Property:AnnotationComment
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I would like to submit that it is, indeed, the logic of science and the scientific method that frequently stops scientists from looking outside a specific domain of possibilities. +
Seen in this way, the scientific method does not refer to, nor does it need, the assumption of an “objective” ontological reality—it concerns exclusively the experiential world of observers. +
For many thousands of years the river Nile flooded the Egyptian lowlands near the Mediterranean coast at least once a year. Vast amounts of fresh water seeped into the soil, fertilized it, and created a natural pressure against the water of the sea. The floods were a nuisance and, quite apart from this, using the Nile’s water to irrigate parts of the desert up-stream seemed eminently desirable. So the Assuan Dam was built to solve these two problems. The Nile no longer got out of hand and new land up- stream could be irrigated and cultivated. For a little while the dam seemed a wonderful success of science and engineering. Then it became clear that the salt of the Mediterranean was slowly but steadily seeping into and devastating the lowlands along the coast which had fed Egypt for millennia. +
That is to say, one must define certain experiences so that one can recognize them when one experiences them again. There can hardly be regularity before one has noticed repetition. +
Hence, the seemingly paradoxical assertion that an observer sees only what he or she already knows. This, in fact, is called “assimilation.” +
As Heinz von Foerster put it in conversation, ‘objectivity is the delusion that observations could be made without an observer’ +
The first is usually intended as an item isolated as part of experience; e.g. the chair you sit on, the keyboard in front of you, the hand that does the typing, the deep breath you have just taken. In short, any item of the furniture of someone’s experiential world can be called an object. +
In both cases it clearly is an active experiencer who creates the units. What is not so obvious, is that the discrete entities that are counted, as well as the continuous ones to which units of measurement are applied, are also an experiencer’s creation. +
To know, thus, is to have viable procedures or, as Maturana said “to operate adequately in an individual or cooperative situation” (1988, p.53). +
Thus, what we ordinarily call ‘experience’ has already been ordered and structured into discrete ‘things’ by perceptual and conceptual operations which endless repetition has rendered unconscious, and by assimilation to more complex conceptual configurations that have been formed in past experience. +
What we call “knowledge”, then, is the map of paths of action and thought which, at that moment in the course of our experience, have turned out to be viable for us. +
Without going into the details of the process that links the experience of a thing with the experience of a word, it should be clear that both these items are composed of elements that are part of the acting subject’s experiential world and are, therefore, determined by what the subject attends to and how the subject perceives and conceives it. +
That is to say, the proponents of a theory will assimilate new experiences as long as they possibly can, even in the face of considerable perturbations. +
To be adapted, therefore, means no more and no less than to be viable. +
In fact, the process of accommodation and adaptation of the meaning of words and linguistic expressions continues for each of us throughout our lives, and no matter how long we have spoken the language, there will still be occasions when we experience a perturbation and realize that we have been using a word in a way that turns out to be idiosyncratic in some particular respect. +
Finally, it must be made clear that, while biologists may tend to think of viability and adaptedness in terms of differential reproduction, in the cognitive domain the two terms refer to the achievement and maintenance of internal equilibrium. For the constructivist, therefore, Knowledge has the function of eliminating perturbations; and the higher we move in the hierarchy of conceptual abstractions, the more the perturbations tend to be conceptual rather than material. This, obviously, is one of the features that make the constructivist approach interesting for therapists. +
Solutions, from the constructivist perspective, are always relative — and this, in turn, makes clear that problems are not entities that lie about in the universe, independent of any experiencer. Instead, problems arise when obstacles block the way to a subject’s goal. +
When the nail that holds up the wire to my computer falls out of the wall in my study and I use my shoe to hammer it in again, I am deliberately assimilating the shoe to the function of a hammer. It may work, or it may not, but even if it does work I am not led to believe that the shoe is a hammer. In contrast, a child that has just begun to associate two or three visual characteristics, such as four legs, a tail, and fur, with utterances of the word “dog”, may well utter that word when a new visual experience allows her to see these three characteristics. A psychologist who witnesses this, may smile and say: “Ah, you see, she assimilates the lamb to her concept of dog!” He will be quite right, of course, in making this assessment; but he will be wrong if he believes that the child’s utterance requires some special activity that is called “assimilation”. From the child’s point of view, given her criteria for using the word “dog”, the lamb is a dog, and she has no reason to modify her categorization until some unexpected event creates a perturbation. Only when the new item behaves in a way that seems undog-like to her, or when someone says “No, dear, this is a lamb”, will the child have occasion to accommodate, i.e., to look for a distinguishing characteristic and, if one can be found, to create a new conceptual category called “lamb”. +
A person whose identity is questioned because the years of absence have made him unrecognizable to his family, will, as a last resort, recount memories of events experienced in their company. +
I may judge the pain I have at this moment to be different from the pain I felt last week; and to make that judgement I do not have to hypothesize that the one comes from my sinus, the other from an impacted wisdom tooth; in fact, to compare any two percepts, I do not have to externalize their origin. Nor do I have to believe that these percepts are images of “objects”. +
