Open/closed
For Luhmann, the concept of “operational closure” marks a radical break with the tradition “that supposed that something from the environment enters into the one who cognizes and that the environment is represented, mirrored, imitated, or simulated within a cognizing system.” But these two claims need not go together. For Whitehead, it is precisely because something from the “environment” (though this is not the word he uses) actually enters into the entity that prehends it, that the prehending entity does not internally “represent” what it prehends. Whitehead opposes both representationalism and “closure.”
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