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Konklusion: Die Koordination in komplexen operativen Systemen kann nicht der natürlichen Selektion zugeschrieben werden, sondern ist Ergebnis des Lernens +
Metapher +
Konklusion: In der Ontologie hat Selektion nicht Eliminierung zur Folge, sondern erfolglose Versuche +
Konklusion: Ein Organismus lernt, was zu zufriedenstellenden Ergebnissen führt +
Konklusion: Neue Verhaltensweisen entstehen, wie Mutationen, ohne biologischen Grund und werden von Generation zu Generation aufrecht erhalten, sofern sie die Lebensfähigkeit nicht beinträchtigen +
Infragestellung der allgemein gültigen Annahmen und Sichtweisen +
Konklusion: Um eine bestimmte Sittuation oder Veränderung der Unmwelt zu überleben, muss ein Organismus die erforderlichen Eigenschaften durch Mutation bereits vorher erworben haben. +
Erkenntnisse, die schockieren +
Irreführungen aufzeigen +
Wissen kann nicht das Ergebnis eines passiven Empfanges sein, sondern ist das Produkt einer aktiven Subjektivität. +
Ideen, die nicht beachtet werden +
Die Produkte bewusster kognitiver Aktivität haben immer einen Zweck und werden danach bewertet, wie gut sie diesen Zweck erfüllen +
Weil die Erlebniswelt genauso wie die Umwelt dem Organismen Grenzen setzt, werden im Lichte der Erfahrung Regelmäßigkeiten, Faustregeln und Theorien entweder als zuverlässig oder nicht zuverlässig eingestuft. +
Schwächen und die Möglichkeit der Missinterpretation der eigenen Theorie aufzeigen +
Die Welt, die konstruiert ist, ist eine erfahrene Welt, die keinerlei Anspruch auf "Wahrheit" im Sinne der Übereinstimmung mit einer ontologischen Welt +
"Durch "Natürliche Selektion" werden nicht die Stärksten und Fittesten selektiert, sondern die aussortiert, die den Test der Überlebensfähigkeit nicht überstehen +
Dilemma der klassischen Sichtweise +
Der Erfolg eines Schlüssels hängt nicht davon ab, ob ein Schloss gefunden wird, in das er passt, sonndern nur davon, ob er den Weg zu einem bestimmten Ziel öffnet. +
Wir können unsere Wahrnehmung nur durch den Vergleich mit anderen Wahrnehmungen prüfen, aber nie mit dem Objekt wie es sein könnte, bevor wir es wahrnehmen +
Es gibt keinen Zusammenhang zwischen den "objektiven" Welt und der Überlebensfähigkeit biologischer Strukturen und Verhaltensweisen. +
Entweder eine Art passt zu ihrer Umgebung oder sie passt nicht, d.h. sie überlebt entweder, oder sie stirbt. +
Der einzige Aspekt der "realen" Welt, der tatsächlich in den Bereich der Erfahrung eintritt, sind die Einschränkungen dieser Welt. +
Ablösen klassischer Denkweisen +
Erfahrungen und alle Objekte der Erfahrung sind unter allen Umständen das Resultat unserer Wege und Mittel des Erlebens +
So wie Umwelt dem lebenden Organismus Grenzen setzt und beseitigt, was die Grenze überschreitet, so bildet die Erfahrungswelt die Grenzen für unsere Ideen (kognitiven Strukturen) +
Gleichheit ist immer relativ +
Die Umwelt kann bestenfalls für das Aussterben verantwortlich gemacht werden, aber nie für das Überleben +
Annotationen:Abstraction, Re-Presentation, and Reflection: An Interpretation of Experience and of Piaget’s Approach/Bfg3odrse4 +
In this requirement, representation is similar to recognition. Both often work hand in hand, e.g., when one recognizes
a Volkswagen though one can see only part of its back but is nevertheless able to visualize the whole. +
Annotationen:Abstraction, Re-Presentation, and Reflection: An Interpretation of Experience and of Piaget’s Approach/Bsgnvh5vo1 +
An example may help to clarify what I am trying to say. If, in someone’s account of a European journey, you read or hear the name “Paris”, you may register it as a pointer to a variety of experiential “referents” with which you hapen to have associated it—e.g., a particular point on the map of Europe, your first glimpse of the Eiffel Tower, the Mona Lisa in the Louvre— but if the account of the journey immediately moves to London, you would be unlikely to implement fully any one of them as an actual re-presentation. At any subsequent moment, however, if the context or the conversation required it, you could return to the mention of “Paris” and develop one of the associated re-presentations. +
Annotationen:Abstraction, Re-Presentation, and Reflection: An Interpretation of Experience and of Piaget’s Approach/Camouqfaz8 +
Any re-presentation, be it of an experiential “thing” or of a program of actions or operations, requires some sensory material for its execution. That basic condition, I believe, is what confirmed Berkeley in his argument against the “existence” of abstracted general ideas, for it is indeed the case that every time we re-present to ourselves such a general idea, it turns into a particular one because its implementation requires the kind of material from which it was abstracted. This last condition could be reformulated by saying that there has to be some isomorphism between the present construct and what it is intended to reconstruct. Clearly, this isomorphism does not concern a “thing-in-itself” but precisely those aspects one wants to or happens to focus on. +
Annotationen:Abstraction, Re-Presentation, and Reflection: An Interpretation of Experience and of Piaget’s Approach/D3z4577hkq +
By this I mean that, as particular users of the word become more proficient, they no longer need to actually produce the associated conceptual structures as a completely implemented re-presentation, but can simply register the occurrence of the word as a kind of “pointer” to be followed if needed at a later moment. I see this as analogous to the capability of recognizing objects on the basis of a partial perceptual construction. In the context of symbolic activities, this capability is both subtle and important. +
Annotationen:Abstraction, Re-Presentation, and Reflection: An Interpretation of Experience and of Piaget’s Approach/Ndkqy9lz7e +
Reflecting upon experiences is clearly not the same as having an experience. +
Annotationen:Abstraction, Re-Presentation, and Reflection: An Interpretation of Experience and of Piaget’s Approach/P55yeeak0x +
No act of mental re-presentation, which in this context of conceptual analysis means neither less nor more than the re-generation of a prior experience, would be possible if the original generation of the experience had not left some mark to guide its reconstruction. +
Annotationen:Abstraction, Re-Presentation, and Reflection: An Interpretation of Experience and of Piaget’s Approach/Sktb6xjmvl +
Hence I suggest that, pace Berkeley, we are quite able to abstract general ideas from experience and that we do this by substituting a kind of place-holder or variable for some of the properties in the sensory complex we have abstracted from our experiences of particular things. +
Annotationen:Abstraction, Re-Presentation, and Reflection: An Interpretation of Experience and of Piaget’s Approach/Tb4vyjiobf +
With regard to the need for an acting agent, a program is similar to a map. If someone draws a simple map to show you how to get to his house, he essentially indicates a potential path from a place you are presumed to know to the unknown location. The drawing of the path is a graphic representation of the turns that have to be made to accomplish that itinerary, but it does not and could not show what it is to move and what it is to turn right or left. Any user of the map, must supply the motion and the changes of direction with the focus of visual attention while reading the map. Only if one manages to abstract this sequence of motions from the reading activity, can one transform it into physical movement through the mapped region. +
Annotationen:Abstraction, Re-Presentation, and Reflection: An Interpretation of Experience and of Piaget’s Approach/Tm9j7422k1 +
If someone, having just eaten an apple, takes a bite out of a second one, and is asked which of the two tasted sweeter, we should not be surprised that the person could give an answer. +
Annotationen:Abstraction, Re-Presentation, and Reflection: An Interpretation of Experience and of Piaget’s Approach/Vop5onvlls +
Hence I suggest that, pace Berkeley, we are quite able to abstract general ideas from experience and that we do this by substituting a kind of place-holder or variable for some of the properties in the sensory complex we have abstracted from our experiences of particular things. +
Annotationen:Abstraction, Re-Presentation, and Reflection: An Interpretation of Experience and of Piaget’s Approach/Wpt5k6ohg9 +
I hope to make this clear with the help of an example. A child growing up in a region where apples are red would neessarily and quite correctly associate the idea of redness with the name “apple”. A distant relative arriving from another part of the country, bringing a basket of yellow apples, would cause a major perturbation for the child, who might want to insist that yellow things should not be called “apples”. However, the social pressure of the family’s usage of the word will soon force the child to accept the fact that the things people call “apple” come in different colors. The child might then be told that apples can also be green, which would enable the child to recognize such a particular green thing as an apple the first time it is brought to the house. +
Annotationen:Abstraction, Re-Presentation, and Reflection: An Interpretation of Experience and of Piaget’s Approach/Y3m0svglur +
In my terms this means, symbols can be associated with operations and, once the operations have become quite familiar, the symbols can be used to point to them without the need to produce an actual re-presentation of carrying them out. +
Annotationen:Abstraction, Re-Presentation, and Reflection: An Interpretation of Experience and of Piaget’s Approach/Zibsapwn7j +
In other words, one can be quite aware of what one is cognitively operating on, without being aware of the operations one is carrying out. +
Annotationen:Abstraction, Re-Presentation, and Reflection: An Interpretation of Experience and of Piaget’s Approach/Zvvv0kffkv +
Hence, from his perspective, there is no linear progression without end, but simply development of method and concepts in one discipline leading to novel conceptualization and coordination in another. The recent impact of the physics of molecules and particles on the conceptual framework of biology would seem a good example. +
