There are a number of important similarities in John Dewey’s and Jean Piaget’s epistemologies. These include their emphasis on cognitive process, their grounding concepts in opertions and their implicit radical epistemology. Dewey’s constructivism is presented in the context of Bridgman’s operationalism each presented as deeper and very different from the operational definition of the contemporary psychology. The paper proposes a consistently radical constructivism as a clarification of views held in the mainstream psychology of the time. Relevance: Part of the collection edited by Ernst von Glasersfeld and Charles Smock in 1974 to launch Radical Constructivism.

Key words: Radical constructivism, Dewey, Piaget, epistemology, cognitive structures, reality

Excerpt: As we know well enough from our own experience, at that level of elaboration, the “permanence” or “universality” of our cognitive constructs tends to become precarious. But even if it did not, even if we could achieve perfect intersubjective agreement of structures, it still would not get us across the border of the black box, because all it would tell us with certainty is that we, collectively, have found one viable construction. Such a construction becomes no more “real,” in the ontological sense, if we share it – it would still be based solely on signals on our side of the construct we have called “experiential interface,” and on the particular way in which we have categorized, processed, and coordinated these signals as input to, or output from, the construct we have called “universe.”

Key words: Jean Piaget, radical constructivism

Excerpt: The purpose of this collection of essays is to suggest an alternative way of looking at knowledge, knowledge acquisition and the process of cognition. The approach is neither easy nor comfortable. It involves the demolition of several concepts which are part of our civilization’s “common sense. ” Many will argue we cannot do without these concepts. But, constructivism does offer a theoretical explanation for the strange and disheartening fact that knowledge, no matter how clear and obvious it may be to the knower, cannot be simply communicated. It does this on the strength of a radical reassessment of the concept of knowledge, a reassessment which, though it is by no means a philosophical novelty, is contrary to the mainstream of philosophical tradition.

Excerpt: It may be that Piaget has for several decades suffered an extreme of misunderstanding of his position – or it may be that in his direct approach to the growth of perceptual organization, he has been applying new principles without having organized them into an “official” statement. The subject of this chapter is another approach that has converged to the same general conclusions from a totally different starting point: cybernetics. In this case the epistemological principles have emerged in an explicit form simply as a consequence of following out the logic of a behavioral model. The model on which I have been working is an offshoot of cybernetics using almost the oldest and least sophisticated of cybernetic concepts: feedback of behavioral outputs to sensory inputs, through the environment. Through a rigorous, and some might say obsessive, application of a simple control-system unit of behavioral organization, I have constructed what seems on first inspection to be a purely hardware model of how behavior works, the kind of model that would make any engineer feel secure.

Excerpt: The radical constructivist philosophy serves as an epistemological framework for a discussion of the role of feedback in theories of behavior and for the application of operational analyses to cognition. It posits that biological organisms build their “realities” or “environments” and respond to those constructions. The environment, then, is a model which is internally organized and which cannot be directly known. The philosophical origins of this position lie in Bishop Berkeley’s rationalist dissociation of sensible object and material object (which is unknowable). As an epistemology, radical constructivism cannot be defended with “evidence” derived from empirical findings since evidence is itself the product of the constructor. Rather, the test of constructivism lies in the generation of a system of formal descriptions of the psychological processes by which the organism constructs a world. As will be shown, these formal descriptions are subject to tests.

Key words: Solipsism, feedback, mind-body problem, purposiveness

Excerpt: Everybody “knows” what is wrong with education… Few have the courage to face two fundamental questions involved: (1) what is the purpose of the institution of public education, and (2) what is the nature of knowledge. Failure to deal with the first leads to tinkering with trivial elements of a complex societal institution that should be a mechanism for guiding change (whether of the child or society) while unwillingness to confront the second produces, at best, temporary excitement about “innovation” and, of course, keeps thousands of people in higher education and the federal government busy… The purpose of this essay relates to the second point and explicates certain issues relevant to implications of one’s view of the nature of knowledge for instruction of children.

Key words: Genetic epistemology, cognitive development, operational structures, experience, equilibration, figurative thought