get shorter may be a sign that questions and disagreements are becoming clearer. But this will be for the readers to judge.
1.a. As an experiencing organism, I have no doubt that I am contained in a WORLD; but that my experience is "of" that WORLD is not something I can be sure of. The only world I know is the world I am patching together from bits of experience. I am in no position to say anything about that "outer" WORLD, because my concepts and the words I use to talk about them are all derived from my experience. Whatever is the "object of experience", i.e., its cause (if there is such a thing), can obviously not be described in terms that invariably refer to its effect.
1.b. The phrase "all experience - viable or otherwise - " is not one a constructivist would ever use. Viability may be predicated of actions, conceptual entities and operations, and thus of concepts, words, theories and models; experience may be agreeable (when it does not impede those constructs) or contrary when it shows them to be non-viable.
1.c. It is, indeed, a central point in constructivism that the statement "P: I am dealing with nothing but experiential items." cannot be claimed to be "true", because, like everything a constructivist says about his orientation, it refers to a model. And models may be viable or not, but they can never be said to be true in the ontological sense that David has in mind. This, of course, does not preclude that we might argue about whether it is true that I or someone else uttered the sentence; but then we are arguing about experience and not about the WORLD.
2.a. If by "self-inconsistent" David means circular, I fully agree. I would claim that any theory of knowing that attempts to analyse cognition by means of cognitive tools will ipso facto be circular. Having seen the usefulness of admitting circularity as a positive principle in cybernetics, I have nothing against that.
2.b. The notion that the reflection upon an act of seeing should enable the seeing subject to compare "the contents" of that act of seeing (i.e. what was seen) with an external object which, as David says, is "intended" by the act, raises the original question how we might access that object in a way that does not again involve experience. From my point of view, this is indeed "attempting to speak the unspeakable", for which I have great sympathy and respect, provided it is done in the mystic's language of poetic metaphors and not presented as rational analysis.
From the editor
The discussion on this central point in the second order stance of cybernetics is open for everyone who has a constructive contribution. The papers of Qvortrup and Brier in this issue discuss the problem from different angles. Further these papers open for the discussion of the relation of second order cybernetics and the semiotics of C.S. Peirce. In my opinion an important issue in the comming years.
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