In order to survive a particular situation or change in the environment, an organism must have the required characteristics before the situation or change in the environment occurs that makes these characteristics necessary. In other words, surviving organisms are adapted before the event and it would make no sense whatever to say that they did or could change because of the event. There simply is no causal connection between the selecting event or environmental pressure and the properties the surviving organisms have acquired at a prior time through mutation or some other accident. +
From an evolutionary point of view, it would be far more consistent to say that, like mutations, novel behaviors may arise for no biological reason at all and may be perpetuated from generation to generation, provided they do not diminish the organisms’ biological viability below a critical point. +
Let me cite one example that is particularly well-documented and well-known: the Japanese macaque Imo on Koshima Islet that started washing her sweet potatoes (Kawai, 1965). Within 10 years the entire population, with the exception of a few old males who were too conservative, practiced potato washing. There was no time for a mutation or some other genetic accident to increase or decrease anyone’s viability. Nor, indeed, is there any evidence that potato washing has increased anyone’s genetic fitness. But as the new activity quickly created exceptional familiarity with water, it led to yet another novel behavior: swimming. Since all this has taken place in a country where earthquakes and tectonic disasters are not at all impossible, it might be tempting to conjecture that if Koshima Islet should one day sink into the sea, the swimming skill might yet become the crucial feature that allows these macaques to reach a safe shore while the macaques in other sinking regions perish. Subsequent generations of sociobiologists could then use the swimming macaques as a textbook example for “evolutionary explanation.” But such a scenario in which swimming might become an important asset toward the survival of macaques or macaque genes has not yet happened. Yet the washing of food and swimming have become part of the behavioral repertoire of a macaque population without the benefit of an evolutionary explanation. +
If something has been found to work, it is likely to work again. +
Hence one may also introduce the concept of reinforcement which, in phylogeny, would remain vacuous, since the only thing that could count as reinforcement on that level (i.e., survival) is not contingent upon the organism’s modification of its behavior but upon its past and therefore immutable history of genetic variation. +
In other words, the basic operational elements were there, but their coordination into complex operational systems cannot be ascribed to natural selection, since it is demonstrably the result of learning in a very peculiar and highly sophisticated environment. +
Epistemology thus becomes the study of how the mind operates, of the ways and means it employs to construct a relatively regular world out of the flow of its experience. +
Two eggs may be considered the same because of their shape, size, or color, or because they come from the same hen; but there will be a pungent difference between them if one was laid yesterday and the other six weeks ago. A fieldmouse and an elephant are different in many ways, but they will be considered the same whenever we want to distinguish mammals from other animals. Finally, all eggs, all animals, and indeed all objects that I have ever seen or imagined, are the same in that one respect that I have isolated them as bounded, unitary objects in the total field of my experience. +
A similar, often cited example, is the movie film which, depending on the conditions of perception, we see as a sequence of individually different images or as one continuously moving image. Irrespective of any “real” horse that may or may not have trotted somewhere at some time and been filmed while doing so, when the film is presented to us, we ourselves must construct the motion by constituting a continuous change of one horse from the succession of images. +
Just a the environment places constraints on the living organism (biological structures) and eliminates all variants that in some way transgress the limits within which they are possible or “viable,” so the experiential world, be it that of everyday life or of the laboratory, constitutes the testing ground for our ideas (cognitive structures). +
The only aspect of that “real” world that actually enters into the realm of experience, are its constraints; +
The question is unanswerable, because no matter what we do, we can check our perceptions only by means of other perceptions, but never with the apple as it might be before we perceive it. +
Sameness, however, as we have seen, is always relative: Objects, and experiences in general, are the “same” with respect to the properties or components that have been checked in a comparison. Hence, an experience that consists, for instance, of the elements a, b, and c, can be considered the same as an experience consisting of a, b, c, and x, as long as x is not taken into account. +
because the success of a key does not depend on finding a lock into which it might fit, but solely on whether or not it opens the way to the particular goal we want to reach. +
In other words, experience as well as all objects of experience are under all circumstances the result of our ways and means of experiencing, and are necessarily structured and determined by space and time and the other categories derived from these +
“natural selection” does not in any positive sense select the fittest, the sturdiest, the best, or the truest, but it functions negatively, in that it simply lets go under whatever does not pass the test. +
No one uses these conceptual possibilities more skillfully than the professional magician. During a performance he may, for instance, request a spectator’s ring, toss another ring across the room to his assistant, and then let the stunned spectator find his ring in his own coat pocket. The magic consists in directing the spectators’ perception in such a way that they unwittingly construct an individual identity between the first experience of the ring and the experience of the thrown object. Once that has been done, it would, indeed, require magic to transfer the ring from the assistant to the spectator’s pocket. Another case is that of the red ribbon which the magician cuts into little pieces and then – literally with a flick of his hand – produces once more as one whole piece. +
Hence, the environment can, at best, be held responsible for extinction, but never for survival. +
either a species fits its environment (including the other species), or it does not; i.e., it either survives, or it dies out. +
A key fits if it opens the lock. The fit describes a capacity of the key, not of the lock. Thanks to professional burglars, we know only too well that there are many keys that are shaped quite differently from ours but nevertheless unlock our doors. The metaphor is crude, but it serves quite well to bring into relief the difference I want to explicate. +
Quite generally, that means that the world which we experience is, and must be as it is, because we have put it together that way. +
The products of conscious cognitive activity, therefore, always have a purpose and are, at least originally, assessed according to how well they serve that purpose. +
The passage I quoted also indicates that there is more than one level of adaptation. On the sensorimotor level of perception and bodily action, it is avoidance of physical perturbation and the possibility of survival that matter. On the level of thought we are concerned with concepts, their connections, with theories and explanations. All these are only indirectly linked to the practice of living. On this higher level, viability is determined by the attainment of goals and the elimination of conceptual contradictions. +
The pattern of learning, however, is the same as in Piaget’s scheme theory, and once we impute to an organism the capability of reflecting upon its experiences, we can say that the principle of induction arises in its own thinking. +
Without the conception of change there would be no use for the notion of causation. +
All my decisions to carry out specific actions are based on the expectation that they will bring about a change towards the desired goal. +
Let us look at the example more closely. I am thirsty, and there is a glass of water in front of me on the table. From past experience I have learned (by induction and abstraction) that water is a means to quench my thirst. This is the ‘voluntary purpose’ I have chosen at the moment. In other words, I am anticipating that water will do again what it did in the past. But to achieve my purpose, I have to drink the water. There, again, I am relying on past experience, in the sense that I carry out the ‘specific movements’ which I expect (anticipate) to bring the glass to my lips. It is these movements that are controlled and guided by negative feedback.
When I reflect upon this sequence of decisions and actions, it becomes clear that the notion of causality plays an important role in the event. +
The use of a cause-effect link in order to bring about a change is based on the belief that, since the cause has produced its effect in the past, it will produce it in the future. +
Even in Aristotle’s day, bright people had noticed that those who regularly took some physical exercise such as walking, had a better chance of staying healthy. They had observed this often enough to consider it a reliable rule. Given that they had Olympic games and were interested in the performances of athletes, they probably also had some plausible theory of why exercise made one feel better. Consequently, they were confident in believing that going for walks was an efficient cause that had the effect of maintaining and even improving your health. People who felt that their physical fitness was deteriorating could, therefore, reasonably decide to use walking as a tool to bring about a beneficial change in their condition. +
Anyway, the more sophisticated view of the reflex enabled Piaget to take the tripartite pattern of perceived situation, action, and result as the basis for what he called ‘Action Scheme’. It provided a powerful model for a form of practical learning on the sensorimotor level that was the same, in principle, for animals and humans.
