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: 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.

Excerpt: A look at the literature published in high impact journals identifies more than three thousand publications that used the keywords constructivism or constructivist from the mid 1970s to the present. In the database the first reference to constructivism is in 1967, increasing to 12 sources by 1976. From 1993 onwards the trajectory increased to more than 100 sources a year and then, since 1999 more than 200 sources a year refer to constructivism. Of course this is the tip of an iceberg since the vast majority of the literature is not included in the Web of Science database and many articles probably address constructivism without including the term either in the title, abstract or keywords. Nonetheless, the trend provides insights into a revolution involving constructivism. Perhaps it is too soon to judge whether this revolution made a difference and possibly I am like the fish that is unable to know about the water in which it lives – I used constructivism to improve science education and had a stake in it being successful. From where I stand as an urban science educator, changes occurred because constructivism is a subversive process that got people thinking about the purposes of education and the nature of teaching and learning. Although there are times when it seems as if nothing has changed at all in education research, the wheels of change still turn and do not seem to be easily reversed. Furthermore, from my experience, constructivism itself was not immune from the change process because it too changed and then was subsumed in a new wave of sociocultural theory that is just as subversive as constructivism.