Ernst has shared some comments on the discussion with me and given me
permission to pass them on to you. Because e-mail does not do italics for
everyone I have used the underline symbol before and after passages which
his original had in italics. At the beginning of each comment he gives the
author of the note to which he is responding and the date of that note.
His responses follow.
If you wish to communicate with Ernst ask me and I can send you his
address. I will send any reply comments that come out on xmca to him.
Dewey
PS: Sorry it took so long to get this out to xmca.
Ernst's comments...
1 (Barowy, May 1) I have made this claim several times. Piaget's theory
is a theory of _how knowledge is built up_, not a description of the world.
Hence, before speaking of social interaction or society, he had to ask
himself how a child comes to have a notion of _others_ and her interaction
with them. Knowledge, after all, is always the result of interpretation -
of experience, observation, texts, of other people's utterances. (Even
Sociologists can express only their view of society - they have no more
access to an objective reality than anyone else.)
2 (Packer, May 3) The craving to avoid "DUALISM" springs from what Heinz
von Foerster has called the illusion that observations could be made
without an observer.
Hegel and those who followed him in criticizing Kant did not take into
account that Kant (explicitly) introduced the "thing-in-itself" as an
_heuristic fiction_ that is useful in social interaction and collaboration,
but has no _ontic_ status. This is amply documented by the Kant quotations
collected in Vaihinger's appendix to the _Philosophy of As If_. and in the
most recent Kant studies (e.g. Bettoni, M., Constructivist foundations of
modeling - A Kantian perspective, International J.of Intelligent Systems,
12, 577-595, 1997)
3 (Packer, May 5) I agree with Packer: At the end of the day, we are not
biology - nor, indeed, science or rationality - because caring, loving,
losing, and dying have no meaning without the values we distil from the
incomprehensible substrate of a mystical world that is not amenable to
rational segmentation. But in my view this should not stop us from trying
to organize as best we can the surface of experience that we are able to
articulate in conceptual elements and relations.
4 (Barowy, May 5) I do not think Bill B. needs to recant his statement
that "children come to the classroom with notions about the physical world
that ..." - Their patterns of description (based on their conceptions) are
no less 'knowledge' than those of the scientists; it is only that the
children's patterns usually have a much more restricted range of viability.
(But I am disturbed that Bill has succumbed to the abomination of using the
word "phenomena" as a singular.)
5 (The discussion beginning on May 7th is summarized by Packer on May 11th
and I pick out his quotation of my Cassiopeia example to respond)
>>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 these stars exist? They must
>>be images too, surely. >>But if they too exist "in our minds", why don't
>>they >>disintegrate too? And if each of them is an image, then where
>>>>are we going when we travel towards them? What are doing >>when we
>>measure our distance from them? What do we interact >>with when we point
>>our telescope towards them?<<
This raises not one question, but several. I want to start from something
Packer mentions in the subsequent paragraph:
>>Kant ... tried to solve the problem by presuming a reality with which we
>>interact, prior to and independent of our acts of knowing.<<
As I read Kant, the only thing he presumes as raw material and starting
point of the cognizing activity is what he called _das Mannigfaltige_,
which has been translated as "the manifold". It is the unspecified,
unstructured substrate on which our ways of experiencing
(_Wahrnehmungsformen_, i.e. space, time, and the basic categories) impose
the articulation we call 'reality'. In the model I have worked out for
myself, I see the _empirical_ manifestation of the "manifold" as the plenum
(totality) of neural signals that whirr about in the closed nervous system.
The question of how these signals may be connected to external causes
belongs to the domain of mysticism (or metaphysics, which to me is the
same) and is not accessible to reason.
Because experience is inherently sequential (which at a certain level of
subsequent construction leads to the conception of 'space' and 'time',
eliminating, as did Piaget, the Kantian notion of their being "a priori"),
experience offers the possibility of constructing repetitions of elements
and thus the notions of 'difference', 'equivalence', 'individual identity',
and 'permanent objects' (see Chapter 4 of my 1995 book).
The individual stars of a constellation, e.g. Cassiopeia, having been
constructed as permanent objects, can in turn be taken as raw material,
i.e., as "given", on subsequent levels of construction (see the section on
"Form and Content", EvG, 1995, p.101-102). As permanent objects the stars
reside among innumerable others in a space that has been structured in the
course of experience by the subject's movements on the sensorimotor level
or by deliberate movements of attention on higher levels of abstraction. In
this space, the focus of attention can move one way or another, can
establish angles and measure distances, and the objects do not
"disintegrate" because in this context of operating they are taken as
given. In this sense, but only in this sense, they have an "existence" that
is independent of the subject's present operating.
Clearly some of the confusion could have been avoided if, in one of my
phrases that Packer quotes I had said: "picking out _among previously
constructed objects_ ...", but the exposition of a theory becomes
practically impossible, if some of the basic definitions have to be
constantly reiterated to stop the reader from assimilating terms to his
habitual way of thinking.
However, there is another, truly puzzling question to which the cited
article provided no answer: How does it come about that in the context of
actual, present experience we can "point" our telescope at specific stars?
- In my view, this does not entail the independent "existence" of the
stars. It merely requires a manifold that is rich enough to permit the
repeated construction of a good many permanent objects. If you now ask why
certain objects, such as the people we love, that for a time seem just as
permanent as the stars, are not available in actual experience after they
have died, I can only say that it appears to be due to a limitation of the
manifold. But a limitation of the manifold does not warrant any inferences
about the ontological reality that may underlie it.
Finally, Packer says: >>... locating the "radical construction" of the real
in the individual mind is not the solution.<< - The solution to what? I
take it, he means an end to the search for an ontology. As radical
constructivist, I cannot take part in that search. I take ontic reality to
be rationally inaccessible and am therefore interested only in finding a
coherent, non-contradictory way of thinking about what I experience. If
someone wants to impute "existence" to me, I have to join Berkeley and ask:
What on earth should this word "existence" mean? I experience myself as
actively perceiving and thinking, and that is quite enough. What lies
beyond this, I leave to the irreducible metaphors of the mystic and the
artist.
6 (May 14) I wrote the above before reading Dewey's excellent and
comprehensive reply. Having read it once, I would say I agree with what he
says. He uses more words than I would, but he also takes into account many
more aspects than I did. This should be helpful in generating
understanding; and as he stresses, _acceptance_ of the proposed ideas is
not the purpose of the exercise. The only point I would put differently
comes up on his p.7:
>> But what, then, do we interact with? <<
> Apparently the "world out there." <
The only interaction I am confident about involves elements of the
'manifold' and re-presentations of prior constructs. How the manifold
relates to "the world out there", we cannot know. - The interaction with it
is a shallow interaction in the sense that Roland Barthes (I believe)
expressed so well when he said: "The only given is the way of taking."
One last thing: In the old days, roughly until the 1920s, the term
"ontology" was used for the realm of _being_, a realm that is the way it is
irrespective of any knower. Since then, some authors have extended the
meaning of the term to include presuppositions made for the construction of
a theory. I vigorously object to this extension and use the term in the old
way.
June 2nd, 1998 Ernst von Glasersfeld