Studies of animal behavior had shown that even the most primitive organisms tend to move towards situations that in the past provided agreeable experiences rather than towards those that proved unpleasant or painful. +
To believe that the future affects the present is no doubt a superstition, but to declare that purpose and goal-directed action must be discarded because they are teleological notions is no better. It shows an abysmal ignorance of the difference between empirical and metaphysical teleology. +
If you consider that in the context of the Darwinian theory of evolution, “to be adapted” means to survive by avoiding constraints, it becomes clear that, for Piaget, “to know” does not involve acquiring a picture of the world around us. Instead, it concerns the discovery of paths of action and of thought that are open to us, paths that are viable in the face of experience. +
Hence, when we intend to stimulate and enhance a student’s learning, we cannot afford to forget that knowledge does not exist outside a person’s mind. +
Knowledge, then, could be treated, not as a more or less accurate representation of external things, situations, and events, but rather as a mapping of actions and conceptual operations that had proven viable in the knowing subject’s experience. +
At best one may observe that in a given number of situations their constructs seem to function in the same way, i.e. they seem compatible. +
If two people share a room, there is one room and both live in it. If they share a bowl of cherries, none of the cherries is eaten by both persons. +
Hence, no matter how one looks at it, an analysis of meanings always leads to individual experience and the social process of accommodating the links between words and chunks of that experience until the individual deems they are compatible with the usage and the linguistic and behavioral responses of others. +
Hence, when Piaget speaks of interaction, this does not imply an organism that interacts with objects as they “really” are, but rather a cognitive subject that is dealing with previously constructed perceptual and conceptual structures. +
That is to say, no matter how hard investigators try to adapt their analyses to the “foreign” ways of children, the model they build up will always be a model constructed out of concepts that are necessarily the investigators’. Because children’s ways of thinking are never directly accessible, the investigators’ model can never be compared to a child’s thought in order to determine whether there is or is not a perfect match. The most one can hope for is that the model fits whatever observations one has made and, more importantly, that it remains viable in the face of new observations. +
In other words, they must come to share some basic ideas on the process of education and the teaching of mathematics in particular. +
if one wants to generate understanding, the reasons why a student operates in a certain way are far more indicative of the student’s stage of conceptual development than whether or not these operations lead to a result that the teacher finds acceptable. Only when teachers have some notion of the conceptual structures with which students operate, can they try to intervene in ways that might lead students to change something in these conceptual structures. +
therefore, they need first of all a plausible model of the conceptual structures with which students are operating at the time. +
In order to formulate even the most tentative model of cognitive change, educational scientists must witness the growth of mathematical knowledge in particular children and clarify and substantiate their interpretations by means of deliberate interventions. Conceptual analysis alone is simply not sufficient as a source of insight in model building. It is only on the basis of models of particular children, that a more general model can eventually be abstracted – and the models of particular children are a natural bridge between educational scientists and the teachers. +
In adopting the new, cognitive paradigm, then, it becomes imperative that both teachers and researchers acquire some theoretical notions of how this “making sense” can be conceptualized. +
Working with children is in many ways like working with foreigners with whom one has only fragments of a language in common. +
A model, then, “simulates reality”; it is a conceptual construct that is treated as though it gave an accurate picture of the real world, but has the actual function of making experimental results and other experiential elements compatible with the general assumptions that are inherent in the research program’s core. +
Just as the interpretation of a piece of language is always guided by the individual interpreter’s experience and expectations, so the interpretation of what one observes is always governed by some theory one has in mind and a goal one has chosen. +
Teachers, therefore, need an at least partially generalized theory and a model of the learner that is general enough to serve as a basis for the establishment of more than one individual model. Ideally, then, the teachers’ models of individual students will be instantiations of the educational scientists’ more general model of mathematics learning; and conversely, the individual models the teachers construct for individual students will be a continuous testing ground for the theoretical assumptions the scientists have incorporated in the more general model. +
When I visually distinguish a hand from the writing pad and the table on which it lies, I carry out exactly the same kinds of operations as when I distinguish the coffee cup from the table on which it stands, or the picture from the wall on which it hangs, or the cardinal outside my window from the branch on which it happens to be perched and from the rest of the landscape. +
In other words, if there are several kinds of disturbance and, consequently, several kinds of error signals, the system has to discover which of the activities in its behavioral repertoire is most likely to correct a particular error signal. On the simplest level this can be achieved only through inductive inference. +
It allows us to proceed much as a bricklayer, who can devote all his energy and attention to the creation of a wall or an arch, without ever stopping to ask where the bricks he is using came from or how they were made. And just as the characteristics of the bricks (e.g., shape and size) make it impossible for the bricklayer to build certain structures, so the ready-made conceptual building blocks impose constraints on any future construction. +
To refer once more to the feedback model, one might say that assimilation, insofar as it adjusts sensory signals, reduces the generation of error signals. Accommodation, on the other hand, occurs only when there is a discrepancy or disturbance for which the organism does not yet have an established remedy. +
There seems to be no way around the assumption that, as far as the organism is concerned, an “object” must be a construct, actively abstracted from a number of experiences by holding on to a somewhat flexible constellation of characteristics and allowing each of them to vary within a certain range. +
Hence this use of an invariant scheme is by no means a manifestation of the concept of object permanence, because its invariance arises from and consists in the repetition of an activity and does not yet involve the invariance of an independent object. +
Now, if the invariant can be used on the representational level, without an activity, it becomes like a program or a subroutine that is invariant in that it is stored somewhere in a memory from which it can be retrieved. It is this change of status that gives rise to the concepts of permanence and of identity, a further step in the construction of permanent objects. +
For many five-year-olds, for instance, the sun today and the sun yesterday are not yet one and the same individual (Piaget, 1971, p. 87). +
Suppose a very young child applies the word dog to every four-legged creature he sees. He may have abstracted a limited set of attributes and created a large category, but his abstraction will now show up in his vocabulary. Parents will not provide him with a conventional name for his category, e.g., quadruped, but instead will require him to narrow his use of dog to its proper range...
