1.

The separation of these perspectives has a "quasi-idiotic" tradition: C. Snow has separated two cultures: the technical idiots he found in one of his two cultures understand nothing of meaning, because they can only construct, while the literary idiots of the other culture do not understand the simplest technical system. The sociologist T. Veblen, who would probably belong more to the second category after C. Snow, invented - following Plato's Governor - the technocrat, who can lead organizations and states according to purely technological criteria without caring about their purposes. "You" only have to tell the technocrat where to steer his ship. And this is what the so-called sovereign does in technocracy.
Here, however, it is not a matter of separating goal-oriented and operative functions, but of distinguishing between the perspectives of the systems-theoretical observer.

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2.

If, for example, I am standing in front of a Greek temple as an enslaved barbarian and therefore cannot even interpret what I see, I can ask myself what this could be and what it could be good for. But then I don't want an explanation but an interpretation. I then do not want to know how the temple is constructed, but what function it could have.

If I cannot spontaneously recognize a meaning, I speak of artifacts. With artifacts I often ask myself how they are constructed in order to get an indication of their meaning. I call this inversion an abductive process.

PS: Of course, you don't have to be a barbarian - that was the name given by the Greeks to anyone who couldn't speak Greek - to not understand what temples could be good for. And in the eyes of enlightened humanists, who admire these temples so much, they may also have a completely different meaning to the Greeks for whom they were built.

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3.

This distinction corresponds in some respects to that which H. Maturana introduces with his "logical accounting". In the sociological systems theory of N. Luhmann this distinction is not made. "What-is-the-questions" are completely and not only perspectively excluded there as non-system-theoretical questions. However, the questions creep in through arbitrary back doors. If one consciously adheres to H. Maturana's bookkeeping, it remains clear that the "what-is-it-questions" do not ask for explanations, and in this sense belong, as it were, in the environment of system theories.
Of course I can formally describe the mechanism of the temple door in terms of system theory. But I cannot speak of a temple door or a heating system in terms of system theory, because I relate these expressions to functions in the world I have interpreted.

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