Property:AnnotationComment
A
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. +
Relations, therefore, are not “perceived” but fictitious +
The meanings of words – and this also applies to every sign and every symbol – must be constructed by each user of the language individually, and this construction is based solely on the subjective experience of the particular parson. Hence it stands to reason that the interpretation of a word or a text will always remain an essentially subjective operation. +
When you are engaged, as you are now, in reading what I have written, it can be said that communication is taking place. To be more precise, you are in the position of a receiver. Let’s take a moment to observe what goes on. To begin with, you have to be able to perceive a series of black marks printed on the page and to identify these marks, first as letters and then as combinations of letters forming words of a language with which you are familiar. You are familiar with a language whenever the meanings of most of its words hold some asso
ciation for you. At that point, the perception of words calls up meanings in your head and you attempt to link these meanings together in order to develop larger conceptual structures that are related to the sentences of the text. If you succeed and manage to produce structures that appear reasonable to you, you feel that you have understood what the author intended to say. +
Instead of “truth.” constructivism speaks of viability and compatibility with previously constructed models. In other words, scientific models are tools. +
Yet, analysis of the process which led a student to answer in a particular way is one of the best means available towards an understanding of his or her concepts and mental operations. +
Thus, instead of claiming that knowledge is capable of representing a world outside of our experience, we would say, as did the pragmatists, that knowledge is a tool within the realm of experience. +
If knowledge cannot be transmitted, but must instead be constructed by each student individually, this does not imply that teaching must dispense with language. It implies only that the role of language must be conceived of differently. +
For me, therefore, the world in which we find ourselves living, is the world that we have been able to build and maintain within the constraints we have so far experienced. – What could be more cybernetic than this? +
each user of a language must build up meanings for him- or herself. +
On the strength of all this, I came to believe that the meanings we attribute to words and phrases, and to whole speeches and texts, are meanings, or built up of meanings, that we ourselves have generated in our own experience. They are the result of “self-regulation” – and the study of self-regulation is an integral part of cybernetics. +
