Open peer commentary on the article “Missing Colors: The Enactivist Approach to Perception” by Adrián G. Palacios, María-José Escobar & Esteban Céspedes. Upshot: The target article discusses the influence of the enactivist account of perception in computer science, beyond subjectivism and objectivism. I suggest going one step further and introduce our VirtualEnaction platform, proposing a federative systemic view for brain-body-environment interaction for this analysis.

Minimalism is a useful element in the constructivist arsenal against objectivism. By reducing actions and sensory feedback to a bare minimum, it becomes possible to obtain a complete description of the sensory-motor dynamics; and this in turn reveals that the object of perception does not pre-exist in itself, but is actually constituted during the process of observation. In this paper, this minimalist approach is deployed for the case of the recognition of “the Other.” It is shown that the perception of another intentional subject is based on properties that are intrinsic to the joint perceptual activity itself.

Key words: sensory-motor, dynamics, perception, minimalism

In this article, the author examines Colin Grant’s recent criticism of the so-called “interaction paradigm” and Jürgen Habermas’s universal pragmatics. Grant’s approach, which is presented as an open challenge to communication theories grounded in philosophical conceptions of communality and dialogue, can be construed as an exemplar of a radical constructivist approach to vital questions of contingency and incommensurability in communication studies. In response, the author outlines a classical pragmatist approach to the problem areas identified by Grant, with the aim of outlining how a pragmatist outlook can offer promising theoretical alternatives to universal pragmatics and radical constructivism. It is argued that moderate Peircean pragmatism, appropriately interpreted, can provide a philosophical platform capable of addressing issues of contingency, uncertainty, and autonomy in communication theory without succumbing to incommensurabilism, traditional objectivism, or nominalistic individualism.

This paper responds to David Elkind’s article “The Problem with Constructivism, ” published in the Summer 2004issue ofThe Educational Forum. It argues that Elkind’s thesis – teacher, curricular, and societal readiness lead to the implementation of constructivism – is conceptually problematic. This paper also critiques constructivism and supports objectivism as a viable philosophy of education.

‘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.

Constructivism, the notion that knowledge must be assembled from pieces rather than assimilated whole, has been a principal learning theory in psychology for about 20 years and in psycholinguistics for 10. The theory is now making a strong entry into educational thinking, but in language education it is less in evidence. That is because applied linguists have always been constructivists, implicitly, and have already confronted some of the implementation problems facing constructivism in mathematics or science education. Nevertheless, a more explicit understanding of the constructivist approach is useful within language education, particularly in providing a framework for exploiting information technologies.

Key words: constructivism, constructivist, educational reform, language technologies, learner-as-linguist, objectivism, second language acquisition.

Abstract: It is trendy to be a “ constructivist,” although this designation is not very illuminating, since very divergent positions are subsumed under this lobe!. In order to arrive at a more precise idea of what constructivism is or might be, exemplary text passages taken from the discussion of radical constructivism in the United States in the past few years are analyzed. Against the background of two contrasting epistemological positions (“objectivism��� and “ constructivism”), constructivism in the field of education defines itself by its reference to constructivist epistemology and by the assumption that instructional design can be deduced, as it were, from an epistemology. This “ deduction assumption,” though, leads to a problematic confounding of epistemological and pedagogical perspectives – this is especially true of the central concept of “construction” – and to an apparent antithesis of “ objectivistic” and “constructivistic” instructional design. Constructivism’s dichotomic approach permeates all spheres of instructional design and tends to lead to a lack of necessary differentiation and to obscure relevant pedagogic problems and contexts. Therefore, it is proposed to dispense with the concept of “constructivism” in the pedagogic field altogether and to join instead Greeno’s search for a synthesis of cognitive psychology and situated learning.

