Annotationen:The Radical Constructivist View of Science
The way science is written about, and popularized, does much to reinforce this illusion, because it reiterates that the scientific method and its results are ‘objective’. This is an irresponsible play on the ambiguities of the words ‘object’, ‘objective’, and ‘objectivity’. 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 contrast, the philosophically minded also use the word for items to which they ascribe ‘existence’, which is to say, they posit them as entities supposed to be independent of anyone’s experience. In this vein, some mathematicians speak of numbers as ‘mathematical objects’ as though they existed without anyone generating them by reflection on an activity such as counting. The other two words, ‘objective’ and ‘objectivity’, show a no less tricky ambiguity. On the one hand, they are intended to indicate the belief that the objects you have isolated in your experience are identical with those others have formed. From the constructivist point of view, this, too, is an illusion. It arises from the fact that we can recognize them and to a large extent agree on their description. None of this, however, requires an exact match of what we have individually abstracted from experience. Such commonality and communication shows no more than a relative compatibility of concepts in the situations in which we have had occasion to compare our individual uses of the particular words. Consequently, it would be preferable (and more accurate) if in all these cases we spoke of ‘intersubjective’ and ‘intersubjectivity’. This would preclude any fanciful flights into the realm of ontology. But in philosophical discourse, ‘objective’ and ‘objectivity’ are deliberately intended to imply direct knowledge of things as they are ‘in-themselves’, i.e. knowledge of items as they might be prior to being experienced. As Heinz von Foerster put it in conversation, ‘objectivity is the delusion that observations could be made without an observer’
The symbols used in mathematical computations designate operations that someone has to carry out. As Reuben Hersh put it: “Symbols are used as aids to thinking just as musical scores are used as aids to music. The music comes first, the score comes later” (Hersh, 1986, p.19). Even on the simplest level, for instance of 2+2=4, the symbol ‘2’ is meaningless for someone who has not abstracted the concept of ‘one’ from experiential items such as fingers, chocolates, or poker chips, and has then learned that sequences of these items can lead to the abstraction of compound units that are symbolized by ‘2’, ‘3’, ‘4’, etc. All other mathematical symbols similarly can be understood only by a thinker who knows and is able to execute the designated mental operations (cf. Steffe et al., 1983). As for measurement, it, too, is contingent on the creation of units - units in the form of things to be counted or units of measurement to count ‘continuous’ items that are experienced without articulation of their own. 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.
Nowhere have I found this better described than in the aphorisms on language and thought which Wilhelm von Humboldt wrote in 1795:
1. The essence of thinking consists in reflecting, i.e., in distinguishing what thinks from what is being thought. 2. In order to reflect, the mind must stand still for a moment in its progressive activity, must grasp as a unit what was just presented, and thus posit it as object against itself. 3. The mind then compares the units, of which several can be created in that way, and separates and connects them according to its needs. (Humboldt, 1907, p.581) The expression ‘the progressive activity’, I suggest, is to be interpreted as the mind’s segmentation and coordination of the flow of the raw experiential material that Kant called ‘the manifold’ (das Mannigfaltige).
The sensory perceptions (conscious empirical presentations) can only be called internal appearances. Not until understanding is added (and makes order in the manifold) does empirical knowledge, i.e., experience, arise from it.[3]
(Kant, 1800, p.144; Kant’s emphasis) This is an amplification of Kant’s earlier formulation “that reason can comprehend only what she herself has brought forth according to her design” (Kant, 1787,p.xvi).
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.To recognize the full power of this position, one has to realize that adaptation is not an activity but the result of the elimination of all that is not adapted. Consequently, on the biological level, anything that manages to survive is 'adapted' to the environment in which it happens to find itself living. Once this is understood, it follows that what matters is not to match an ontic world, but to fit into the experiential one, in the sense of being able to avoid whatever obstacles or traps it might present. Taken out of the biological context and applied to cognition, this means that 'to know' is not to possess true representations of reality, but rather to possess ways and means of acting and thinking that allow one to attain the goals one happens to have chosen. To know, thus, is to have viable procedures or, as Maturana said “to operate adequately in an individual or cooperative situation” (1988, p.53).
Some of the Pre-Socratics saw that this shift was possible, and the sceptics of all ages have reiterated that a true view of the real world could not be attained. But they were unable to specify a relation between knowledge and experience that could replace the conventional one of representation.
It is clear that fundamentalists, who claim to possess the one and only ‘truth’, cannot abide such a notion.
Karl Popper incorporated this observation in his ‘Conjectures and refutations’ and added as subtitle ‘The growth of scientific knowledge’ (Popper, 1968). He thought that this process was bound to lead science to a more and more adequate understanding of the real world. But he was unable to indicate how one could ever ascertain that the new conjectures were actually getting closer to such unquestionable ‘Truth’. This was one of the problems that had prompted Thomas Kuhn to try another approach. One can certainly argue against details in Kuhn’s description of ‘scientific revolutions’ (1970), but no one can deny that every now and then the invention of wholly unforeseeable concepts has relegated previously held convictions to the growing scrap heap of explanatory theories. The image of the scientist gradually unveiling the mysteries of a world that is and forever remains what it is, does not seem appropriate.
