Kelly’s work was formed and developed in the context of the American philosophical movement known as pragmatism. The major figures to which this tradition is attributed are Charles S. Peirce, William James and John Dewey. In Personal Construct Psychology, Dewey was acknowledged by Kelly and by subsequent writers as perhaps his most important influence. It has recently become increasingly apparent, however that Peirce was a much more pervasive and crucial influence on James and Dewey than has previously been recognized. Kelly did not mention Peirce but a close reading of the two writers reveals a remarkable correspondence and relationship between their two bodies of work. To set these two thinkers side by side proves to be an interesting and productive exercise. In this paper, after introducing Peirce and examining the relationship between him and Dewey, Kelly’s basic philosophical assumptions, as outlined at the beginning of Volume 1 of the Psychology of Personal Constructs, are used as a framework for exploring their similarities and differences. The result is an enrichment of our understanding of Kelly’s philosophy which allows us to make links with many different subsequent thinkers’ ideas and provides a basis for exploring the psychological aspects of the two men’s work. The latter forms the subject of Part II of this series which is in preparation.

Key words: peirce, kelly, pragmatism, personal construct psychology, constructivism.

This volume addresses cutting edge issues in constructivist psychology dealing with theory, practice, and social justice. The volume begins by delving into thorny issues of meaning and communication from both radical constructivist and social constructionist perspectives. Building on this, prominent practitioners share advances in research and practice related to constructivist therapy - including work exploring grief, love, and narrative. From there, the volume pays special attention to constructivist conceptions of social justice as they relate to working with torture survivors, mentoring graduate students, and dealing with the objectification of women; it even uses constructivist theory to reflexively examine the limits of social justice counseling as a theoretical orientation. Finally, the volume comes full circle by revisiting theory - this time exploring the value preferences that often infuse research on epistemological beliefs, the metaphor of the psychotherapist-as-philosopher-of-science, and the contentious status of individualism within pragmatism and constructivism. In sum, Studies in Meaning 4 highlights constructivism’s multiplicity through fourteen stimulating and, at times, controversial scholarly contributions intended to sharpen the implications of constructivism for social critique and psychological practice.

Purpose: Examination of the main arguments for radical constructivism and the critical arguments put forward against it. Findings: Although there is no reason to doubt the value of constructivism as such, it can be stated that any epistemological radicalism lacks plausibility. There is ample evidence that we still can adopt a critical realist outlook, even if every part of our world view is a construction. Implications: We should engage ourselves in the development of an anti-metaphysical, non-objectivist epistemology. By far the most promising contribution should be a version of pragmatism.

Key words: cognitive constructivism, critical realism, epistemology, pragmatism, reality, viability, radical constructivism

Functional information means an encoded network of functions in living organisms, which is represented by two components: code and an interpretation system, which together form a self-sustaining semantic closure. The interpretation system consists of inference rules that control the correspondence between the code and the function. The utility factor operates at multiple time scales: short-term selection drives evolution towards higher survival and reproduction rates within a given fitness landscape, and long-term selection favors those inference rules that support adaptability and lead to evolutionary expansion of certain lineages. Inference rules make short-term selection possible by shaping the fitness landscape and defining possible directions of evolution, but they are under the control of the long-term selection of lineages. Communication normally occurs within a set of agents with compatible interpretation systems, which I call a “communication system” (e.g., a biological species is a genetic communication system). This view of the relation between utility and inference can resolve the conflict between realism/positivism and pragmatism. Realism overemphasizes the role of inference in evolution of human knowledge because it assumes that logic is embedded in reality. Pragmatism substitutes usefulness for truth and therefore ignores the advantage of inference. The proposed concept of evolutionary pragmatism rejects the idea that logic is embedded in reality; instead, inference rules are constructed within each communication system to represent reality, and they evolve towards higher adaptability on a long time-scale. Relevance: This paper applies pragmatism and ineractivism (Bickhard) to biological evolution. It suggests that biosemiotics rests on evolutionary pragmatism.