The child who spontaneously hits on the category four-legged animals will be required to give it up in favor of dogs, cats, horses, cows, and the like ... The schoolboy who learns the word quadruped has abstracted from differentiated and named subor- dinates. The child he was abstracted through a failure to differentiate. Abstraction after differentiation may be the mature process, and abstraction from a failure to differentiate the primitive. +
Here I shall confine myself to pointing out that the kind of knowledge our simple organism acquires by installing connections between error signals and activities is, indeed, a form of construction, and since it deals exclusively with the proximal data of the organism’s own subjective experience, one would be justified in calling it wholly subjective. +
In other words, we can come to know only what we consider to be in some sense separate from our knowing selves. By questioning something, by the very act of asking what it is, we have already set our self, the questioner, apart. +
This central item, the experiencer himself, remains mysterious. +
Hence, mention of “steps” in subsequent paragraphs does not imply a chronological but a logical sequence. There are certain steps that are logically indispensable prerequisites for others. But the logic is our logic, an observer’s logic, and as such it applies to a model the observer is building. +
Hence we may safely assume that attention can also shift between items when some or all of them are representational. +
For example, the visual experience that we consider an instance of a specific object is different every time. The object’s shape changes according to the angle, and its size according to the distance from which it is seen. Its color changes according to the illumination, and other parameters are no less variable according to changes in the context. What, then, constitutes the invariant object which the organism recognizes? +
The second development made possible by the introduction of the representational use of invariants is that they can now be used as building blocks for conceptual constructions that move further and further away from the raw material of sensory or motor signals. This shift constitutes one of the salient characteristics of all the “higher,” more sophisticated mental operations and it has consequences for epistemology far beyond the scope of this chapter. +
The rep- resentation, therefore, will have to be no more and no less than a hypothetical model of functions, entities, and events that could “explain” regularities in the organism’s experience. And as a cyberneticist would expect, there is no way to match the model against the “real” structure of the black box. +
When an infant, for instance, assimilates some visual elements to the invariant pattern that, for him, constitutes a rattle, and grasps and shakes a piece of wood that happens to be within reach, then the absence of the auditory element expected to ensue may cause a discrepancy that cannot be eliminated by assimilation. In that case, attention is likely to be focused on any of the formerly disregarded visual or tactual elements by means of which the piece of wood could be discriminated from the rattle. Once the discrimination has occurred, the new elements, with or without some of the old ones, can be associated in an act of accommodation to form a novel scheme. This novel scheme, from then on, will serve as a relatively independent invariant for the assimilation of future experiences. +
The indispensable limitation of this hypothesizing is that the organism can operate only with its own proximal data, i.e., with signals that can be supposed to originate within it rather than with “information” originating in what from the observer’s point of view is the organism’s environment. I would also like to emphasize that this analysis is provisional and lays no claim to being definitive, let alone exhaustive. +
The child who stands in front of a looking glass, sticks out his tongue, and contorts his face into all sorts of grimaces gets a constant confirmation of this causal link. The mirror image is as obedient as his own limbs and can, thus, be integrated with the body percept, expanding it by providing visual access to otherwise invisible aspects. And like the body image, it is a visual percept, an item that is experienced not the item that does the experiencing. +
A well-fed brother whom one has not seen for 20 years may be bald and scrawny when he returns; he may have a different accent, his likes and dislikes may have changed, and what he now says about politics, art, and women may be incompatible with what one remembers of him. Yet one could still accept him as the self-same individual. +
The simplest learning system, thus, will have a repertoire of several different activities and at least one sense organ and one comparator that generates an error signal whenever the sensory signals do not match the reference value. What it has to learn (i.e., what is not determined by fixed wiring), is to make the error signal trigger the particular activity that is likely to reduce it. +
In Piagetian terms, this active imposition of invariance on instances of experience that are always different in some way is the ubiquitous process of assimilation. +
Take a finger of your right hand and run it along your left forearm: the tactual signals originating in your finger will be a homogeneous “continuous” succession because the receptors from which they come remain the same; the tactual signals originating in your left arm, instead, will constitute a sequence of different signals because they come from different receptors. If you consider this second set of signals as a sequence of different locations with which your finger establishes and terminates contact, you will conceive of your finger as moving. If you consider them equivalent units linked into sequence by the continuous signals from your finger, you will conceive of them as points or “moments” in time. In this second case, the finger of your right hand supplies what is perhaps the closest sensory-motor analogy to the continuity of the experiencing subject that we call our ““self.” +
Hence, from the organism’s point of view, to assimilate means to modify a present experience so that it fits a hereditary or acquired scheme, i.e., a perceptual or motor pattern that already has, in some sense, the character of an invariant. In other words, invariants create repetition as much as repetition creates invariants. +
Both the concept of the object as prototype, with regard to which experiences may be considered equivalent, and the concept of object permanence, as a result of which two or more experiences may be considered to derive from one identical individual, involve a form of invariance. But the invariance is certainly not the same in both cases. +
One can say that such an organism will learn only as a result of disturbance, and it will give up or modify something it has learned only when this again leads to disturbance. This mode of functioning, as we shall see later, fits very well into the Piagetian conception of the complementary processes of assimilation and accommodation. +
Under the heading time, I said that continuity and sequence both spring from the juxtaposition of two successions of signals that are separate in the experiential field but interrelated by attention. +
The invariant the system achieves can, therefore, never be found or frozen in a single element because, by its very nature, it consists in one or more relationships—and relationships are not in things but between them. +
Thus, although we can visually distinguish birds, coffee cups, tables, and hands from the rest of the visual field and from one another, it seems clear that a naive organism (i.e., an organism such as an infant that does not yet have a great deal of intermodally coordinated experiences) cannot visually discriminate between a hand and his own hand. +
((46)) Beide Operationsweisen sind wichtige Elemente im Aufbau der Begriffswelt. Indem wir Klassen bilden, ersparen wir es uns, jeden Gegenstand, den wir erleben, als Neuerscheinung zu untersuchen. +
Ein Thermostat zum Beispiel bewirkt nur dann eine Tätigkeit (Heizen oder Kühlen), wenn die wahrgenommene Temperatur nicht mehr mit dem festgelegten Sollwert (Referenz) Ubereinstimmt. +
Kurz, alles, was überlebt. war schon im Vorhinein an die Bedingungen und Beschränkungen angepaßt, durch die die natürliche Auslese nun das Nichtangepaßte vernichtet. +
((58)) Auf Grund dieser epistemologischen Voraussetzungen lassen sich einige Schlußfolgerungen ziehen:
- Der Konstruktivismus leugnet keineswegs eine ontologische Realität, doch er behauptet, daß wir sie nicht rational erfassen können. - ‘Wirklichkeit’ ist die Welt, die wir erleben, und aus ihr allein leiten wir, auf die uns eigene Weise, Ideen und Dinge ab, sowie die Begriffe der Beziehungen, mit denen wir Verbindungen hersteilen und Theorien aufbauen, die es uns erlauben, mehr oder weniger viable Erklärungen und Vorhersagen in unserer Lebenswelt zu formulieren. - Der Begriff der Viabilität ersetzt jenen der ontischen Wahrheit; das heißt, die Bestätigung des Wissens wird nicht in einem unmöglichen Vergleich mit der Realität gesucht, sondern in seiner Brauchbarkeit angesichts der Hindernisse, denen wir beim Verfolgen unserer Ziele begegnen. Daraus folgt, daß die Lösung eines Problems nie als die einzig mögliche betrachtet werden darf; es mag die einzige sein, die wir zur Zeit kennen, aber das rechtfertigt niemals den Glauben, unsere Lösung gewähre uns Einsicht in die Struktur einer von uns unabhängig existierenden Welt.
- Dieser letzte Punkt betrifft notwendigerweise auch den Konstruktivismus selbst. Wie alle Theorien, beruht er auf Voraussetzungen, doch er hütet sich, diese Voraussetzungen, seien sie bewußt oder unbewußt, als ontologische Gegebenheiten zu betrachten. Sie werden als Annahmen gedacht, um Modelle zu bauen, die sich in der Welt des Erlebens bewähren sollen. +
Selbst wenn die fürsorgliche Mutter eine Tasse vom Tisch hebt und zur einjährigen Tochter sagt: „Schau, Marie, das ist eine Tasse, eine Tasse.“, muß Marie zuerst den Gegenstand in ihrem Gesichtsfeld isolieren und den Wortlaut von anderen gleichzeitigen Geräuschen trennen, bevor sie zwischen beiden eine semantische Verbindung hersteilen kann. +
((12)) Die Schlagkraft dieser Aussage beruht auf der Einsicht, daß die Richtigkeit oder 'Wahrheit' eines Weltbildes nur durch einen Vergleich mit der Welt an sich bestätigt werden könnte und daß dieser Vergleich für uns ausgeschlossen ist. Wir können unser Weltbild nur mit anderen Vorstellungen vergleichen, die wie die erste auf unserem Erleben beruhen und somit durch unsere Art und Weise des Wahrnehmens und Begreifens gebildet wurden. Alles Wissen unterliegt dieser Bedingung, denn was immer wir auch tun, wir können aus unseren Formen des Erlebens und Denkens nicht aussteigen. +
Wir können unser Weltbild nur mit anderen Vorstellungen vergleichen, die wie die erste auf unserem Erleben beruhen und somit durch unsere Art und Weise des Wahrnehmens und Begreifens gebildet wurden. Alles Wissen unterliegt dieser Bedingung, denn was immer wir auch tun, wir können aus unseren Formen des Erlebens und Denkens nicht aussteigen. +
Man braucht mindestens zwei, zwischen denen man einen Unterschied feststellt. Nehmen wir an, ich sehe, daß der Apfel, den meine Frau mir vor zwei Tagen auf den Schreibtisch gelegt hat, nun angefault ist. Das Diagramm dieser Änderung sieht so aus:
((53)) Um zu sagen, daß der Apfel „X“ sich verändert hat, muß ich annehmen, daß er in beiden Beobachtungen derselbe war; wäre er es nicht, so müßte ich ‘Austausch’ denken, nicht ‘Veränderung’. Ist der Apfel an eine andere Stelle des Schreibtischs gerollt, so setzte ich statt der Eigenschaften im Diagramm die zwei verschiedenen Ortsbestimmungen ein, und dann zeigt es die ‘Ortsveränderung’ an. ((54)) Wenn ein Objekt im Laufe mehrerer Erlebnisse in gewisser Hinsicht unverändert bleibt, so kann ich die Fortdauer seines Zustands durch zwei einander folgende, aber ansonsten gleiche Momentaufnahmen anzeigen und so den Begriff der Dauer nahelegen. Verbinde ich das Element der Fortdauer an einem Ort mit der Beobachtung des identischen Individuums an einem anderen, so erhalte ich den Begriff der räumlichen ‘Ausdehnung’.
