Property:AnnotationComment
A
Just as, for instance, the Morse code links short and long experiences of beeps to re-presentations of letters of the alphabet, so in language, sound images are linked to concepts, that is, to re-presentations of experiential units. +
Whatever one assumes to be genetically determined in children, it is they themselves who must actively isolate units in their experiential field and abstract them into concepts. +
The point I want to make is that it is the experiencer who generates the image, the configuration that becomes the “representation”, and that this configuration is always one of several others that are equally possible within the constraints of the sensory material. This, I claim, goes for all the experiential units or things to which we give names, and it is the reason why I maintain that meanings are always subjective. They are subjective in the sense that they have to be constructed by the experiencer. +
The point I want to make is that it is the experiencer who generates the image, the configuration that becomes the “representation”, and that this configuration is always one of several others that are equally possible within the constraints of the sensory material. This, I claim, goes for all the experiential units or things to which we give names, and it is the reason why I maintain that meanings are always subjective. +
The point I want to stress is that from our perspective it is attention and above all its movements that generate the conceptual structures and thus the things we talk about. These items, as I said before, cannot have an existence of their own but originate through the operations of an experiencer or observer. +
What speakers of a language have constructed as the meanings of the words they use, is at best compatible in the linguistic interactions with other speakers; but such compatibility remains forever relative to the limited number of actual interactions the individual has had in his or her past. What speakers have learned to mean always remains their own construction. +
The problem of meaning thus comes down to the problem of how we generate units in our experience such that we can associate them with words, and how we relate these units to form larger conceptual structures. +
This, I believe, is as close as a constructivist can come to “objectivity”. +
If knowledge can be considered the result of the adaptive effort of cognitive organisms in their struggle to maintain their equilibrium in the face of perturbations, it does not seem reasonable for them to use this knowledge to compete with one another. On the contrary, it seems that in order to maintain not only their own equilibrium but also that of the planet on which they find themselves living they would have to foster in every conceivable way every kind of mutual collaboration. +
The salient point in all this is that, since this “reality” manifests itself only in failures of our acting and/or thinking, we have no way of describing it except in terms of actions and thoughts that turned out to be unsuccessful. +
Thus, we need Others. +
Scientific knowledge, then, does not and could not yield a picture of the “real” world; it provides more or less reliable ways of dealing with experience. Hence it may be viable, but it can make no claim to “Truth”, if “Truth” is to be understood as a correspondence to the ontologically real world. On the other hand, this way of looking at knowledge, be it scientific or other, makes it immune against the sceptics’ perennial argument. Since this constructivist notion of knowledge does not claim to provide a picture of something beyond experience, the fact that one cannot compare it with such a something, does not detract from this kind of knowledge - it is either viable or it is not. Indeed, as a constructivist, I tend to go one step further: Since we have access only to experience and cannot get outside the experiential field, there is no way one could show that one’s experiences are the effects of causes that lie outside the experiential world. +
Constructivism, thus, does not deny the “existence” of Others, it merely holds that insofar as we know these Others, they are models that we ourselves construct. +
Annotationen:Knowing without Metaphysics: Aspects of the Radical Constructivist Position/Cakas2wfvu +
This, of course, is the reason why the best teachers have always paid more attention to the sources of mistakes than to the how of students’ correct answers. +
Annotationen:Knowing without Metaphysics: Aspects of the Radical Constructivist Position/Faufc0pgou +
That is to say, teachers must try to infer, from what they can observe, what the students’ concepts are and how they operate with them. Only on the basis of some such hypothesis can teachers devise ways and means to orient, direct, or modify the students’ mental operating. This is a context in which the constructivist approach and its analysis of conceptual development seemed promising. +
Annotationen:Knowing without Metaphysics: Aspects of the Radical Constructivist Position/Iksre2deu2 +
Thus the inside becomes ‘self’, the outside the individual’s ‘universe’. +
Annotationen:Knowing without Metaphysics: Aspects of the Radical Constructivist Position/J3len2nz3t +
If a prediction, made on the basis of imputing to another person a scheme of acting or thinking that one has found to be viable for oneself, turns out to be correct, then that scheme and the conceptual structures it involves achieve a level of experiential reality that cannot be reached without the social context. Indeed, this kind of ‘corroboration’ produces the only objectivity that is possible in the Radical Constructivist view. +
Annotationen:Knowing without Metaphysics: Aspects of the Radical Constructivist Position/Jkeg7bli5o +
In other words, the self we come to know and the world we come to know are both assembled out of elements of our very own experience. +
Annotationen:Knowing without Metaphysics: Aspects of the Radical Constructivist Position/Mrkitz3yc3 +
The models of another’s conceptual operating that one can build on the basis of observable behavior, thus, are and remain hypothetical; +
Annotationen:Knowing without Metaphysics: Aspects of the Radical Constructivist Position/Oczp7q8gfi +
To know, thus, is not to have ‘correct pictures’ but, viable procedures or, as Maturana said (1988: 53), ‘to operate adequately in an individual or cooperative situation’. +
