This paper reviews Constructivism and the sources of its influence over Israeli educational discourse. Then, it describes examples of Constructivists projects in the teaching of sciences and technology in Israel (Sela, Media Plus), as well as a project that is based on the Constructivist approach to teaching (Together), and several Constructivist experimental schools, followed by a summary of the obstacles to the implementation of such projects. Next, it stresses two basic flaws in the Constructivist view and introduces a post-constructivist educational paradigm, the Autonomy Oriented Education (AOE), which uses ‘reflection on experiments in living’ as its major tool and aims to enable the development of autonomous, belonging and moral individuals.
Open peer commentary on the article “The Circular Conditions of Second-order Science Sporadically Illustrated with Agent-based Experiments at the Roots of Observation” by Manfred Füllsack. Upshot: I address Füllsack’s main conclusions in his article regarding the meaning of second-order observations. Especially envisaged are the epistemological and ontological difficulties raised by his scrutiny of the merging between systemic-internal conditions of second-order reflexivity and the thematic-theoretical accounts of selection, intentionality and purposiveness in evolutionary systems.
Bockelman P., Reinerman-Jones L. & Gallagher S. (2013) Methodological lessons in neurophenomenology: Review of a baseline study and recommendations for research approaches. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 7: 608. https://cepa.info/4058
Neurophenomenological (NP) methods integrate objective and subjective data in ways that retain the statistical power of established disciplines (like cognitive science) while embracing the value of first-person reports of experience. The present paper positions neurophenomenology as an approach that pulls from traditions of cognitive science but includes techniques that are challenging for cognitive science in some ways. A baseline study is reviewed for “lessons learned,” that is, the potential methodological improvements that will support advancements in understanding consciousness and cognition using neurophenomenology. These improvements, we suggest, include (1) addressing issues of interdisciplinarity by purposefully and systematically creating and maintaining shared mental models among research team members; (2) making sure that NP experiments include high standards of experimental design and execution to achieve variable control, reliability, generalizability, and replication of results; and (3) conceiving of phenomenological interview techniques as placing the impetus on the interviewer in interaction with the experimental subject.
Brainerd C. J. (2003) Jean Piaget, learning research, and American education. In: Zimmerman B. J. & Schunk D. H. (eds.) Educational psychology: A century of contributions. Erlbaum, Mahwah NJ: 251–287.
Although the core of Jean Piaget’s scientific legacy is his stage model of intellectual ontogenesis and his studies of the reasoning skills that figure in those stages, his impact on education, especially American education, has been vast. Thirty years ago, his theory of cognitive development stimulated revolutionary changes in preschool and elementary school curriculum practices, and in the ensuing decades, Piagetian thought has continued to foment major changes in American education, with the whole language approach to reading instruction being a recent illustration. The aim of the present chapter is to focus attention on those aspects of Piaget’s contributions that have proven to be of greatest significance for educational psychology. The chapter begins with a biographical sketch. The rest of the chapter deals with Piaget’s views on learning. This material is divided into 2 sections. The first section presents Piagetian ideas about the relation between cognitive development and learning, and it summarizes findings from classical experiments that tested those ideas. The second section presents Piagetian ideas about instructional methodology and also summarizes findings from classical experiments that tested those ideas.
Camilleri K. (2014) Toward a constructivist epistemology of thought experiments in science. Synthese 191(8): 1697–1716. https://cepa.info/4564
This paper presents a critical analysis of Tamar Szabó Gendler’s view of thought experiments, with the aim of developing further a constructivist epistemology of thought experiments in science. While the execution of a thought experiment cannot be reduced to standard forms of inductive and deductive inference, in the process of working though a thought experiment, a logical argument does emerge and take shape. Taking Gendler’s work as a point of departure, I argue that performing a thought experiment involves a process of self-interrogation, in which we are compelled to reflect on our pre-existing knowledge of the world. In doing so, we are forced to make judgments about what assumptions we see as relevant and how they apply to an imaginary scenario. This brings to light the extent to which certain forms of skill, beyond the ability to make valid logical inferences, are necessary to execute a thought experiment well.
Open peer commentary on the article “Modeling Subjects’ Experience While Modeling the Experimental Design: A Mild-Neurophenomenology-Inspired Approach in the Piloting Phase” by Constanza Baquedano & Catalina Fabar. Upshot: The authors show in their pilots how open it is to participants not to obey the instructions during an experiment. Their findings leave us to choose between two options: either we (a) accept that subjective confounds are inevitable and stronger than we think, but in this case, why should we continue trying to measure subjective experience?; or (b) strive at designing better experiments in order to control for these fluctuations. I will argue for option (b) and propose an alternative model to go beyond the first- and third-person data gap, namely “predictive processing.”
