Annotationen:The Construction of Knowledge
About thirty years ago, Heinz von Foerster noticed an inherent quality of the
nervous system (and almost everybody believes that human beings must be viewed as nervous systems when one focuses on cognition): The signals that are sent from sensory elements to the cortex are all the same. This had been discovered by Johannes Müller around the middle of the last century, but von Foerster was, as far as I know, the first to emphasize its epistemological implications. He called this “undifferentiated coding”.1 What this means is that if a neuron in the retina sends a “visual” signal to the cortex, this signal has exactly the same form as the signals that come from the ears, from the nose, from fingers or toes, or any other signal-generating part of the organism. There is no qualitative distinction between any of these signals. They all vary in frequency and amplitude, but there is no qualitative indication of what they are supposed to mean. It was a very baffling observation. It has since been confirmed by Humberto Maturana in the field of color vision, where he has shown that the receptors which are supposed to sense red – or what physicists think of as the kind of light waves we call red – send signals that are in no way different from the ones that sense green. If we are able to distinguish them, the distinctions must be made in the cortex. Yet, they cannot be made on the basis of simple qualitative differences, because there are no such differences.2 It is therefore unwarranted to maintain that we distinguish things
because we receive “information” from what we usually call the outside world.Having grown up the way I did, you sooner or later also come to ask another
question. You realize that the differences between the languages are not merely a matter of vocabulary or grammar, but a matter of looking at the world. This inevitably raises the question, which of these ways of looking might be the right one. But then, because you have been living quite happily among people who look at the world differently, you realize that this is a silly question, because all the speakers of one language obviously think that theirs is the “right” way of looking at the world. After a while you conclude that each group may be right for itself and that there is no
rightness outside the groups.The skeptics argue that what we come to know
has gone through our sensory system and through our conceptual system and it gives us a picture. But when we would like to know whether this is a correct picture, a true picture of an outside world, we are completely stuck, because every time we look at the outside world, what we see is again seen through our sensory system and through our conceptual system. So we are trapped in a paradox. We want to believe that we can know something of the outside world, but we can never tell whether this knowledge is true. Because to establish such truth would require a comparison which we simply cannot make. We Ernst von Glasersfeld (1991) The Construction of Knowledge have no way of getting at the outside world, except by experiencing it. And in experiencing it, we may be making the same mistakes; even if we saw it all correctly,
we would have no way of knowing that it is correct.3In Darwin’s Theory an organism’s physical form and its way of behaving must fit
into the environment in which it has to live. You all know that adaptation in this Darwinian sense is not something that the organism itself can do. It is something accidental. Biological adaptation is not an activity of either organisms or species but a state of affairs. Anything that has the possibility to survive in the given environment is “fit”. As the biologist Colin Pittendrigh said, it is a pity that Darwin himself occasionally slipped and talked of “the survival of the fittest”, which is misleading. In principle, to be “fit” means to be able to survive.5 For the organism it is an either/or matter, not a matter of degree. That relationship of fitting into a set of constraints is what we call the relationship of “viability”. Organisms are viable if they manage to survive in spite of the constraints their environment places on their living and reproducing. This relationship, therefore, is not one of representation but one of fitting into given circumstances. Where knowledge is concerned, the circumstances are often purely logical ones. They do not constitute a physical environment but a conceptual one. To be viable, a new thought should fit into the existing scheme of conceptual structures in a way that does not cause contradictions. If there are contradictions, either the new thought or
the old structures are deemed to require changing.The first person to take this idea and bring it into cognition was Mark Baldwin,
who was one of Jean Piaget’s teachers in Paris. Piaget then developed it into a fullfledged theory of cognition and cognitive development.6 Throughout his works he repeated that cognition was an adaptive activity. In my opinion, however, a great many readers of Piaget never took this seriously. And still today, most read Piaget as though he talked about knowledge of the old kind, knowledge that is representational. If one tries to make a coherent interpretation of Piaget, one comes to the conclusion that this can be done only through a change of the concept of knowing and the concept of knowledge, a change from the representational to the adaptive. In this changed perspective, then, knowledge does not provide a representation
of an independent world but rather a map of what can be done in the experienced environment.The last root of Constructivism is Cybernetics. This relatively new branch of studies
focused much interest on self-regulation and self-organizing organisms. It seems to me that a serious study of Self-Regulation must come to the point where it asks also about the activity of knowing, and whether knowing is not also a result of self-regulation. Once again, a very simple statement. It means that whatever you call knowledge must be made-up or constructed out of material that is accessible to the knower. In fact, it is the cybernetician’s way of formulating what Vico said; namely, that you can only know what you yourself have made. And to make it yourself, you must have access to the building blocks, to the raw material. Cybernetics then helps to unravel the question of what is accessible and what not. From the Cybernetic point of view, self-regulating systems are informationally closed. To explain this, we must remember what Claude Shannon, in his famous paper on the Theory of Communication,7 showed about signals and their meaning. Two of his points are sufficient to clear up the wide-spread misconception of the term “information”: (1) meaning does not travel from the sender to the receiver – the only thing that travels are signals; (2) signals are signals only insofar as someone can decode them, and in order to decode them you have to know their meaning. Communication, therefore, works when two people send each other a telegram
and they have previously established a code outside that communication system.They
can decode the message because they already know the code. But how should we decode the signals that we get from our sensors, the signals that, according to the traditional view, are coming from the outside world? We do not know who or what encoded them in that hypothetical outside world, nor do we know the code. We can only look at the signals from the inside, namely from the receiver’s side. Hence the use of the term information makes no sense in this context. We can speak of “information” relative to our own experiences, but never with regard to anything that is supposed to lie beyond our experiential interface. Professor Prigogine said, if I understood him rightly, “Knowledge is participation”.8 As you can tell from what I have said, I go further and say:
“Knowledge is construction.”There is no constructing unless you have some form of reflection. What I mean
by reflection is much the same that Piaget and, long before him, the British empiricist Philosopher John Locke meant. Locke said early on in his treatise that there are two sources of knowledge. One is the senses, and the other is the mind’s reflection upon its own operations.9 The child’s reflection upon its own mental operations is for Piaget the basis of “reflective abstraction” which yields all the important concepts that cannot be derived directly from sensory or motor experience. These abstract or “operative” concepts
form a level above the “figurative” ones that can be abstracted from sensory material.Let us
assume that I was here yesterday and, just as now, had a glass of water in front of me. I come in today and say: “Oh, this is the same glass, the identical glass that stood here yesterday.” If someone asked me, how I can tell that it is the identical glass, I should have to look for a particular that distinguishes this glass from all others. This may turn out to be impossible. But this is not the problem I want to focus on.
