Constructivism

Thus, in the history of epistemology, the trend has been to move from a static, passive view of knowledge towards a more adaptive and active view (Heylighen, 1993). Early theories emphasized knowledge as being the awareness of objects that exist independent of any subject. According to this objectivist view, objects have intrinsic meaning, and knowledge is a reflection of a correspondence to reality. In this tradition, knowledge should represent a real world that is thought of as existing, separate and independent of the knower; and this knowledge should be considered true only if it correctly reflects that independent world. Jonassen (1991) provides a summary of objectivism:

Knowledge is stable because the essential properties of objects are knowable and relatively unchanging. The important metaphysical assumption of objectivism is that the world is real, it is structured, and that structure can be modelled for the learner. Objectivism holds that the purpose of the mind is to "mirror" that reality and its structure through thought processes that are analyzable and decomposable. The meaning that is produced by these thought processes is external to the understander, and it is determined by the structure of the real world. (p.28)

In contrast, the constructivist view argues that knowledge and reality do not have an objective or absolute value or, at the least, that we have no way of knowing this reality. Von Glasersfeld (1995) indicates in relation to the concept of reality: "It is made up of the network of things and relationships that we rely on in our living, and on which, we believe, others rely on, too" (p.7). The knower interprets and constructs a reality based on his experiences and interactions with his environment. Rather than thinking of truth in terms of a match to reality, von Glasersfeld focuses instead on the notion of viability: "To the constructivist, concepts, models, theories, and so on are viable if they prove adequate in the contexts in which they were created" (p.7).

On an epistemological continuum, objectivisim and constructivism would represent opposite extremes. Various types of constructivism have emerged. We can distinguish between radical, social, physical, evolutionary, postmodern constructivism, social constructionism, information-processing constructivism and cybernetic systems to name but some types more commonly referred to (Steffe & Gale, 1995; Prawat, 1996; Heylighen, 1993). Ernest (1995) points out that "there are as many varieties of constructivism as there are researchers" (p.459). Psychologist Ernst von Glasersfeld whose thinking has been profoundly influenced by the theories of Piaget, is typically associated with radical constructivism - radical "because it breaks with convention and develops a theory of knowledge in which knowledge does not reflect an objective, ontological reality but exclusively an ordering and organization of a world constituted by our experience" (von Glasersfeld, 1984, p.24). Von Glasersfeld defines radical constructivism according to the conceptions of knowledge. He sees knowledge as being actively received either through the senses or by way of communication. It is actively constructed by the cognizing subject. Cognition is adaptive and allows one to organize the experiential world, not to discover an objective reality (von Glasersfeld, 1989).

... For Vincent Ostrom, an institutional fact is the “social reality that is itself an artifactual construction by relying on norms and rule-ordered relationships” (ibid.). He utilizes the term artifactual to connote that social reality is constructed by humans and their (tacit) concepts of society.

For this reason, Elinor Ostrom also maintains in her book Governing the Commons that we must critically reflect our “metaphorical use of models” due to their influence of policy prescription and collective action (E. Ostrom 2008a, 8). With Elinor Ostrom we could therefore say that the reformulation of metaphors, concepts and ideas provides us with new “heuristics, strategies, norms […] [or] rules of thumb” (E. Ostrom 2003, 40). These “focal points” (ibid., 41) help us (re-)orient ourselves in our interactions with the world. Thus, the reflection of our use of language and concepts, in turn, opens up choices in the way we organize society and can “increasingly transform the material conditions of their environment” (V. Ostrom 1997, 128). Within this framework, language and ideas are thus understood as key determinants in the reproduction and transformation of social order and material reality. Put somewhat differently, we can therefore maintain that concepts do not only provide us with abstract ideas that help us understand an objectively given reality, but also co-constitute the symbolic-material order of things (Castoriadis 1987, Latour 1993, Foucault 2002).

...

Due to the inherent interrelation of language, nature and social relations, I would therefore contend that the different ecological, economic and political crises that contemporary societies are facing today are also a result of specific conceptions of nature. In order to deal with these problems, we therefore also have to rethink our central concepts that constitute this relationship, such as the mind-body, subject-object, individual-society and human-nature dichotomies (Dewey 1930, Latour 2013). As I will show, this shift should move us beyond a reductionist, mechanistic and deterministic to a more systemic and adaptive understanding of nature and society. Or more specifically, it is a shift from a dualistic and anthropocentric to an interrelated and ecocentric model, in which humans are conceived as interdependent, creative components of the natural world (Dewey 1929, Eckersley 1992, Stengers 2010/2011).

