Excerpt: In 1957, Heinz von Foerster founded the Biological Computer Laboratory (BCL) at the University of Illinois. At this institution, he brought together avant garde artists and original minds from all over the world. In the inspiring climate of the BCL, philosophers and electrical engineers, biologists (e.g. Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela), anthropologists and mathematicians, artists and logicians debated epistemological questions from interdisciplinary perspectives deriving from both the sciences and the arts. They dealt with the rules of computation in humans and machines and analysed the logical and methodological problems involved in the understanding of understanding and the observation of the observer. It is von Foerster’s outstanding achievement to have brought into focus the inescapable prejudices and blind spots of the human observer approaching his apparently independent object of inquiry. His ethical stance demands constant awareness of one’s blind spots, to accept, in a serious way, that one’s apparently final pronouncements are one’s own productions, and to cast doubt on certainties of all kinds and forms, while at the same time continually searching for other and new possibilities of thought.

Excerpt: Three principal research interests have made [Ernst von Glasersfeld] one of the well-known founders of constructivism. He systematically scoured the history of European philosophy for varieties of epistemological scepticism and set up an ancestral gallery reaching back to the insights of the ancient sceptics of the 4th century B. C. He replaced the classical realist concept of truth by the idea of viability: theories need not and do not correspond with what is real, he says, but they must be practi-||cable and useful, they must be viable. Finally, he introduced the work of the Swiss developmental psychologist, Jean Piaget, into the constructivist debate.

Excerpt: [Maturana] is particularly well known for his theory of autopoiesis (self-creation) that he began to develop in the late 1960s. This theory provides a novel feature of living beings going beyond the traditional criteria of biology reproduction, mobility, etc. According to Maturana, a circular, autopoietic form of organisation distinguishes living beings, from the amoeba to humans. Living systems form a network of internal and circularly enmeshed processes of production that make them bounded unities by constantly producing and thus maintaining themselves. Autopoietic systems are autonomous. Whatever may happen inside them, whatever may penetrate and stimulate, perturb or destroy them, is essentially determined by their own circular organisation.

Excerpt: The constructivist thinking game is being turned into a norm, a new creed – a new truth. To avoid the fossilisation and dogmatisation of thinking, all so-called constructivists must constantly make clear that there can be no final proof and no observer independent justification for their theses. Biology and brain research cannot, in any way, claim to be the trailblazers for the verification of constructivist assumptions; they can make them plausible, they can illustrate them, they can supply relevant indications, but they cannot prove their truth in an emphatic sense. Constructivism is itself only a construction (among many others); it cannot be tested for its truth but only for its utility, its viability. The main thing is, Ernst von Glasersfeld maintains in conversation, to develop effective procedures and assumptions, which will serve the purposes of particular observers. One must struggle to move forward, to explore whether one’s theses and theories prove productive or whether the big unknown, ordinarily and quite roughly called reality, resists our interpretations.

Excerpt: Roth – director at the Institute of Brain Research at the University of Bremen – calls cognitive neurobiology, with reference to the German terminological tradition, a geisteswissenschaft, “of a special kind.” It investigates how perceptions and mental states take place. It attempts to tackle the key question of the relation between res extensa (matter) and res cogitans (mind; spirit; consciousness) that has remained virulent since Rene Descartes first formulated it in the 17th century. It describes how a human brain produces the image of an external world with all its riches of sounds, smells, colours and shapes. The link between this research programme as designed by Roth and the cognitive quest of constructivism is immediately apparent: the purpose of cognitive neurobiology is to discover the rules of reality construction as they operate in an organism’s brain.

Excerpt: In his books on constructivist themes, Schmidt always pursues a twofold objective: he tests the theory by application and simultaneously works on its elaboration. On the one hand, he uses constructivist assumptions as an instrument to investigate the world of advertising or the irritating power of art. On the other hand, he seeks to develop the constructivist framework as a whole. As the constructivist authors come from very different traditions and disciplines, and either concentrate on the individual or on the culture surrounding individuals as the decisive producers of reality, the points of view are manifold and cannot easily be reconciled. The integrative constructivism advocated by Siegfried J. Schmidt unites the thesis of the cognitive autonomy of the individual with the assumption of the socially fashioned human being: brain and society combine in a new kind of theoretical synthesis.

Excerpt: Since the early 1980s, Helm Stierlin has been working on integrating the systemic view, which deals with the ties of individuals, with constructivism, which postulates the autonomy of individuals. His principal interest is not the highlighting of opposites but the integration of diversity; it is synthesis, the goal of any dialectical effort.

Excerpt: In his research work embracing cognitive science, evolutionary theory, and immunology, Francisco J. Varela, constantly inspired by his fundamental interest in the key questions of epistemology, gave the epistemological debate a new orientation. In his thinking he refuses to accept the strict separation of subject and object, of knower and known, which as a rule unites realists and constructivists alike. Francisco J. Varela rejects the fundamental dualism dividing mind and world, which had shaped Western philosophy from its earliest beginnings. He does not subscribe to the idea that human individuals can invent their own realities – blindly and arbitrarily, and without experiencing any resistance from the external world and all other things given. He equally distances himself, however, from the diametrically opposite position that overstates the eigenpower of the world of objects. The external world and all other things given cannot determine what happens in an organism. Varela’s claim is that individual and world create each other.