Time and Space / There is another conceptual problem that is difficult for adults to see, because it was
solved in an ingenious way at a very early age. I am claiming that the glass I see now is the self-same individual that I saw yesterday, but I did not see it during the entire interval of 24 hours. During that interval this glass was not part of my experiential world and my attention was on other things, and for a third of the interval I was asleep. Yet, I want to say this is the self-same, identical glass. This would require that the glass had some form of continuity outside my experiential world. Therefore there must be some place beyond my field of experience where the glass could be while I
was busy experiencing other things or asleep.This construction of proto-space immediately raises a second question: What are
the items in it doing while one is experiencing other things? After all, a lot was going on in one’s experiential world during the interval the abandoned items spent in their repository. The language in which I am describing this, the words “while” and “during”, already give away the trick. The “being” of the things in the repository gets extended so that they can keep up with the flow of my experience and be available when my attention turns to them again. This parallelism of two extensions – the flow of a subject’s experience and the individual identities stretched over intervals in their repository is what I call “proto-time”. It is the beginning of the concept of time. It is different from the notion of proto-space because in it there are already the notions of “before” and “after”. But this “before” and “after” is constructed by the projection of the subject’s experiences on things in the repository that are not in the field of experience. It is, indeed, this parallelism that makes it possible to choose a standard experience, for instance the movement of a clock’s hand, and to project it on some other experiential sequence as a measure of time. To me, therefore, time is not, as Prigogine said, an illusion. If I called the construct of time an illusion, the entire world that I know, the world that I live in, would also have to be called an illusion. And that is not the way I would characterize it. Although my entire world is a construction, I can still make a useful distinction in it between illusion and reality. But remember that for me “reality” always refers to experiential reality, not to the ontological reality of traditional philosophy. If we want to construct a rational reality for ourselves, time and space are indispensable building
blocks, and I would rather call “illusion” any claim to knowledge beyond the field of our experience.From the epistemological point of view, this is earth-shaking. Yet if you look
through the contemporary literature of psychology and especially the psychology of
perception, one finds practically no reference to it.It is important to make this clear
because there is much talk today about “evolutionary epistemology” and I consider this misleading. For me, as for a number of thinkers at the turn of the century, the
important idea was the notion of “fit” rather than “match”.When I explain that, for me, language was a source of constructivism, I cannot help
but speak in a biographical vein. I was in what I consider the fortunate position of growing up without a particular native language. I grew up with two, and very soon it
was three. So I grew up between languages.In retrospect, I believe it was this circumstance that drove me into philosophy
and was the primary source of my interest in theories of knowledge. I read philosophy eclectically and without supervision. This has a disadvantage. Having no professional guidance, it may take you many years to solve a problem, and then you discover that you could have found the solution in a book, if only someone had told you where to look. On the other hand, eclectic reading has the advantage that you read some authors that are never mentioned in standard philosophy courses. And in my case some of these authors happened to be particularly important for constructing a
constructivist theory of knowing.Among others
there were thinkers like Gassendi and Mersenne in France, who argued that it was perfectly all right for science to make rational models, but they were always models of our experiential world and not models of a real world. This separation of two kinds of knowledge – the rational and the non-rational – was a novel idea in skepticism. If I have called the second “mystical”, some people may think that I intend an evaluation, that I value the mystical less than the rational. This is not so. In that regard I follow the first real constructivist, the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico, who contrasted the knowledge of reason and the knowledge of “poetic imagination” but did not question the value of both. He wrote a Latin thesis at the very beginning of the 18th century and called it “De Antiquissima Italorum Sapientia”. It is the first constructivist manifesto. Speaking about the real world, Vico said very clearly that humans can only know what humans themselves have made. He crystallized this in the rather beautiful statement that God is the artificer of the world, man the god of artifacts.4 (When Vico said “man”, he included
women, which at that time was always taken for granted.)From the Cybernetic point of view, self-regulating systems are informationally
closed. To explain this, we must remember what Claude Shannon, in his famous paper on the Theory of Communication,7 showed about signals and their meaning. Two of his points are sufficient to clear up the wide-spread misconception of the term “information”: (1) meaning does not travel from the sender to the receiver – the only thing that travels are signals; (2) signals are signals only insofar as someone can decode them, and in order to
decode them you have to know their meaning.In order to show you how Constructivism imagines this construction, I would like to
describe one example. It is a construction which, I believe, most of us have accomplished within the first two years of our lives. What I am going to say is to a
large extent based on Piaget’s La construction du réel chez l’enfant”.6But, how would reflection start to build up anything? I would suggest (as did
William James a long time ago) that the notions of differences and sameness are among the first indispensable tools. George Spencer Brown, in his treatise “Laws of
Form”,10 begins with an injunction that says simply: “Make a distinction.”