Costa M. R., Kim S. Y. & Biocca F. (2013) Embodiment and embodied cognition. In: Shumaker R. (ed.) Virtual, augmented and mixed reality: Designing and developing augmented and virtual environments. Springer, Heidelberg: 333–342. https://cepa.info/7680
Progressive embodiment and the subsequent enhancement of presence have been important goals of VR researchers and designers for some time (Biocca, 1997). Consequently, researchers frequently explore the relationship between increasing embodiment and presence yet rarely emphasize the ties between their work and other work on embodiment. More specifically, we argue that experiments manipulating or implementing visual scale, avatar customization, sensory enrichment, and haptic feedback, to name a few examples, all have embodiment as their independent variable. However, very few studies explicitly frame their work as an exploration of embodiment. In this paper we will leverage the field of Embodied Cognition to help clarify the concept of embodiment.
Dahlbohm B. (1992) The idea that reality is socially constructed. In: Floyd C. Z. H., Budde R. & Keil-Slawik R. (eds.) Software development and reality construction. Springer-Verlag, Berlin: 101–126. https://cepa.info/3996
Excerpt: I will take you on a tour through the idea of reality construction by travelling back and forth between the two intellectual strands in the process of modernization: the Enlightenment and Romanticism. The major part of our tour will be spent in the land of Romanticism, accepting without argument the kind of irrealism propounded by constructivists like Nelson Goodman, Richard Rorty and Jacques Derrida. But throughout I will try to give the Enlightenment its due by pointing out the important roles of technology in the processes of reality construction: in material constructions, as a basis for thought experiments, as provider of intellectual tools, and as a source for constructivist ideas in general.
De Loor P., Manac’h K. & Tisseau J. (2009) Enaction-based artificial intelligence: Toward co-evolution with humans in the loop. Minds & Machines 19(3): 319–343. https://cepa.info/4547
This article deals with the links between the enaction paradigm and artificial intelligence. Enaction is considered a metaphor for artificial intelligence, as a number of the notions which it deals with are deemed incompatible with the phenomenal field of the virtual. After explaining this stance, we shall review previous works regarding this issue in terms of artificial life and robotics. We shall focus on the lack of recognition of co-evolution at the heart of these approaches. We propose to explicitly integrate the evolution of the environment into our approach in order to refine the ontogenesis of the artificial system, and to compare it with the enaction paradigm. The growing complexity of the ontogenetic mechanisms to be activated can therefore be compensated by an interactive guidance system emanating from the environment. This proposition does not however, resolve that of the relevance of the meaning created by the machine (sense-making) Such reflections lead us to integrate human interaction into this environment in order to construct relevant meaning in terms of participative artificial intelligence. This raises a number of questions with regards to setting up an enactive interaction. The article concludes by exploring a number of issues, thereby enabling us to associate current approaches with the principles of morphogenesis, guidance, the phenomenology of interactions and the use of minimal enactive interfaces in setting up experiments which will deal with the problem of artificial intelligence in a variety of enaction-based ways.
Di Paolo E. A., Rohde M. & lizuka H. (2008) Sensitivity to social contingency or stability of interaction? New Ideas in Psychology, 26(2), 278294. https://cepa.info/4483
We introduce a series of evolutionary robotics simulations that address the behaviour of individuals in socially contingent interactions. The models are based on a recent study by Auvray, Lenay and Stewart [(2006) The attribution of intentionality in a simulated environment: The case of minimalist devices. In Tenth meeting of the association for the scientific study of consciousness, Oxford, UK, 23–26 June, 2006] on tactile perceptual crossing in a minimal virtual environment. In accordance, both the empirical experiments and our simulations point out the essential character of global embodied interaction dynamics for the sensitivity to contingency to arise. Rather than being individually perceived by any of the interactors, sensitivity to contingency arises from processes of circular causality that characterise the collective dynamics. Such global dynamical aspects are frequently neglected when studying social cognition. Furthermore, our synthetic studies point out interesting aspects of the task that are not immediately obvious in the empirical data. They, in addition, generate new hypotheses for further experiments. We conclude by promoting a minimal but tractable, dynamic and embodied account to social interaction, combining synthetic and empirical findings as well as concrete predictions regarding sensorimotor strategies, the role of time-delays and robustness to perturbations in interactive dynamics.