A transcendental interpretation of decoherence theories is presented, as a middle way between the realist and empiricist interpretations. From a transcendental standpoint, the latter interpretations are both biased. The realist one is biased in favor of formal constructs taken as descriptive of a reality more real than phenomena; and the empiricist one is biased in favor of phenomena, thus forgetting that they acquire their meaning from the formalism in which they are embedded. By contrast with these two positions, transcendental epistemology sees decoherence as one step in a stratified process of constitution of objectivity adapted to microphysical phenomena.

‘Constructivism’ is a term adopted by many contemporary philosophical approaches. It appeared with the work of Piaget, and since then it has been appropriated by many approaches with different ontological and epistemological orientations. This article examines some of these major contemporary appropriations on three issues: the problem of realism and the problems of possibility and source of knowledge. Piagetian constructivism, socioconstructivism, logical constructivism, radical constructivism and social constructivism are analyzed. The purpose of this study || is to provide a better definition of the term, maintaining its link to its historical origin, and at the same time to be helpful in clarifying its indiscriminate use. A part of the conceptual confusion surrounding the term is solved with the dissolution of the false polarities between realism and constructivism, and between objectivism and skepticism. The conclusion is that the positions vary between realism and antirealism, and between criticism and relativism. It finds in the problem of the source of knowledge the common denominators of all allegations of constructivism: the rejection of empiricist objectivism and the adoption of the Kantian sense of the construction metaphor. We can positively define constructivism as the epistemological thesis that supports the active role of the subject in creating and modifying his representations of the object of knowledge.

Key words: constructivism, social constructivism, radical constructivism, jean piaget, objectivism.

In this paper I examine constructivism as a view of learning which has come to dominate educational debates about learning in the field of teacher education. The major claims of a variety of constructivist theories are considered and found to be largely wanting, in that they either differ little from common sense empiricist views, or else provide misleading and incomplete views of human learning, with consequently misleading implications for teaching in classrooms.

Social constructionism views discourse about the world not as a reflection or map of the world but as an artifact of communal interchange. Both as an orientation to knowledge and to the character of psychological constructs, constructionism forms a significant challenge to conventional understandings. Although the roots of constructionist thought may be traced to long-standing debates between empiricist and rationalist schools of thought, constructionism attempts to move beyond the dualism to which both of these traditions are committed and to place knowledge within the process of social interchange. Although the role of psychological explanation is rendered problematic, a fully developed constructionism could furnish a means for understanding the process of science and invites the development of alternative criteria for the evaluation of psychological inquiry.

Excerpt: Crossing the frontiers between conventional areas of study such as biology, psychology, and philosophy and seeking common themes that could unite them is a hazardous business. This is not only because of the absence of guidelines in the no-man’s-land between the occupied territories and the consequent danger of losing one’s way. More significantly, if the adventure has any consequences it will entail quite deep reorganizations of familiar patterns of thought within the separate disciplines, and such disturbance is always unpopular. However, a consistent reading of Piaget’s long, fruitful, and distinguished career sees all his scientific and intellectual endeavors stemming from a deeply-held conviction that the manifestation of intelligence is an inevitable logical consequence of the laws governing biological evolution, so that he inevitably found himself struggling to bring order to an unruly interdisciplinary domain. Thus, the articulation of transformation laws in the realm of developmental psychology (understood by Piaget as a particular aspect of biological process), which preoccupied him for much of his career, was no more than a necessary precursor to the more general task of describing the principles underlying the unifying generative foundations of biological and cognitive phenomena. This unification has the consequence that, under Piaget’s constructionist hypothesis whereby one realm of order arises out of another by a process of manifestation from a condition of latency or virtuality, the virtual domain for cognitive phenomena lies in organic life, in biology. This creative unfolding may be regarded as a part of the study he called genetic epistemology. The adjective “genetic” is not to be understood here in the narrow biological sense that connects it with genes, but in its proper sense relating to genesis, denoting both the problem of logical (necessary) origins as governed by law, and historical origins related to contingencies; i.e., it is the real problem of creation, or what Piaget preferred to call construction. This unites both structuralist and functionalist methods of analysis and description, Piaget steering boldly between what he saw as the Scylla of empiricist reductionism and the Charbydis of static, preformed idealist concepts, constructing a new world in his passage between these seductive polarities which have brought shipwreck to so much biological thought. To take on both these traditions and attempt a new synthesis and clarification over such a range of disciplines is not a modest endeavor; but then, Piaget was not a modest man.

