The idea of “constructivism” now pervades the educational literature. Indeed, so much has been written on the topic that we are reluctant to claim that we make any points in this chapter that haven’t been made in one form or another before. Nonetheless, we believe that a considerable amount of fog continues to obscure the landscape, partic-ularly its epistemological contours. We hope to disperse much of it and provide a clearer view.

Our task is to study comparisons and contrasts between social constructionism, radical constructivism, information processing constructivism, cybernetic system s, socio-cultural developmental approaches, and social constructivism.

There is for me, as a researcher and teacher of researchers, a certain engagement with Funes’ wonderment of detail that an initial exegesis provides. So much of a world never becomes visible because we do not allow ourselves to see such detail, often seeing and feeling only those abstractions whose labels our professional languages assert as “what is really going on. ” Funes provides a vehicle, albeit an extreme one, for making one see, as Needham (1971) notes in his reference to Funes, like an “unusually perceptive and diligent ethnographer newly arrived in the field” (p. xix).

Excerpt: Constructivism as a philosophical orientation has been widely accepted in mathematics and science education only since the early 1980s. As it became more broadly accepted, it also became clear that there were incongruous images of it. In 1984, Ernst von Glasersfeld introduced a distinction, echoed in Steier’s paper at this conference, between what he called “naive” constructivism and “radical” constructivism. At the risk of oversimplification, suffice it to say that naive constructivism is the acceptance that learners construct their own knowledge, while radical constructivism is the acceptance that naive constructivism applies to everyone – researchers and philosophers included. Von Glasersfeld’s distinction had a pejorative ring to it, and rightly so. Unreflective acceptance of naive constructivism easily became dogmatic ideology, which had and continues to have many unwanted consequences. On the other hand, I will attempt to make a case that to do research we must spend a good part of our time acting as naive constructivists, even when operating within a radical constructivist or ecological constructionist framework. To make clear that the orientation I have in mind is not unreflexive, I will call it “utilitarian” constructivism, and will use Steier’s and Spiro’s papers as a starting point in its explication.