Many scholars in the instructional systems field have addressed the paradigm shift in the field of learning psychology and its implications for instructional systems technology (IST). This article analyzes the philosophical assumptions underlying IST and its behavioral and cognitive foundations, each of which is primarily objectivistic, which means that knowing and learning are processes for representing and mirroring reality. The philosophical assumptions of objectivism are then contrasted with constructivism, which holds that knowing is a process of actively interpreting and constructing individual knowledge representations. The implications of constructivism for IST provide a context for asking the reader to consider to what extent our field should consider this philosophical paradigm shift.

Key words: educational technology, system technology, paradigm shift, knowledge representation, individual knowledge.

Context: Philosophical and - more recently - empirical approaches to the study of mind have recognized the research of lived experience as crucial for the understanding of their subject matter. Such research is faced with self-referentiality: every attempt at examining the experience seems to change the experience in question. This so-called “excavation fallacy” has been taken by many to undermine the possibility of first-person inquiry as a form of scientific practice. Problem: What is the epistemic character and value of reflectively acquired phenomenological data? Can the study of experience, despite the excavation fallacy, rely on the act of reflection on lived experience and make sense and use of its results? Method: Through a philosophical discourse, informed by empirical first-person inquiry, we explore the experiential structure of the act of reflection and the formation of the corresponding belief about past experience. Results: We present a provisional first-person model of the experiential dynamics of retrospective reflection, in which the reflective act is characterized as enaction of belief about past experience that co-determines - rather than distorts - its results. From a constructivist perspective on the inevitable interdependence between the act of observing and the observed, the excavation “fallacy” is recognized as an intrinsic characteristic of reflection. Reflection is described as an iterative, self-referential process, guided by a context- and subject-specific horizon of expectations. Implications: Knowing the characteristics of the formation of beliefs about experience is essential for understanding first-person data and for the possibility of their acquisition and use in scientific practice, particularly in the context of second-person approaches to the study of experience. Constructivist content: We relate the proposed understanding of reflection to constructivist epistemology and argue that constructivism provides an epistemological foundation for the empirical study of experience more suitable than the traditional epistemological objectivism of cognitive science. We suggest that the constructive nature of the process of reflection calls for a collaboration between the fields of constructivism, phenomenology, and first-person research, and points towards the potential for their mutual enrichment.

Key words: Reflection, enaction, constructivism, past experience, excavation fallacy, second-person methodology

Constructionism? “Use with caution” … Space as a medium of constructing social reality. Constructionism has been one of the most frequently debated philosophical ideas of the 1990s (IAN HACKING). For years, things have been said to be socially constructed and geography has been engaged in this debate along with other sciences. While sometimes the idea of a socially constructed world may shed some light on the produced and objectified, usually taken-for-granted characteristics of the life-world, there are still some problems: It seems to be unsatisfactory to unmask “essen-tialism,” “objectivism��� and “naturalism” by the mere assertion that space is a social construct. Coming from a linguistic turn within geography, the paper discusses some possible meanings of the mantra that “space is a social construct” and some consequences which could be drawn from alternative findings. German: Der Konstruktivismus gilt als “Modephilosophie” (IAN HACKING) der 1990er Jahre. Konstruktivistische Formeln findet man seit Jahren auch in der Geographie, wo sie – anderen Wissenschaften vergleichbar – einerseits erhellende Funktionen haben können, weil sie den produzierten und “objektivierten” Charakter der für gegeben gehaltenen Alltagswelt explizit thematisieren. Andererseits birgt die inflationäre Verwendung des Begriffs einer “konstruierten Wirklichkeit” die Gefahr, “essentialistische,” “objektivistische” und “naturalisierende” Denkweisen allein mit dem Hinweis auf die “soziale Konstruiertheit des Raumes” entlarven zu wollen. Der Beitrag geht – ausgehend von der sprachpragmatischen Wende, die die Geographie in den 1990er in Teilen vollzogen hat – der Frage nach, in welcher Weise die Formel vom “Raum als sozialem Konstrukt” interpretiert werden könnte und welche Schlussfolgerungen daraus zu ziehen sind.