Commentary on “Stepping off the pendulum: Why only an action-based approach can transcend the nativist–empiricist debate” by J. Allen and M. Bickhard.

The discourse of postmodernism proclaims with a unified voice the context-dependence or knower-dependence, the relativity or subjectivity, of all truth claims. But the discourse of postmodernism also proclaims universal truths upon which this antirealist epistemology itself rests. These constitute the very foundational claims that the postmodernist campaign, in all its alleged antifoundationalism, strives to subvert. In this article I consider three universal truth claims of postmodernist discourse. And because the antirealism that defines much of postmodernist discourse is often grounded in the doctrine of social constructionism, the three truth claims under consideration constitute the claims of social constructionism itself, especially the claims of social constructionism as it has been propounded within postmodern therapy circles. Each of the three claims is articulated, and then followed by a critique which asks whether the claim is not either (a) simply a variant of the so-called modernist paradigm that is under attack, or (b) the product of the very observational/empirical powers that postmodernist doctrine seeks to erode in its anti-empiricist spirit. Particular attention is given to challenging the value – found within postmodernist circles – of a pragmatic or utilitarian standard for acceptance of theory or discourse.

Excerpt: The fact that we somehow understand, learn, and use observation terms does not in the least imply that the way in which we understand, learn, and use them is either different from or irrelevant to the way we understand, learn, and use theoretical terms. Let us then subject the observation language to the same scrutiny which the theoreti¬cal language has received. Rather than attacking directly the dual language view and its underly¬ing empiricist assumptions, my strategy will be first to attempt to con¬struct a different account of meaning and confirmation in the observation language. This project is not the ambitious one of a general theory of meaning, nor of the learning of language, but rather the modest one of finding conditions for understanding and use of terms in science – some specification, that is to say, in a limited area of discourse, of the “rules of usage” which distinguish meaningful discourse from mere vocal reflexes. In developing this alternative account I shall rely on ideas which have become familiar particularly in connection with Quine’s discussions of language and meaning and the replies of his critics, whose significances for the logic of science seem not yet to have been exploited nor even fully understood. I shall consider, in particular, the predicate terms of the so-called observation language. But first something must be said to justify consid¬ering the problem as one of “words” and not of “sentences. ” It has often been argued that it is sentences that we learn, produce, understand, and respond to, rather than words, that is, that in theoretical discussion of language, sentences should be taken as units. There are, however, several reasons why this thesis, whether true or false, is irrelevant to the present problem, at least in its preliminary stages. The observation language of science is only a segment of the natural language in which it is ex¬pressed, and we may for the moment assume that rules of sentence formation and grammatical connectives are already given when we come to consider the use of observation predicates. Furthermore, since we are interested in alleged distinctions between the observation and theoretical languages, we are likely to find these distinctions in the characteristics of their respective predicates, not in the connectives which we may assume that they share. Finally, and most importantly, the present enterprise does not have the general positive aim of describing the entire structure of a language. It has rather the negative aim of showing that there are no terms in the observation language which are sufficiently accounted for by “direct observation, ” “experimentally identifiable instances, ” and the like. This can best be done by examining the hardest cases, that is, predicates which do appear to have direct empirical reference. No one would seriously put forward the direct-observation account of grammatical connectives; and if predicates are shown not to satisfy the account, it is likely that the same arguments will suffice to show that sentences do not satisfy it either.

EX: This chapter proposed a constructivist rapprochement to address the shortcomings found in the rationalist, empiricist, and pragmatist traditions. It was argued that a survival-based tension exists between the expectations of the perceiving agent and perceived information. The agent’s expectations can be characterized by Kant’s, Bartlett’s, or Piaget’s schemas that are either reinforced or recalibrated as new information is perceived. Friston (2009) refers to this phenomenon as free energy minimization; Piaget (1970) describes it as continuing to move towards a state of equilibration. A set of five assumptions and 8 follow-on conjectures were proposed to capture this active subject perception dialectic. The set of conjectures included characterizing the meta-concepts of knowledge, meaning, and truth.

The paper outlines the significant influence of constructivism in contemporary science and mathematics education, and emphasises the central role that epistemology plays in constructivist theory and practice. It is claimed that despite the anti-empiricism of much constructivist writing, in most forms its epistemology is nevertheless firmly empiricist. In particular it is subject-centered and experience-based. It is argued that its relativist, if not skeptical conclusions, only follow given these empiricist assumptions. Further it is suggested that such assumptions belong to Aristotelian science, and were effectively overthrown with the modern science of Galileo and Newton. Thus constructivism cannot provide understanding of post-Aristotelian science.