Second-Order Autopoietic Unities and Cognitive Domains. As previously mentioned, one of the most fascinating implications of Xxxxxxxx’x and Xxxxxx’x autopoiesis is its scalability. By taking the construction, enactment and preservation of a homeostatic system of relations as the fundamental definition of a unity, many different levels of organization can be viewed through the same criteria. Autopoietic unities can be identified at all levels of the human organism, from atoms to cells to organs, as well as to systems of organs, the whole body and even social bodies. Xxxxxxxx and Xxxxxx refer to these higher scale interactions as “second and third order autopoietic unities” (1972, p. 107). This is to say that, as two or more autopoietic unities come into contact with one another, whether they be two or more cells or human beings, if they are able to engage in a cooperative exchange of stimuli and to build a consensual linguistic domain, then they can be viewed together as a second-order autopoietic unity. There is, theoretically, no real limit to how far this concept can scale up or down. Any level of micro- or macro-scopic entities can be analyzed as autopoietic unities, provided only that they demonstrate the necessary criteria of constructing and maintaining a homeostatic domain of interrelation. In order to describe how such second-order autopoietic domains are created, it is helpful to first examine Xxxxxxxx’x and Xxxxxx’x definition of cognitive domains, which is more or less an extension of what was previously examined as a linguistic domain. According to Xxxxxxxx and Xxxxxx, cognitive domains encompass “all of the deformations that [the closed system] can undergo without loss of autopoiesis,” (1972, p. 119), or “the domain of all interactions in which [it] can enter without loss of identity” (1972, p. 136). This is, of course, intricately related to the most basic characteristics of autopoiesis. The boundaries between linguistic domains and cognitive domains can become blurred as one begins to examine second- and third-order autopoietic unities; as orientational networks of mutual organization, language and cognition can begin to be seen as scaled-up or -down versions of each other. A linguistic domain describes “a consensual domain in which the coupled organisms orient each other … through interactions that have been specified during their coupled ontogenies” (1972, p. 136) These domains are so intimately related that, as Xxxxxxxx and Xxxxxx describe the way in which a cognitive domain interacts with its...
