Excerpt: In this chapter we introduce Heidegger’s analysis of understanding and Being, Heidegger’s writings are both important and difficult, and we will make no attempt to give a thorough or authoritative exposition. Our intention is to bring out those aspects relevant to our examination of language and thought and to our understanding of technology. Before turning to Heidegger, however, it will be useful to look briefly at issues that arise in interpreting texts. In addition to the obvious relevance of this material to our discussion of language, we have found that it is easier to grasp the more radical phenomenological statements about interpretation if we first consider interpretive activity in a more obvious setting. When someone speaks of ‘interpretation,’ the most likely association is with artistic or literary works. The musician, the literary critic, and the ordinary reader of a poem or novel are all in some immediate sense ‘interpreting’ a collection of marks on a page. One of the fundamental insights of phenomenology is that this activity of interpretation is not limited to such situations, but pervades our everyday life. In coming to an understanding of what it means to think, understand, and act, we need to recognize the role of interpretation.

‘Konstruktivismus’ bezeichnet erkenntnis- und wissenschaftstheoretische Positionen, die sich mit Fragen der Wirklichkeitskonstruktion durch Beobachter beschäftigen. Ontologisch-dualistische Fragen nach dem Was des Erkennens – dem Erkenntnisobjekt – werden dabei durch Fragen nach dem Wie des Erkennens ersetzt, die auf eine Konzeption von Erkennen bzw. Beobachten als beobachtergebundenem Prozess verweisen, an dessen (gesetztem) Ende grundsätzlich keine Einsichten in eine objektiv erfassbare Wirklichkeit stehen können. Als Theorien der Beobachtung zweiter Ordnung thematisieren konstruktivistische Ansätze gerade auch nicht-bewusstseinspflichtige und -bewusstseinsfähige Formen von Konstruktion, die Kognition und Kommunikation alltagshandelnder Aktanten (sog. Beobachter erster Ordnung) ausmachen. Erkenntnis vollzieht sich nach konstruktivistischem Verständnis ausschließlich im Modus der Selbstreferenzialität gebunden an beobachtende Systeme.

Excerpt: First, however, let us consider briefly the nature of the work as a whole. How does it stand as a work of science, and how does it fit with Maturana’s view of science? The quotation at the start of this chapter can be seen to summarize science for Maturana. Science is not effective and powerful because it is true, because it corresponds to reality; rather, scientific theories become accepted as truth because they are effective, because they are powerful. Cognition is effective action. So autopoiesis is an explanation presented to a community of scientists; it is the proposal of a mechanism which, if it exists, would generate the phenomena experienced by them. Its acceptance as an explanation, and thereby its truth, will depend on its effectiveness, its usefulness, as part of an ongoing conversation among observers.

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.

This paper explores how discourse analysis can benefit from the main tenets of complexity theory: including its holistic (or systemic) perspective in the research of any object, always in relation to its emergency conditions; and transdisciplinarity as methodology. If applied to the study of discourse, it revitalizes ethnography as an empirical methodology, constructivism as a theoretical starting position, and the integration of discourse analysis with rhetoric, argumentation theory and semiotics, among other disciplines.

Constructivism is most interesting in the context of theory of knowledge as a little known, hence unpopular, but potentially viable alternative to other, better known, still popular but arguably unsuccessful approaches to epistemology. The argument in favor of constructivism is twofold, including the claim that other, better known, often ingenious forms of realism are not viable, and the further claim that constructivism is potentially viable. This chapter will sketch the differences between some main forms of realism in arguing that nonconstructivist, more popular and better known, often ingenious realist approaches to knowledge fail, and in further identifying constructivism as a less well-known but potentially viable epistemological alternative. All views of knowledge feature realism understood in the first instance as the concern to know the real, where the real is understood in a variety of different ways. If knowledge concerns knowing the real, then, depending on how the cognitive object is understood, there are only a few main variant realist approaches. This chapter will consider the most obvious, and arguably main, nonconstructivist varieties of realism in arguing that they fail. It will further suggest that constructivism, or more precisely a constructivist variety of realism is at least arguably a potentially acceptable alternative.

The first chapter developed an indirect argument for constructivism in 1 two points: first, all theories of knowledge defend some form of realism, but not necessarily metaphysical realism; and, second, no form of the metaphysical realist claim for knowledge can be made out. If the best kind of theory of knowledge features metaphysical realism, then constructivist is a second-best theory. The aim of this chapter is to begin to clarify the meaning of the term and to describe some main forms of epistemological constructivism.

Excerpt: In Biological Autonomy, philosophers Alvaro Moreno and Matteo Mossio present a new theoretical framework for understanding how living organisms differ from other physical systems. Their framework, which they call the “autonomous perspective,” addresses biological organisms qua systems. They show how it generates insights into a wide range of questions in philosophy of biology such as, Does causation operate top down? What are functions? Which is more fundamental for the origin of life – metabo-lism or replication? What distinguishes cognition as a kind of biological process? Moreno and Mossio’s systems-oriented approach, with its holistic focus on the organizational features of biological systems (including the entire spectrum from bacteria to large multicellular organisms), is a welcome and refreshing departure from the contemporary plethora of mechanistic approaches that emphasize reductive accounts of biological systems as decomposable into hierarchies of parts and operations. The autonomous perspective also provides insights into why mechanistic explanation must be supplemented with other explanatory approaches. In this review, we briefly sketch some of the core ideas of the framework and how the authors apply it to two central problems in philosophy of biology: the nature of functions in biology and how to understand cognition in biological systems in general.