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There are, for instance, the conscious or unconscious accommodations we have to make – and make quite successfully – in the thousands of trivial routines that are indispensable in our way of living, such as retrieving the toothpaste that has fallen behind the wash basin, looking up the telephone number of a person we want to meet, locating a book on a shelf, finding our misplaced car keys, negotiating the stairs to the garage during a power failure, etc., etc. +
A simple example may illustrate this. Having got tired of buying matches, someone may decide to design a cigarette lighter. Lighting cigarettes will be the purpose prescribed for the gadget. “People do not build purposeless machines” (loc.cit.). +
As they quickly discovered, one and the same thing might be reinforcing under certain circumstances (e.g. meat pellets, when the rat was hungry) and not reinforcing under others (e.g. when the rat was well fed). +
The analogy, of course, does not stretch to include the sculptor. The natural environment that carries out the selective process has no more a vision of the forms that are left than the sculptor’s chisel has a vision of the statue it helps to peel out of the marble. Such a vision may be attributed to the sculptor. It would constitute a telos or goal, which will be discussed when we come to final causes. +
Annotationen:The Concepts of Adaptation and Viability in a Radical Constructivist Theory of Knowledge/Gvn1s8aexn +
In order to remain among the survivors, an organism has to "get by" the constraints which the environment poses. +
Annotationen:The Concepts of Adaptation and Viability in a Radical Constructivist Theory of Knowledge/Hqbpcwl9qc +
It is easy to see that a bricklayer is to some extent constrained in his building by certain basic characteristics that are inherent in the bricks he uses. In much the same way, I believe, the representation we construct of our adult experiential world is constrained by certain basic characteristics of the building blocks we are using, which is to say, the building blocks which we created during the sensorimotor period. +
Annotationen:The Concepts of Adaptation and Viability in a Radical Constructivist Theory of Knowledge/Mv3evgsza0 +
Any construction, be it physical or mental, is subject to certain constraints that spring from the material that the constructor employs. +
Annotationen:The Concepts of Adaptation and Viability in a Radical Constructivist Theory of Knowledge/Neaky5p1rt +
A rather convincing case can be made for the notion that all practical learning may be considered the result of a process of induction. +
Annotationen:The Concepts of Adaptation and Viability in a Radical Constructivist Theory of Knowledge/O8h5mfjw3o +
It seems, then, that there is simply no way around the assumption that organisms construct their representations of their world, their environment, or whatever one chooses to call what is outside them. In other words, an activity of construction has to be assumed regardless of whether one wants to be a constructivist or not. +
Annotationen:The Concepts of Adaptation and Viability in a Radical Constructivist Theory of Knowledge/Qcgycyjn3c +
Thus we can say that the only indication we may get of the "real" structure of the environment is through the organisms and the species that have been extinguished; the viable ones that survive merely constitute a selection of solutions among an infinity of potential solutions that might be equally viable. +
“Knowledge is construction.” +
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. +
After a while you conclude that each group may be right for itself and that there is no
rightness outside the groups. +
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. +
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. +
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. +
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. +
It is therefore unwarranted to maintain that we distinguish things
because we receive “information” from what we usually call the outside world. +
There is no constructing unless you have some form of reflection. +
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. +