John Stewart commits himself to the defence of a demanding version of enaction. Among its many original features, John’s version of enaction includes a questionable form of anti-representationalism, and leaves room for the Varelian idea that intentionality is a biological property. This stance anticipates contemporary endorsements in 4E cognition of intentionality as a non-representational and non-contentful property. Once it is deprived of its representational tinsels, intentionality appears to us again as a property of object-directedness. Nevertheless, is the autopoietic model of intentionality as object-directedness coherent and convincing? And do we need intentionality when we describe the meaningful relations between organisms and their environments? The article seeks to answer to these questions.

Key words: enaction, intentionality, autopoiesis, representationalism, pragmatism, sense-making.

Review of Bernhard Poerksen, The Certainty of Uncertainty: Dialogues Introducing Constructivism, translated from German by Alison Rosemary Koeck and Wolfram Karl Koeck, Imprint Academic, 2003, 192 pp., £14. 95/$29. 90. Bernhard Poerksen, a Junior Professor of journalism and communication theory at the University of Hamburg, has composed a very nice little book, consisting of interviews with some of the leading proponents of the constructivist school-which is probably not a school, but a convenient expression for some similarities between some writers, leaving apart their differences. His victims are Heinz von Foerster, Ernst von Glasersfeld, Humberto R. Maturana, Francisco J. Varela, Gerhard Roth, Siegfried J. Schmidt, Helm Stierlin, and Paul Watzlawick. He has taken the role of the television interviewer, using his favorite position face to face with a series of celebrities to pose all the questions which the viewer would like to pose himself, and pressing them on their logic and consistency. Poerksen is well acquainted with their works and well prepared, so that he can follow them to their pet areas, whether is in pragmatism, brain theory or therapy. Often his questions are what Heinz von Foerster calls positive, meaning that they are not based on a conflicting theory, but accept the point of view of the interviewee in order to clarify and elaborate. In this way, you can do propaganda for a theory even by criticizing it. Poerksen is a sympathetic interviewer, and as he is too young to be a competitor, he is getting an excellent treatment by his chosen theorists, according to the principle that an old cat will fight another old cat, but never a kitten.

This paper is intended as a companion paper to two others focused on the links between Pragmatism and George Kelly’s theory of personal constructs: Butt’s (2005) discussion of George Herbert Mead (1863–1931), and McWilliams’ (2009) account of the ideas of William James (1842–1910). Given that much of what has been said about Pragmatism and PCP in these last papers, and also in Warren (1998, 2003) applies almost equally to Dewey, the present paper attempts to present a different perspective and to highlight lesser known matters that are hopefully not only interesting in their own right but also raise similarities and points of contrast between the intellectual careers of Dewey and Kelly. Thus is here presented a discussion of some aspects of the ideas and career of a thinker long identified with North American Pragmatism, in the light of Kelly’s (1955/1991) comment that Dewey’s “philosophy and psychology can be read between many of the lines of the psychology of personal constructs” (p. 154/108). The discussion is necessarily selective, and in the context of a focus on the historical and theoretical origins of PCP. Its aim is to provide a fuller sketch of the wider climate of ideas to which both Dewey and Kelly were subjected as their scholarly work and their careers developed.

Key words: personal construct psychology, pragmatism, kelly, dewey.

Predictive processing and its apparent commitment to explaining cognition in terms of Bayesian inference over hierarchical generative models seems to flatly contradict the pragmatist conception of mind and experience. Against this, I argue that this appearance results from philosophical overlays at odd with the science itself, and that the two frameworks are in fact well-poised for mutually beneficial theoretical exchange. Specifically, I argue: first, that predictive processing illuminates pragmatism���s commitment to both the primacy of pragmatic coping in accounts of the mind and the profound organism-relativity of experience; second, that this pragmatic, “narcissistic” character of prediction error minimization undermines its ability to explain the distinctive normativity of intentionality; and third, that predictive processing therefore mandates an extra-neural account of intentional content of exactly the sort that pragmatism���s communitarian vision of human thought can provide.