((55)) Daß die in diesen Diagrammen angedeuteten mentalen Operationen zumeist nicht bewußt registriert werden, läßt sich mit Hilfe von zwei ganz banalen Aussagen zeigen. Einmal sage ich zu einem Besucher: „Der Zug geht direkt von hier nach Boston“, ein andermal,.Diese Straße geht nach Boston.“ Normalerweise wird weder mir noch ihm dabei bewußt, daß der Zug nur jeweils an einem Ort sein kann, während die Straße als an beiden Orten zugleich gedacht wird. +
((27)) Auf der kognitiven Ebene geht es nicht direkt um Überleben, sondern um 'Aquilibration', das heißt um inneres Gleichgewicht, und die Auslese ist darum weniger drastisch. Ziel der Anpassung ist hier das Vermeiden von Hindernissen und das Ausgleichen von Störungen. +
((60)) Für mich liegt das wichtigste Anwendungsgebiet des Konstruktivismus im täglichen Leben. Mit dem Verzicht auf objektive Wahrheit verliert alles Rechthaberische seinen Sinn. Wenn man keinen Grund mehr hat zu behaupten, man wisse wie dies oder jenes ist, versteht man leichter, daß andere ihre Wirklichkeit nicht so sehen müssen, wie man die eigene sieht. Man kann zwar darüber diskutieren, ob die eine oder andere Handlungs- oder Denkweise voraussichtlich zu dem gemeinsam erwünschten Ziel fuhren wird oder nicht, aber man bleibt sich der Tatsache gewahr, daß die Frage letztlich nur in der Praxis entschieden werden kann. +
Wenn der ‘intelligente’ Organismus nicht auf Stimuli der Umwelt, sondern lediglich auf Unterschiede zwischen Wahrnehmungen und vorbestimmten Sollwerten reagiert, um sein internes Gleichgewicht zu erhalten, dann gewinnt der Organismus kein objektives Wissen von der Außenwelt. Er kann bestenfalls lernen, sein Gleichgewicht angesichts der Perturbationen, die er wahrnimmt, einigermaßen aufrecht zu erhalten. +
Kurz, man kann die allgemeine Regel formulieren, daß Akkommodationen und somit Lernen dann zustande kommen, wenn ein gewohntes Schema ein unerwartetes Resultat hervorbringt. +
((18)) Diese Bedingung der Aufeinanderfolge ist besonders wichtig, denn sie bringt die grundlegende Tatsache ans Licht, daß eine Folge nur gewußt werden kann, wenn wir ein Ding nach dem anderen erleben. +
Diese Beziehung des Hineinpassens läßt sich vielleicht am besten durch die Metapher klar machen, die einige Biologen formuliert haben: Der Vorgang der Auslese, die nur Angepaßtes überleben läßt, ist mit der Funktion eines Siebs vergleichbar, das alles durchfallen läßt, was irgendwie durch die Maschen schlüpft. Was durchfällt 'paßt', besitzt aber keine Eigenschaften des Siebs - es ist nur so beschaffen, daß es durch die Beschränkungen des Siebs nicht beinträchtigt wird. +
Das, worauf es ankommt, ist, wie der Organismus die gegebene Situation wahrnimmt. Solange sie mit dem Erkennungsmuster vereinbar ist, das der Organismus ererbt oder sich gebildet hat, löst sie die assoziierte Handlung aus. Das ist die ontogenetisch erste Manifestation dessen, was Piaget 'Assimilation' genannt hat. +
So kann zum Beispiel eine Frau ihrer Freundin entrüstet von einer Party berichten: „Stell Dir vor, die Irmgard kam in demselben Kleid wie ich!“; und der Sohn kann der Familie auf einer Ferienfahrt erklären: „Das ist das gleiche Auto, das uns schon vor dem Mittagessen vorgefahren ist.“ - Im ersten Fall sind es zwei Kleider, die sich in Bezug auf die Eigenschaften, die da maßgebend sind, nicht unterscheiden; im zweiten Fall hingegen handelt es sich um ein und dasselbe Auto. Anders ausgedrückt: Im ersten Fall wird auf Grund eines Vergleichs die Zugehörigkeit zweier
Gegenstände zu einer bestimmten Klasse behauptet, im zweiten wird dem Gegenstand zweier zeitlich getrennter Erlebnisse individuelle Identität zugeschrieben. +
Die Antwort liegt nicht in den wahrgenommenen Dingen, sondern im Bereich der Operationen, die der Wahmehmende ausführt. Um eine Mehrheit zu konstruieren, muß man merken, daß man ein und dieselbe Erkennungsprozedur, die einem den Gegenstand „Tasse“ liefert, mindestens zweimal ausgeführt hat. Die Pluralform des Wortes bedingt diese Wiederholung, denn sie bezieht sich nicht auf Elemente der sinnlichen Wahrnehmung, sondern auf die Art und Weise, wie man Wahrgenommenes verbindet. +
auf Grund einer einzigen Beobachtung kann man keine Änderung konzipieren. +
((42)) Die Sozialpsychologen haben also völlig recht, wenn sie sagen, daß die Bedeutungen von Wörtern in der Gesellschaft ‘ausgehandelt’ werden. Wichtig ist jedoch die Einsicht, daß das letzte Ergebnis dieses fortlaufenden Handels Vereinbarkeit ist, d.h. Kompatibilität im Sinne der Anpassung, und niemals eine absolute Gleichheit. Denn selbst wenn ein Lehrer oder ein Wörterbuch uns den Gebrauch eines Wortes erklärt, so beruht die Bedeutung, die wir uns aufbauen, doch auf der Interpretation unseres eigenen Erlebens. Diese Bedeutung wird dann zweifellos im Laufe sprachlicher Unterhandlungen geschliffen, verfeinert und weiter angepaßt, doch das Material aus dem sie besteht ist und bleibt das Material der subjektiven Erfahrung. +
From that angle, then, it becomes clear that, in the autopoietic organism also, “expectations” are nothing but re-presentations of experiences that are now projected into the direction of the not-yet-experienced. +
In Maturana’s edifice every point arises out of the preceding one – much as when, in thick fog on an Alpine glacier, one places one foot in front of the other without ever seeing what lies further ahead or further behind one; and as sometimes happens in such a fog, after hours of walking, one realizes that one is walking in one’s own footsteps. The fact that one has begun the circle at a specific point could be perceived only from a higher vantage point – if the fog had lifted and made possible a view. But the fog that obstructs our view of ontic reality cannot lift, because, as Kant already saw, it is inextricably built into our ways and means of experiencing. +
For that reason, a meticulous investigation such as Maturana’s, can only show that, regardless of where we step into the circle, we can neither come to an end of the path, nor, if we retraced our steps, to a beginning. +
In my terminology that means the observer must be capable of reflection. +
To observe oneself as the maker of distinctions, therefore, is no more and no less than to become conscious of oneself. +
We know that we can reflect, but we do not know how. +
The case of the mollusks may serve as an example. It is as though a growing mollusk could notice that the water around it flows quickly, and that the shell it is building had therefore better be flat, so that it offers less resistance. From an evolutionary point of view, such a notion is even worse than the Lamarckian heresy. +
Let me give you a very simple example. It is a charming anecdote I read, but cannot remember where. A little girl is walking, and every now and then she pushes her ball to roll ahead. As the path begins to go up a hill, the ball, to her surprise, comes rolling back. And she asks: “How does the ball know where I am?.” The little girl’s question demonstrates that she is at least to some extent aware of her experience and can reflect upon it. Only a reflective mind, a mind that is looking for order in the baffling world of experience, could formulate such a question. It is the kind of question that, after innumerable further trials and untenable assumptions, would lead an imaginative thinker with the stamina of Galilei, to an explanatory principle such as ‘gravitation’. +
To put it generally, an organism must fit, i.e. be viable within the constraints of the environment. +
If you consider the relative distances of the individual stars it becomes clear that there is only a very small area of the universe (as astronomers have taught us to conceive it) from which the five stars could be said to form a double-u. Move the observer a few light-years to the right or the left, the double-u would disappear. Move the observer 50 light-years forward, and he or she could construct only a triangle with the three stars that remained in front. +
I can illustrate this by a simple example. English text books of linguistics frequently give “the boy hit the ball” as example of a simple sentence that contains a subject, a verb, and an object. In the British Isles this sentence usually calls forth the re-presentation of a boy armed with a tennis racket or a golf club. In the United States he will be imagined to hold a baseball bat. This is a very minor difference. However, if the sentence has to be translated into German, it turns out to be far more complicated. The translator has to know more about the situational context, because the “simple” sentence turns out to be ambiguous. It would be appropriate in several situations, each of which requires different words in German. Here are the four most likely ones:
Fig.6: “The boy hits the ball” If the boy hits the ball with a racket, a club, or a bat, the German verb has to be schlagen; if he hits it with an arrow or a bullet, it would be treffen; if he hits it with his bicycle, it would be stossen plus the preposition auf; and if he hits the ball when falling from the balcony, it would be fallen … auf or schlagen … auf. +
A striking example are the constellations we all can learn to see, name, and recognize on a clear night. Take the one called Cassiopeia. It has been know
n since the beginning human history. The Greeks saw it as the crown of a mythical queen and gave it her name. We see it more prosaically as a “W” in the vicinity of the Polar Star.
