Property:AnnotationComment
A
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’. +
Annotationen:Knowing without Metaphysics: Aspects of the Radical Constructivist Position/Roj6vedf4k +
I claim that we cannot even imagine what the word ‘to exist’ might mean in an ontological context, because we cannot conceive of ‘being’ without the notions of space and time, and these two notions are among the first of our conceptual constructs. +
Annotationen:Knowing without Metaphysics: Aspects of the Radical Constructivist Position/Rr6ajt0u6w +
The experiential environment in which an individual’s constructs and schemes must prove viable is always a social environment as well as a physical one. Though one’s concepts, one’s ways of operating, and one’s knowledge cannot be constructed by any other subject than oneself, it is their viability, their adequate functioning in one’s physical and social environment, that furnishes the key to the solidification of the individual’s experiential reality (von Glasersfeld, 1985). +
Annotationen:Knowing without Metaphysics: Aspects of the Radical Constructivist Position/Tgr4tpc6ol +
Concepts, therefore, have no iconic or representational connection with anything that might ‘exist’ outside the cognizing system; and the raw material out of which concepts are composed or coordinated cannot be known to have any such connection either. To call the basic elements of our cognitive conceptual constructions ‘distinctions’ is, I think, the least misleading way of speaking about them. From the distinguisher’s point of view, what is actually distinguished depends not on what might be there before the activity of distinguishing is carried out, but on what the organism is able to distinguish and chooses to distinguish in the given experiential context. +
Annotationen:Knowing without Metaphysics: Aspects of the Radical Constructivist Position/Tipqfppga9 +
I am in agreement with Maturana when he says: ‘an observer has no operational basis to make any statements or claim about objects, entities or relations as if they existed independently of what he or she does’ (1988: 30). +
Annotationen:Knowing without Metaphysics: Aspects of the Radical Constructivist Position/Tujb4l2u48 +
Assume you have made an appointment with a friend to meet in a certain place on a certain day. When the day comes, a lot of snow has fallen during the preceding night. There is a shorter and a longer way to drive to the arranged place. You know that the longer way is the quicker when there is snow on the roads. You know this from your own experience in your subjective physical environment. But now you use it in your social environment by predicting that your friend will come by that route. If your prediction turns out to be correct and, especially, if your friend confirms that he chose the longer way for the reason that you had in mind, your reasoning will be greatly reinforced and the elements that were involved in it will seem more like an objective reality that is independent of both of you. +
Annotationen:Knowing without Metaphysics: Aspects of the Radical Constructivist Position/U6b3jonz63 +
‘there’s a book in front of you on the table; you know it’s a book, I know it’s a book, and anyone who looks at it would recognize it as a book – why do you keep telling us that the book is not really there?’ +
Annotationen:Knowing without Metaphysics: Aspects of the Radical Constructivist Position/Ubaxm0s76d +
Language does not transport pieces of one person’s reality into another’s – it merely prods and prompts the other to build up conceptual structures which, to this other, seem compatible with the words and actions the speaker or writer has used +
From the radical constructivist perspective, “knowledge” fits reality in much the same way that a key fits a lock that it is able to open. The fit describes a capacity of the key, not a property of the lock. When we face a novel problem, we are in much the same position as the burglar who wishes to enter a house. The “key” with which he successfully opens the door might be a paper clip, a bobby pin, a credit card, or a skillfully crafted skeleton key. All that matters is that it fits within the constraints of the particular lock and allows the burglar to get in. +
Knowledge, thus, is usually assumed to be knowledge of the environment. +
Pyrrho and his followers had successfully argued that if, say, an apple appears to have a certain color and a certain smell, feels smooth and tastes sweet to us, this cannot give us the knowledge that a real apple possesses these properties, because we have no way of examining the apple other than by seeing, smelling, tasting, and feeling it again. +
