Dewey, in answer to my request to clarify radical reconstructivist
ontology, you said:
>>It's a bit like the analogy that both a grain of sand and an ounce of water
>>will fit into an empty wine bottle, but a baseball will not. Taking the
>>development of our ideas about the physical world over history as an
>>example, we can see many examples in which we found the grain of sand (idea
>>1), say, fits into the bottle 9fits our experience) but some alternative,
>>say a baseball (idea 2), did not, while at the same time the ounce of water
>>(idea 30 had not yet occurred to us. Later when the 'ounce of water' idea
>>did finally occur to someone, we try it and see that it fits also. We can
>>only know the degree of fit if we can, *at the same time-independently*,
>>know the idea (the grain of sand, the ounce of water, etc.) AND the thing
>>we are trying to fit the world "out there" (the empty wine bottle).
Your example seems designed to illustrate von G's notion that knowledge
is not a copy, a representation, that can be said to "match" (or not) the
way things are, but rather can be said to "fit." There is no unique
correspondence of knowledge to reality, but a variety of ways of knowing
that "fit." But fit what? Surely to speak of a "fit" one must still
appeal to
things-to-be-known that exist apart from and prior to our knowing of them?
The characterization I gave of constructivism to which you took strong
exception
was the following:
>Both Piaget and von Glasersfeld, the two figures most often cited as the
>sources of constructivism, link their work to Kant, whose philosophy was
>notorously dualistic. Kant assumed an ontology of two realms, of the
>subject and an independent world.
You replied:
>I don't think that one can say that von Glasersfeld really includes an
>ontology of an independent world, at all.
I've been mulling over von G's writing, and here's an example. It's
a section called "The reality of a constellation" in A Constructivist
Approach to Teaching( in Steffe and Gale, 1995):
>"Among the constellations in the northern hemisphere that were well known
>at the beginning of Greek culture in the first millenium before Christ, one
>is called Cassiopeia. The Cassiopeia is opposite the Big Bear or the Big
>Dipper, on the other side of the Polar Star. It has the shape of a W or,
>as the Greeks said, a crown. The shape has been known and recognized for
>thousands of years, and it served the navigators of all times to find their
>way across the seas. It has not changed and has proved as reliable, as
>'real,' as any visual percept can be.
>For an astronomer, the five stars that are taken to compose the W have
>Greek letters as names, and the astronomer can tell how far these stars are
>from those who observe them from this planet. Alpha is 45 light years
>away, Beta 150. The distance to Gamma is 96, to Delta 43, and to Epsilon
>520 light years. Consider this spatial arrangement for a moment. If you
>moved 45 light years towards Cassiopeia, you would have passed Delta and
>you would be standing on Alpha. The constellation would have fallen apart
>during your journey. If you moved sideways from our earth, it would
>disintegrate even more quickly. Where, then, does this image called
>Cassiopeia exist? The only answer I can suggest is that it exists in our
>minds. Not only because it is relative to the point from which we look,
>but also because it is we who pick five specific stars and create a
>connection between them we consider appropriate. This picking out and
>connecting is part of what I call the *subjective construction* [original
>emphasis] of our experiential world."
This passage is what I would called confused. It seems at first that von G
is making a distinction between the constellation--an "image," "in our
minds"--and the real stars we are "picking out and connecting."
These stars are independent of us, whereas the constellation is not. But
this is
surely not compatible with von G's constructivism. For where
do the stars exist? They must be "images" too, surely. But if they too
exist "in our minds" why don't they "distintegrate" too? And if each of
them is an "image," then where are we going when we travel towards them?
What are we doing when we measure our distance from them? What do we
interact with when we point our telescopes towards them?
These questions can be answered without falling back into naive realism or
a representational theory of knowledge, but not, I believe, in the way that
von G tries. His view is precisely Kantian: the mind imposes structure on
the raw data of experience: in von G's terms this is a "subjective
construction," such that the "experiential world" is "in our minds." But
what, then, do we interact with? Kant, with the same view, tried to solve the
problem by presuming a reality with which we interact, prior to and
independent of our
acts of knowing. Von G explcitly tries to deny this independent reality
but his writing
continually appeals to something that underlies appearance. These are the
conundra that Kantian dualism leaves one in: one wants to distinguish
appearance from reality, and yet one can't say anything about that reality.
But if one instead denies reality, what distinguishes knowledge from fantasy?
Again, the assumed ontology is one of mind and (albeit unknowable)
independent reality.
I agree with von G in so far as he is saying that what is "real" is real
*to us,* but locating the "radical construction" of the real in the
individual mind is not the solution. It confuses knowing with being, for a
start, because what people have in their minds is knowledge, not things.
Conversely, what people have in their hands is not knowledge, but things.
It is such problems that motivated efforts to articulate a non-dualistic
ontology--and these are one source, at least, of sociocultural psychology.
Such an approach acknowledges that
we construct not just knowledge but also things, and that this construction
is not an individual mental one, but a practical social one. Things become
real not in our minds, but in our practices. This is not to deny mental
activity, but mind and its activity are themselves the products of social
practices. The world is not private and mental, it is public and
practical.
In this kind of account there are indeed things, objects, prior to our
knowing them, but their existence, their reality, is a social, practical
matter. If we distinguish between knowing and being we can see that both
knowledge and reality are constructed, but that knowing something doesn't
somehow magically make it real. Reality is not subjective; it is social,
intersubjective. Cultural, historical. Individual acts of knowing occur
within a field of activity that constitutes the real--including the reality
of the knowing subject; and these change over time. At the same time, each
person can and does take a stand on the culture in which they live--and
question its reality.
That's all I was trying to say!
Martin
================
Martin Packer
Associate Professor
Department of Psychology
Duquesne University
Pittsburgh PA 15282
(412) 396-4852
fax: (412) 396-5197
packer who-is-at duq3.cc.duq.edu
http://www.duq.edu/liberalarts/gradpsych/packer/packer.html