The current frequent use of the words ‘information’, ‘communication’, ‘representation’, and ‘meaning’ introduces misleading metaphors into some of our most important social interactions. The paper presents an outline of the constructivist approach to the underlying phenomena as a more adequate and productive way of thinking – it shows linguistic ‘meaning’ to be the result of individuals’ reflection upon their experience.

Key words: language, semiotics, communication

Students’ views of the nature of scientific knowledge have been recognized as an important component of science learning environments. In this study, we analyze an extensive data base consisting of 23 students’ written and oral discourse about ontology, epistemology, and sociology of scientific knowledge collected over a 15-month period in the context of two consecutive junior- and senior-level physics courses. Over a 2-month period at the beginning of the second year, students read, reflected on, and talked about a text which discusses epistemology in the context of physics. Our study shows that students drew on nine types of discursive resources to support their ontological, epistemological, and sociological claims. Toward the end of the study, the range and number of supportive statements had increased. Simultaneously, few students changed their ontological and sociological claims, but a considerable number changed their epistemological claims. Two case studies illustrate the development of student discourse in the course of the study.

An experimental analysis of the claim that individual constructive activity is social was carried out using two categories of interactions, subjective-environment interactions and interactions of operations within the individual. The primary question of the analysis concerns the contribution of these two kinds of interaction to the individual construction of a mathematical scheme called the equi-partitioning scheme. It was found that interactions of operations within the individual were the principal interactions contributing to the construction of the scheme. It was further found that these interactions were occasioned by subject-environment interactions. But the subject-environment interactions could not be used to explain the individual construction of the scheme.

Epistemology is often presented as an abstract body of knowledge accessible only to a small minority of intellectually capable individuals. In this paper, we elaborate the educational possibilities that present themselves when we question this prejudice and consider epistemology as a social practice. We argue that epistemology looses its air of divine mystery and becomes one of many language games they learn to play. We provide illustrations for this argument from high school students” conversations conducted in the context of their physics course. Enacting epistemological practice in the educational context is therefore not only possible but also desirable. It triggers a recursive self-organizing process that transforms pedagogical practice itself and thus brings to the foreground the socio-political and ethical character of the educational endeavor. Our brief argument is written in the form of a reflexive text and is presented as the starting point for the readers to begin a conversation about the problematic subjects raised.

Introduction, by guest editor, to special issue on radical constructivism in education Whether the subject is the production of scholarly knowledge, or the development by an individual of his or her own knowledge, radical constructivism adopts a point of view distinctly at odds with the perspective afforded by the empirico-realist tradition. Whereas in the latter current, interest is focused on determining whether knowledge of various types truly corresponds to ‘states of the world’, the constructivist perspective centers more on the ‘living being’ who constructs these various forms of knowledge and who so doing also devises for himor herself an image or theory about the world. Or, as the work of Piaget (1971, 1972) has tellingly indicated, the focus is placed on the processes and resources which a subject draws on to create a certain order of things out of his or her experiences, thereby producing within him/her the impression of dealing with a ‘stable’ world, and occasionally a world endowed with ‘states’.

I argue that an older debate in phenomenology concerning Husserl’s notion of hyletic data can throw some light on contemporary debates about qualia and phenomenal consciousness. Both debates tend to ignore important considerations about bodily experience and how specific kinds of bodily experience can shape one’s consciousness of the world. A revised and fully embodied conception of hyletic experience enriches the concept of enactive perception.

Excerpt: So called “Second-Order” cybernetics developed the notions of self-organization in a manner more radical than Wiener, attempting to both give a strong sense to the prefix “auto” and, at the same time, to explain reflexive phenomena, memory, and the relation between the organism and its history, in terms of the emergence of a global effect out of local interactions and the networking of retroactive processes. But the proposed theories didn’t always work. Today’s connectionist systems are analogous in some ways to the “non-trivial machines” of von Foerster. They lay claim to a common filiate (the formal networks of neurons of McCulloch and Pitts) and, more recently, they attack the problem of the recognition and the representation of recursive, nested structures. This new step is reminiscent of the one which took us from Ashby’s homeostat to the application by von Foerster of the concept of recursivity to the problem of non-trivial or memory-equipped machines. We will attempt to show that the analogy is a real one and that von Foerster anticipated many of the current problems. But we will also see that with the development of working models, other more redoubtable difficulties have appeared precisely where Second-Order cybernetics failed to foresee them.

Excerpt: This final chapter of applications will look at two related areas: computer-based information systems (IS), and cognitive science and artificial intelligence. Within IS, autopoietic ideas have so far had only a limited influence, largely through the work of Winograd and Flores, who have produced a critique of both information systems design and artificial intelligence. This is covered in Section 11.2. More significantly, Varela has concentrated, in recent years, on cognitive science and has developed a new framework, the enactive approach, based partly on earlier cognitive theories and the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty. This is the subject of Section 11.3.