Fig.4: The Constellation of Cassiopeia If you consider the relative distances of the individual stars it becomes clear that there is only a very small area of the universe (as astronomers have taught us to conceive it) from which the five stars could be said to form a double-u. Move the observer a few light-years to the right or the left, the double-u would disappear. Move the ob
server 50 light-years forward, and he or she could construct only a triangle with the three stars that remained in front. +
Just as, for instance, the Morse code links short and long experiences of beeps to re-presentations of letters of the alphabet, so in language, sound images are linked to concepts, that is, to re-presentations of experiential units. +
Whatever one assumes to be genetically determined in children, it is they themselves who must actively isolate units in their experiential field and abstract them into concepts. +
The point I want to make is that it is the experiencer who generates the image, the configuration that becomes the “representation”, and that this configuration is always one of several others that are equally possible within the constraints of the sensory material. This, I claim, goes for all the experiential units or things to which we give names, and it is the reason why I maintain that meanings are always subjective. They are subjective in the sense that they have to be constructed by the experiencer. +
The point I want to make is that it is the experiencer who generates the image, the configuration that becomes the “representation”, and that this configuration is always one of several others that are equally possible within the constraints of the sensory material. This, I claim, goes for all the experiential units or things to which we give names, and it is the reason why I maintain that meanings are always subjective. +
The point I want to stress is that from our perspective it is attention and above all its movements that generate the conceptual structures and thus the things we talk about. These items, as I said before, cannot have an existence of their own but originate through the operations of an experiencer or observer. +
What speakers of a language have constructed as the meanings of the words they use, is at best compatible in the linguistic interactions with other speakers; but such compatibility remains forever relative to the limited number of actual interactions the individual has had in his or her past. What speakers have learned to mean always remains their own construction. +
The problem of meaning thus comes down to the problem of how we generate units in our experience such that we can associate them with words, and how we relate these units to form larger conceptual structures. +
This, I believe, is as close as a constructivist can come to “objectivity”. +
If knowledge can be considered the result of the adaptive effort of cognitive organisms in their struggle to maintain their equilibrium in the face of perturbations, it does not seem reasonable for them to use this knowledge to compete with one another. On the contrary, it seems that in order to maintain not only their own equilibrium but also that of the planet on which they find themselves living they would have to foster in every conceivable way every kind of mutual collaboration. +
The salient point in all this is that, since this “reality” manifests itself only in failures of our acting and/or thinking, we have no way of describing it except in terms of actions and thoughts that turned out to be unsuccessful. +
Thus, we need Others. +
Scientific knowledge, then, does not and could not yield a picture of the “real” world; it provides more or less reliable ways of dealing with experience. Hence it may be viable, but it can make no claim to “Truth”, if “Truth” is to be understood as a correspondence to the ontologically real world. On the other hand, this way of looking at knowledge, be it scientific or other, makes it immune against the sceptics’ perennial argument. Since this constructivist notion of knowledge does not claim to provide a picture of something beyond experience, the fact that one cannot compare it with such a something, does not detract from this kind of knowledge - it is either viable or it is not. Indeed, as a constructivist, I tend to go one step further: Since we have access only to experience and cannot get outside the experiential field, there is no way one could show that one’s experiences are the effects of causes that lie outside the experiential world. +
Constructivism, thus, does not deny the “existence” of Others, it merely holds that insofar as we know these Others, they are models that we ourselves construct. +
Annotationen:Knowing without Metaphysics: Aspects of the Radical Constructivist Position/Cakas2wfvu +
This, of course, is the reason why the best teachers have always paid more attention to the sources of mistakes than to the how of students’ correct answers. +
Annotationen:Knowing without Metaphysics: Aspects of the Radical Constructivist Position/Faufc0pgou +
That is to say, teachers must try to infer, from what they can observe, what the students’ concepts are and how they operate with them. Only on the basis of some such hypothesis can teachers devise ways and means to orient, direct, or modify the students’ mental operating. This is a context in which the constructivist approach and its analysis of conceptual development seemed promising. +
Annotationen:Knowing without Metaphysics: Aspects of the Radical Constructivist Position/Iksre2deu2 +
Thus the inside becomes ‘self’, the outside the individual’s ‘universe’. +
Annotationen:Knowing without Metaphysics: Aspects of the Radical Constructivist Position/J3len2nz3t +
If a prediction, made on the basis of imputing to another person a scheme of acting or thinking that one has found to be viable for oneself, turns out to be correct, then that scheme and the conceptual structures it involves achieve a level of experiential reality that cannot be reached without the social context. Indeed, this kind of ‘corroboration’ produces the only objectivity that is possible in the Radical Constructivist view. +
Annotationen:Knowing without Metaphysics: Aspects of the Radical Constructivist Position/Jkeg7bli5o +
In other words, the self we come to know and the world we come to know are both assembled out of elements of our very own experience. +
Annotationen:Knowing without Metaphysics: Aspects of the Radical Constructivist Position/Mrkitz3yc3 +
The models of another’s conceptual operating that one can build on the basis of observable behavior, thus, are and remain hypothetical; +
Annotationen:Knowing without Metaphysics: Aspects of the Radical Constructivist Position/Oczp7q8gfi +
To know, thus, is not to have ‘correct pictures’ but, viable procedures or, as Maturana said (1988: 53), ‘to operate adequately in an individual or cooperative situation’. +
Annotationen:Knowing without Metaphysics: Aspects of the Radical Constructivist Position/Roj6vedf4k +
I claim that we cannot even imagine what the word ‘to exist’ might mean in an ontological context, because we cannot conceive of ‘being’ without the notions of space and time, and these two notions are among the first of our conceptual constructs. +
Annotationen:Knowing without Metaphysics: Aspects of the Radical Constructivist Position/Rr6ajt0u6w +
The experiential environment in which an individual’s constructs and schemes must prove viable is always a social environment as well as a physical one. Though one’s concepts, one’s ways of operating, and one’s knowledge cannot be constructed by any other subject than oneself, it is their viability, their adequate functioning in one’s physical and social environment, that furnishes the key to the solidification of the individual’s experiential reality (von Glasersfeld, 1985). +
Annotationen:Knowing without Metaphysics: Aspects of the Radical Constructivist Position/Tgr4tpc6ol +
Concepts, therefore, have no iconic or representational connection with anything that might ‘exist’ outside the cognizing system; and the raw material out of which concepts are composed or coordinated cannot be known to have any such connection either. To call the basic elements of our cognitive conceptual constructions ‘distinctions’ is, I think, the least misleading way of speaking about them. From the distinguisher’s point of view, what is actually distinguished depends not on what might be there before the activity of distinguishing is carried out, but on what the organism is able to distinguish and chooses to distinguish in the given experiential context. +
Annotationen:Knowing without Metaphysics: Aspects of the Radical Constructivist Position/Tipqfppga9 +
I am in agreement with Maturana when he says: ‘an observer has no operational basis to make any statements or claim about objects, entities or relations as if they existed independently of what he or she does’ (1988: 30). +
Annotationen:Knowing without Metaphysics: Aspects of the Radical Constructivist Position/Tujb4l2u48 +
Assume you have made an appointment with a friend to meet in a certain place on a certain day. When the day comes, a lot of snow has fallen during the preceding night. There is a shorter and a longer way to drive to the arranged place. You know that the longer way is the quicker when there is snow on the roads. You know this from your own experience in your subjective physical environment. But now you use it in your social environment by predicting that your friend will come by that route. If your prediction turns out to be correct and, especially, if your friend confirms that he chose the longer way for the reason that you had in mind, your reasoning will be greatly reinforced and the elements that were involved in it will seem more like an objective reality that is independent of both of you. +
Annotationen:Knowing without Metaphysics: Aspects of the Radical Constructivist Position/U6b3jonz63 +
‘there’s a book in front of you on the table; you know it’s a book, I know it’s a book, and anyone who looks at it would recognize it as a book – why do you keep telling us that the book is not really there?’ +
Annotationen:Knowing without Metaphysics: Aspects of the Radical Constructivist Position/Ubaxm0s76d +
Language does not transport pieces of one person’s reality into another’s – it merely prods and prompts the other to build up conceptual structures which, to this other, seem compatible with the words and actions the speaker or writer has used +
