Excerpt: I wish address some of the paradoxes that arise if one adopts a non-critical radical constructivist stance to account for creative people’s interactions with – and through – (hu)man-made artifacts, in particular as they engage in the process of ‘world-making’, to use Goodman’s expression (1978), or designing in a broad sense.

Excerpt: I briefly want to explain my interpretation of certain key ideas proposed by three among the thinkers from whom I drew as I was formulating the radical theory of knowing. Vico and Berkeley have been dead for almost two and a half centuries, Piaget for a decade. None of them, I suspect, would agree whole­heartedly with my interpretation of what they intended to say. This does not greatly worry me. All three tended to disagree with most, if not all, of the interpretations of their work that came to their eyes during their life time. Had they witnessed the most recent developments in the philosophy of science, they might have been radicalized themselves.

Key words: Vico, Berkeley, Piaget, being, reality, truth, radical constructivism

[From the first paragraph:] Let me say at once, the tentative and rather speculative ideas I am presenting here are not intended to answer the question of what time is, in an ontological sense. I am interested in how the thinking mind might come to have a concept of time. This concept has been a problem from the beginning of Western philosophy. It was implicit in the irreconcilable conflict between Parmenides” notion of an eternal, changeless world of being and Heraclitus” unceasing flux. The history of modern science, and especially biology – as Stephen Gould so convincingly argues – manifests the dichotomy expressed by the contrasting metaphors of “Time’s arrow and Time’s cycle

Excerpt: The grandest designs – and I say this without the least hesitation – are the philosophers’ schemes to find out what the world ‘in itself’, the world apart from the human knower, might be like. And since I do not belong to any discipline and do not have to defend a particular dogma, I would add that these grand schemes have finally run out of steam.

Excerpt: From my perspective, there need not be a contest between religious faith and any scientific model – including the model of biological evolution that is perhaps the most comprehensive and successful one science has come up with. Any religious faith is a metaphysical attempt to pacify the soul. What science produces, in contrast, are rational constructs whose value resides in their applicability and usefulness. Believers may cling to what they are told or what they want to believe; scientific knowledge is of a different kind because it is tied to a method that involves experiential corroboration. Much of the fuel that keeps the controversy alive springs from the fact that many proponents of science cling to a conception of the scientific method that no longer seems tenable today.