One key to the puzzle was offered in the form of a metaphor proposed by Einstein:
Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world. In our endeavor to understand reality we are somewhat like a man trying to understand the mechanism of a closed watch. He sees the face and the moving hands, even hears its ticking, but he has no way of opening the case. If he is ingenious he may form some picture of a mechanism which could be responsible for all the things he observes, but he may never be quite sure his picture is the only one which could explain his observations. He will never be able to compare his picture with the real mechanism and he cannot even imagine the possibility or the meaning of such a comparison. (Einstein & Infeld, 1967, p.31) Later Einstein formulated the guiding principle:
The object of all science, whether natural science or psychology, is to co-ordinate our experiences and to bring them into a logical order. (Einstein, 1955, p.1)Humberto Maturana has characterized the scientific method as a succession of four steps scientists enact when they intend to explain a specific phenomenon:
1. They define the conditions under which the phenomenon can be observed, in the hope that others will be able to confirm the observation. 2. They propose a hypothetical mechanism or model that could serve as explanation of how the phenomenon might arise. 3. From this mechanism they deduce a prediction concerning an event that has not yet been observed.
4. Then they proceed to define and generate the conditions under which the mechanism is expected to lead to the observation of the predicted event.[1]Some recurrent things can be coupled to form relatively reliable correlations or, better still, causal connections. The infant, without conceptualizing these connections through reflection, tries to re- enact them because they produce an ‘interesting result’ (Piaget, 1937, chapter III).
The other way of postulating a model is based on what Charles Peirce called ‘abduction’. He considered this a third form of inference and defined it in the pattern of a syllogism:
The surprising fact C is observed; But if A were true, C would be a matter of course; Hence, there is reason to suspect that A is true.
(Peirce, 1931-35; 5.189)Peter Medawar, by all accounts a serious scientist, thought that it required “a sanguine expectation of success and that ability to imagine what the truth might be which Shelley believed to be cognate with the poet’s imagination” (Medawar, 1984, pp.17-18).
As Heinz von Foerster put it in conversation, ‘objectivity is the delusion that observations could be made without an observer’
But what about measurements, you might say, or formal derivations - are they not objective? That this is an illusion was remarked a long time ago by Berkeley: “... to be of service to reckoning and mathematical demonstration is one thing, to set forth the nature of things is another” (Berkeley, 1721, §18).
As Reuben Hersh put it: “Symbols are used as aids to thinking just as musical scores are used as aids to music. The music comes first, the score comes later” (Hersh, 1986, p.19).
Even on the simplest level, for instance of 2+2=4, the symbol ‘2’ is meaningless for someone who has not abstracted the concept of ‘one’ from experiential items such as fingers, chocolates, or poker chips, and has then learned that sequences of these items can lead to the abstraction of compound units that are symbolized by ‘2’, ‘3’, ‘4’, etc. All other mathematical symbols similarly can be understood only by a thinker who knows and is able to execute the designated mental operations (cf. Steffe et al., 1983).
Nowhere have I found this better described than in the aphorisms on language and thought which Wilhelm von Humboldt wrote in 1795:
1. The essence of thinking consists in reflecting, i.e., in distinguishing what thinks from what is being thought. 2. In order to reflect, the mind must stand still for a moment in its progressive activity, must grasp as a unit what was just presented, and thus posit it as object against itself. 3. The mind then compares the units, of which several can be created in that way, and separates and connects them according to its needs. (Humboldt, 1907, p.581) The expression ‘the progressive activity’, I suggest, is to be interpreted as the mind’s segmentation and coordination of the flow of the raw experiential material that Kant called ‘the manifold’ (das Mannigfaltige).
The sensory perceptions (conscious empirical presentations) can only be called internal appearances. Not until understanding is added (and makes order in the manifold) does empirical knowledge, i.e., experience, arise from it.[3]
(Kant, 1800, p.144; Kant’s emphasis)
This is an amplification of Kant’s earlier formulation “that reason can comprehend only what she herself has brought forth according to her design” (Kant, 1787,p.xvi).Piaget adopted Kant’s general orientation, but disagreed with the notion of the ‘a priori’. He replaced it with a developmental model of the child’s construction of space, time, permanent objects, and causal relations among them (Piaget, 1937). The generation of these fundamental concepts begins with the construction of objects that appear recurrently in the child’s experience.
Apart from the focus on how the mind could generate the conceptual structure of knowledge, Piaget provided a reason why one should assume that it endeavors to do this. Note that Humboldt, in the 3rd aphorism I quoted, says that it “separates and connects [the units it has created] according to its needs”, but does not specify what these needs might be and where they come from.
Suggestions in this direction had been proposed earlier and and somewhat generically by William James (1880), Georg Simmel (1895), Alexander Bogdanov (1909), and Hans Vaihinger (1913).
as Maturana said “to operate adequately in an individual or cooperative situation” (1988, p.53).
Stephen Hawking, to give one example, writes in his Introduction to A Brief History of Time (1988, p.10)): “A physical theory is always provisional, in the sense that it is only a hypothesis: you can never prove it.” But throughout the following ten chapters there are many statements that reflect the belief that, in principle, physics can devise theories that describe the universe as it is.
Einstein implied the same belief in his famous dictum “God does not play dice”.