From the radical constructivist perspective, “knowledge” fits reality in much the same way that a key fits a lock that it is able to open. The fit describes a capacity of the key, not a property of the lock. When we face a novel problem, we are in much the same position as the burglar who wishes to enter a house. The “key” with which he successfully opens the door might be a paper clip, a bobby pin, a credit card, or a skillfully crafted skeleton key. All that matters is that it fits within the constraints of the particular lock and allows the burglar to get in. +
Knowledge, thus, is usually assumed to be knowledge of the environment. +
Pyrrho and his followers had successfully argued that if, say, an apple appears to have a certain color and a certain smell, feels smooth and tastes sweet to us, this cannot give us the knowledge that a real apple possesses these properties, because we have no way of examining the apple other than by seeing, smelling, tasting, and feeling it again. +
For constructivists, then, studying the genesis of the concepts that allow us to organize our experience is not a sin but a necessity; and the way in which that genesis will be studied should undoubtedly be part of psychology, even if the psychological establishment, with the exception of Piaget and his Geneva School, has hitherto not done very much in that direction. +
It is analogous to asking, say, what the magnification of a telescope might be if nothing that is seen through the telescope can be seen or measured in any other way. +
In other words, we cannot help realizing that our experience is subject to constraints that are altogether outside our control. +
Hence, if our senses distort what they are supposed to “convey,” we have no way of ever discovering that distortion. +
The radical constructivist, therefore, must not be thought to do away with “objectivity”—he merely defines it in a different way. Any concept, event, theory, or model will be considered “objective” if and only if it has proved to be viable not only in one’s own organization of the experiential world, but also in the particular area of conceptual organization that proves to be a viable model for the experiential worlds one imputes to others. +
But success is relative. +
Pyrrho, a little later, formulated the argument that quickly became and still remains the cornerstone of all kinds of philosophical scepticism. How, he asked, could we ever tell whether or not the pictures our senses “convey” are accurate and true, if the only way they can be checked is again through our senses? The question is, indeed, unanswerable. +
Given this central notion of fit, the radical constructivist theory of knowledge is essentially a cybernetic theory in that it is based on the principle of adaptation to constraints rather than the principle of causation. +
That notion, in fact, is no less an ontological assumption than the realist’s assumption that the experiencer-independent ontic reality should have a knowable structure. The character of experiential reality will have to be explained, not as a result of preordained ways of experiencing (Kant’s Anschauungsformen), but as a result of the experiencer’s coordinatory and conceptual operations. +
The self, thus, is an experiential entity to which the experiencer attributes a number of specific properties, abilities, and functions. +
This viability is, in principle, the same notion as in the case of the lock and the key. +
“Knowledge” and the process of cognizing are therefore seen as inseparable. They reciprocally entail one another in the same way as drawing a “figure” entails categorizing the sheet of paper as “ground.”
Knowledge, thus, becomes the product of an active, constructive mind. +
The scenario, in which the knower is supposed to acquire “true” pictures or representations of the real world, is thus inherently unsatisfactory. If the knower can never be sure that the picture of the world which he or she distills from experience is unquestionably a correct representation of a world that exists as such, the knower is cast in the role of a discoverer who has no possible access to what he or she is expected to discover. +
Similarly, the problem-solver attempts to conceive a method that will successfully open a path to his or her goal. Any method that does this will serve as well as any other, and to the extent that the problem-solver is successful, his or her know-how is functionally adapted to the constraints of unknowable ontic reality. Note that considerations as to how well a method serves its purpose are secondary in that they require reflection on what has been done as well as the introduction of ulterior values, such as speed, economy, ease of execution, compatibility with the methods used for other problems, etc. +
In other words, one takes for granted that what one has come to know had its own independent existence before one captured it by a cognizing effort. Given that perspective, it is indeed difficult to avoid asking just how well the knowledge one has acquired “corresponds to,” “depicts,” or “represents” what it is supposed to correspond to, depict, or represent, namely Reality. +
Knowledge, therefore, was knowledge of the things that caused one’s experiences, the things that were given, the data, and it could all be put together as a picture of Reality. +
It is the same trick that the statistician performs quite openly: when something has recurred a sufficient number of times, it is considered “significant”—which is to say, it is considered probable enough to be taken as a “fact.” The good statistician, of course, does not forget that it was he or she who decided the level of recurrence beyond which things were to be considered “significant.” Like the good modern physicist, he does not argue that, just because the sun has risen every morning for as long as we can remember or have records, we have the right to assume that it must continue to do so in the future. With David Hume, they know that there is no conceivable logical reason why the future should resemble the past. But, for practical reasons, we tend to assume that it will. If we did not make that assumption, we could not draw any inferences at all from past experience, and our attempts at predicting and controlling future experience could not even get started. +
First of all, it is important to realize that there are several levels of reality that differ largely in the material that is used to construct the items that are then considered “real.” +
In the cognitive realm of conceptual structures, then, the concept of viability applies to those structures which, in the cognizing organism’s past experience, have led to success. +
This means that learning is an activity that we, consciously or unconsciously, have to carry out ourselves. In contrast, the basic meaning of adaptation is not an activity of organisms or species. +
Eventually this perspective led him to the conclusion that the function of intelligence was not, as traditional epistemology held, to provide cognitive organisms with ‘true’ representations of an objective environment. Rather, he began to see cognition as generator of intelligent tools that enable organisms to construct a relative fit with the world as they experience it. +
the adaptedness of living organisms can be credited only to accidental variations. +
This addition was legitimate because, although reflexive action patterns are ‘wired in’ and remain fixed for a certain time, they can eventually be modified or even dismantled by the organism’s experience. Adults, for instance, no longer manifest some of the reflexes that helped them to find the mother’s nipple when they were infants. +
The urge to know thus becomes the urge to fit, on the sensorimotor level as well as in the conceptual domain, and learning and adaptation are seen as complementary phenomena. +
Understanding language, therefore, requires continuous checking and evaluation of the re-presentations the other’s words call forth. +
The crucial difference, for me, is this: Whatever is called forth by the piece of language, the items it refers to, are items that have been abstracted from experience. They may, but need not, have any immediate link with sensory-motor experience that is going on, nor any link with present or future manifest behavior. Yet, what is said or heard is not without effect. But the effect is on the language users’ acts of representation. +
To interpret an utterance or a written piece of language (be it a message or a text) requires something more than the construction of its conventional linguistic meaning. In fact, to interpret an utterance requires the insertion of whatever we consider its conventional meaning into a specific experiential context. +
The viability of an interpretation, after all, can be assessed only from the interpreter’s point of view. +
If I am told that a mermaid is a creature with a woman’s head and torso and the tail of a fish, I need not have met such a creature in actual experience to understand the word, but I must be somewhat familiar with what is called “woman” and what is called “fish” to construct a meaning for the novel word. And if I am not told that the fish’s tail replaces the woman’s legs, I may construct a notion that is more like a fish-tailed biped than like the intended traditional mermaid. My deviant notion could then be corrected only by further interaction, i.e., by getting into situations where my conception of a creature with legs as well as a fish’s tail comes into explicit conflict with a picture or with what speakers of the language say about mermaids. +
Any prediction based on the interpretation of an experiential item that is taken as a sign pointing to a not yet experienced item, will be judged according to whether it is or is not confirmed by actual subsequent experience. +
a linguistic message, under any circumstances, can be interpreted only in terms of the receiver’s experience. +
I submit that whatever one might choose as the measure of justification, plausibility, or correctness when one is concerned with literary interpretation lies beyond the realm of linguistic competence (which is taken for granted as prerequisite) and involves relations one establishes between the conceptual structures called forth by the text and the conceptual network that constitutes one’s own experiential world. These relations, by definition, are subjective, in the sense that they cannot connect anything but the reader’s own conceptual structures with the reader’s own experiential world. +
