Property:AnnotationComment
A
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”. +
What one makes oneself can hardly be expected to have that perennial reliability one would like to attribute to the real world. +
Thus, there is no basis for the assumption that re-presentations arise as internal images of an outside world; instead, it seems quite plausible that they constitute the material which the cognizing subject externalizes in the construction of reality. +
the fiction of individual identity is the key element in the conceptual construction of the basic notions of space and time. +
The pen I hold in my hand does not become another while you’re watching it. You are quite sure of that – at least until you’ve seen a sharper do a sleight of hand with cards. Then you suddenly realize that things can change their identity under your very eyes. It is a question of speed – and speed, after all, is the quotient of space an time. The conservation of individual identity may be more of a problem than it seemed. +
Mount Etna towers over Sicily regardless of any Sicilians, the Monalisa smiles whether the Louvre is open to the public or not, and the river Inn flows down the Engadin even when no one dangles a toe in its icy water. All that (and more) is what we hold to be reality. The mountain, the painted smile, and – in spite of what Heraclitus said – even the flowing river, are supposed to have their place and to remain what they are. +
Space is the medium in which things maintain or, as the case may be, change their location; time is the medium in which they must conserve their identity lest they disappear qua “things” and be reduced to momentary apparitions. +
Take, for example, the two statements: “This is the same girl I saw yesterday” and “She bought the same dress as her sister.” The girl is one and the same individual, seen twice; the dresses are two, considered equivalent in every respect that one chose to take into account when comparing them. +
“Sameness” and “difference”, then, refer to relations, and relations are instituted or constructed by the experiencing subject. +
It concerns experience alone, experience segmented into chunks, if you will, but not items that exist in their own right, independently of the experiencer. +
More often than not, this will do the trick, because the possession of specific memories is accepted as unquestionable proof of individual continuity. +