Before continuing, it is of utmost importance to stress that this does not imply that we can simply create another reality by describing it differently. That would be solipsistic and naïve, especially considering the interests of those who are not interested in such social change. Nevertheless, the aim is to develop a new “shared common understanding” of nature that will influence people’s patterns of (inter)actions and possibly become a “material force” of social change towards a more democratic society. ...

As noted in part 2, this interest in the role of the observer and the observer herself as a system to be observed and understood lead von Foerster to propose a distinction between a first and second order cybernetics, where first order cybernetics is ‘the study of observed systems’ and second order cybernetics is ‘the study of observing systems’ (von Foerster et al, 1974, p. 1). Von Foerster also referred to this second order domain as the ‘cybernetics of cybernetics’. Others had been thinking along somewhat similar lines to those of Pask and von Foerster. Humberto Maturana in his seminal paper, ‘Neurophysiology of cognition’ (Maturana, 1970), frames his thesis about the operational closure of the nervous system with an epistemological metacommentary about what this implies for the observer, who, as a biological system inhabiting a social milieu, has just such a nervous system. The closure of the nervous system makes clear that ‘reality’ for the observer is a construction consequent upon her interactions with her environmental niche (Maturana uses the term ‘structural coupling’ for these interactions). In other words, there is no direct access to an ‘external reality’. Each observer lives in her own constructed universe. It is by consensus and coordinated behaviour that a shared world is brought forth.

Background

Social constructivism is a variety of cognitive constructivism that emphasizes the collaborative nature of much learning. Social constructivism was developed by post-revolutionary Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky. Vygotsky was a cognitivist, but rejected the assumption made by cognitivists such as Piaget and Perry that it was possible to separate learning from its social context. He argued that all cognitive functions originate in (and must therefore be explained as products of) social interactions and that learning did not simply comprise the assimilation and accommodation of new knowledge by learners; it was the process by which learners were integrated into a knowledge community. According to Vygotsky (1978, 57),

Every function in the child’s cultural development appears twice: first, on the social level and, later on, on the individual level; first, between people (interpsychological) and then inside the child (intrapsychological). This applies equally to voluntary attention, to logical memory, and to the formation of concepts. All the higher functions originate as actual relationships between individuals.

Vygotsky’s theory of social learning has been expanded upon by numerous later theorists and researchers.

View of Knowledge

Cognitivists such as Piaget and Perry see knowledge as actively constructed by learners in response to interactions with environmental stimuli. Vygotsky emphasized the role of language and culture in cognitive development. According to Vygotsky, language and culture play essential roles both in human intellectual development and in how humans perceive the world. Humans’ linguistic abilities enable them to overcome the natural limitations of their perceptual field by imposing culturally defined sense and meaning on the world. Language and culture are the frameworks through which humans experience, communicate, and understand reality. Vygotsky states (1968, 39),

A special feature of human perception … is the perception of real objects … I do not see the world simply in color and shape but also as a world with sense and meaning. I do not merely see something round and black with two hands; I see a clock …

Language and the conceptual schemes that are transmitted by means of language are essentially social phenomena. As a result, human cognitive structures are, Vygotsky believed, essentially socially constructed. Knowledge is not simply constructed, it is co-constructed.

... Since all communications are endlessly available to be referred to, also the environments that they delineate become available endlessly. Each such an environment has a potential of becoming evoked by a following occurrence of communication and thus, by the means of repetition of such occurrences, has a potential of becoming more or less stabilised.

Once communications interact and individuate into more entangled and interrelated sequences, the stabilization of their mutually fashioned environment increases. The more such a shared environment is referred to (and every communication may add another instance of such reference), the more opportunities arise for the following communications to anchor there as well. Furthermore, mutual referring and self-referring of the communications themselves include them as part of that increasingly stabilised environment. As a result, specific sequences of communication become bundled more or less tightly with their respective environments and turn into patterns of communication that are increasingly likely to be further referred to as ‘belonging’ to that specific environment/context. Thus, the whole socially constructed reality (Berger & Luckmann, 2011) comes into existence. On one hand, the description of the environment may grow and thicken into a fully operational worldview (Aerts et al., 2007; Vidal, 2008), while on the other, some occurrences of communication that are shaping that worldview, may become increasingly labeled as the ones, that are part of it. The consolidating worldview is accompanied with specific language games, which are expected and accepted in its context (Wittgenstein, 2009). ...