and again, any such adaptation and abstraction must be based on the individual construction of patterns of concepts and actions which turn out to be compatible with actions and reactions of other users of the language. +
It is important to realize that the compatibility of two items does not entail their identity. +
At the beginning of the 18th century, Giambattista Vico formulated a constructivist epistemology by saying that humans can know only what humans can construct. +
“Shut the door!,” for instance, must be responded to with a sequence of motor acts which has to be learned in a succession of experiential situations, a succession which provides occasion for the acquisition of simple but nevertheless specific skills and, above all, occasion to experience what has to be avoided. Most of us have been scolded at one time or another for slamming a door when the instruction was to shut it. +
Compatibility is a matter of avoiding clash, passing between obstacles, fitting into space that is not encumbered by the conditions that have to be complied with. +
The constraints within which it attempts to achieve viability are set by the text alone and not by any external area of experience. Hence, the quest for the interpretation of a text turns out to be a futile undertaking. +
Insofar as we remember these structures, we can recall them—and then they are Re-Presentations. I write this with a hyphen, to indicate that they are pieces of experience we have had and are now reviewing. They are not pieces of an external reality. +
In other words, reality leaves sufficient room for them to work in our experiential world. +
One can therefore say: in perception, sensory signals call up a concept, in re-presentation, on the other hand, a concept calls up sensory impressions. In neither case is the experience caused by what philosophers want to call “reality”. +
so, to have survived does not tell the biological organisms anything about the constraints they have not met, i.e., the constraints that eliminated those that could not survive. +
According to the neurophysiologist’s model of the nervous system, it therefore appears that the discrimination of sensory modalities—seeing, hearing, touching, etc.—must be the result of the system’s own computation. From this perspective, then, whatever sensory structures, patterns, or images a living system compiles are its own construction, and the notion that they represent something that was there beforehand, has no empirical foundation. +
You may, for example, dream that you are in a room, but all you see of the room is a door (perhaps because you expect someone to come in through it). You have no idea of the size of the room, and there are no windows, curtains, pictures, no ceiling or furniture, or anything else that usually characterizes a room. These items may come in later—as the plot of the dream develops— but at this point, they are irrelevant in your dream-presentation of a room. In contrast, your perception of a room starts from sensory impressions that you proceed to coordinate, and they then allow you to consider them compatible with your concept of “room”. +
The argument that our concepts, which we abstract from experience, cannot grasp anything that lies beyond our experiential interface, applies not only to the divine but also to any ontological reality posited as independent of the human experiencer. +
Compatibility, to repeat it once more, means no more and no less than to fit within constraints. Consequently, it seems to me that one of the most demanding tasks of A.I. would be the plausible simulation of an organism’s experience of social constraints +
We can visualize it with the help of a metaphor: the environment “selects” in the manner of a screen used to grade gravel: the screen admits what falls through and discards what does not. +
This principle is, indeed, universal. If there is something we would like to create or have, we look for some specific event or action to which experience has tied the desired item as ‘effect’. If we find it, we try to implement its causal function, hoping that it will produce what we wanted. +
To my mind, this illustrates what is perhaps the most valuable feature of the cybernetical analysis of phenomena in general, and of 2nd-order Cybernetics in particular. It leads us to think in terms, not of single causes and effects, but rather of equilibria between constraints. This helps to avoid the widespread illusion that we could gather “information” concerning a reality supposed to be causing our experience; and it therefore focuses attention on managing in the experiential world we do get to know. +
The good old thermostat, the favorite example in the early literature of cybernetics, is still a useful explanatory tool. In it a temperature is set as the goal-state the user desires for the room. The thermostat knows nothing of the room or of desirable temperatures. It is designed to eliminate any discrepancy between a set reference value and the feedback it receives from its sensory organ, namely the value indicated by its thermometer. If the sensed value is too low, it switches on the heater, if it is too high, it switches on the cooling system. Employing Gordon Pask’s clever distinction (Pask, 1969, p.23–24): from the user’s point of view, the thermostat has a purpose for, i.e. to maintain a desired temperature, whereas the purpose in the device is to eliminate a difference. +
If we have never formulated a tentative rule of the kind “all roses I have seen, smelled sweet,” we would not be tempted to say: “this flower looks like a rose— therefore it will smell sweet.” In other words, if we have had no success with inductive inferences, we are unlikely to proceed to deductive ones. +
Consequently there is no past experience of steps that led towards it or actions that brought it about. There are no abstracted cause-effect relations that one could try to implement to reach an unfathomable end. In short, even for those who believe that knowledge does not pertain to anything beyond the realm of experience, a cause that lies outside has no explanatory power. +
Definitions set conditions which the abstract form we call concept must satisfy, and it is the same conditions that some experiential material must fit in order to be accepted as a proper instantiation of the concept. +
Prediction, in one form or another, permeates our living, and the expectation that the efficient causes we have isolated in the past will have their effects also in the future, is the key to whatever success we have in managing our experience. +
Prescriptive purposes, therefore, are there prior to their embodiment, which then has the particular purpose in it. +
Though the sequential frames that compose the concept of efficient cause are obviously abstracted from prior experience and therefore lie in the past, they can, and often are, projected as predictions into areas that have not yet been actually experienced. +
Hence, it was unfortunate, to say the least, that the term teleological was indiscriminately applied to the explanation of actions that are in no way determined by something that lies in the future, something that still awaits to be experienced. +
Hence it is quite legitimate to call the attainment and maintainment of the projected state the purpose in the mechanism. +
That is to say, neither of these two basic elements in the construction of our experiential world is conceivable unless we segment experience into separate discrete frames and then focus attention on similarities or differences between the segments. +
Where evolution is concerned, then, there is no harm in using ‘purpose of’ as a descriptive tool, provided one does not mistake it for the purpose for, which would imply a guiding outside force that intentionally designed the thing one is describing. +
Hence, an external agent with powers that override the constraints we run into in our experiential world, would have to be supernatural and therefore out of bounds for science. +
According to this break-down, change is a relational concept and, as such, requires more than one segment of experience, as well as a comparison. It also manifests what I consider a basic presupposition of all conceptual analysis: Segments of experience, insofar as they reach the level of conceptualization and rational description, always appear sequential. This sequence is usually interpreted as a temporal one. +
In contrast, if archaeologists, in digging up remnants of a bygone civilization, find an unknown item and discover that it generates a flame when it is handled in a particular way, they may conclude that this was indeed its purpose. This would be conceived as the purpose of the item, in their description. +
Thus it is, indeed, an inductive procedure, because ‘what works’ is seen from the organism’s point of view and selected within the organism’s own experience. +
Thus there was no proper causal connection between reinforcement and subsequent behavior, because it was to some extent the rat who decided what it considered reinforcing and what not.
Taylor wants to turn the effects of a feedback mechanism’s behavior into a ‘causal factor’, but he overlooks that one and the same effect does not always generate the same subsequent behavior. +
The example of the bronze statue again offers a useful image. The shape of the statue is quite literally ‘defined’ by the mold, in the sense that the mold constrains and delimits where the liquid metal can flow. Analogously, the ‘parts of a definition’ constrain and delimit both conceptual construction and the application of concepts. +
An organism’s actions, thus, are selected and shaped according to what worked in the past. +
The way the sculptor imposes form, is by chipping away the bits of marble that do not fit into his vision. The way form is imposed on the bronze, is by pouring it into a constraining mold. Potentially, the material could end up in innumerable other forms, but the procedure of statue-making, be it chipping or casting, eliminates all but one. +
If there is no preference for not having pain and getting blisters on one’s fingers, there is no reason why the toddler should not touch the hot stove every time it happens to be near enough. +
From this, one is led to conclude that the scientific search of efficient causes is fueled largely, if not entirely, by our intention to use them for the attainment of goals. +
