The author criticizes different varieties of constructionist theories of social problems. The strict version of constructionism is criticised for missing its objective and for not leading to a theory but only producing descriptions of rhetorical strategies. Contextual constructionism seems to suffer from unidentified objectivisms that are unavoidable but innocuous when handled in a reflexive manner. Schetsche’s reception of Baudrillards ideas seems to be unconvincing because of empirical and methodological reasons. There are alternatives that do not demand so many serious and unprovable assumptions. Some of these alternatives derived from modernization and globalisation theories and from Nedelmann’s Theory of Conflict Management are discussed.

Key words: constructionism, globalisation, rhetoric, modernization, ontological gerrymandering, professionalization, values conflict

Excerpt: Ecology is an eminently practical discipline, but the practical dilemmas of the ecological movement – and arguably of the environmental crisis itself – are the consequences of our failure to comprehend the complexity and unity of nature theoretically. The ecological crisis is first and foremost an epistemological crisis. 1 As Thomas Kuhn has taught us, such crises are potentially revolutionary episodes out of which new paradigms can emerge. 2 We have also learned from Kuhn that paradigm shifts are rarely sudden events; usually they unfold over decades or even centuries. So it has been with the search for a new paradigm that was inaugurated by Goethe’s scientific work. 3 As a practicing scientist and as a philosopher of science, Goethe both foresaw the crisis of mechanistic explanation and laid foundations for a new paradigm that might replace it. 4 In doing so, he also laid foundations for a future, alternative science of ecology. Although the term “ecology” did not exist until Ernst Haeckel coined it in 1866, Goethe was a profound ecologist in principle and practice if not yet in name. 5 This essay on four major “Goethean ecologists” seeks to add a brief chapter to the history of the reception of Goethe’s scientific work6 and also to Donald Worster’s now standard history of ecology, 7 which barely mentions Goethe in passing.

“Gaming the Trace” builds up the power of narrative structures from a consideration, first, of the trace – the event of minimal inscription – and next, of what is latent in the reception – that is, the construction – of the trace. I coin a word to capture this combination of grammatological event and observing process, semiolepsis, and relate these dynamics to an allegory of narrative reception. Metempsychosis, or the tale of the transmission of the soul from one body to another, comes forward as an allegory of the reception of the trace. From here the essay moves to an interrogation of the movie Avatar’s mise en scène of the avatar system – its telling, its design specs, and its phantasmagoric realizations of technological metempsychoses. It turns out that an actual media technology exterior to that frame feeds another digital “transmission of soul” back into the physiological metamorphoses of the storyworld. Relevance: The essay expounds as well as applies a broadly Luhmannian framework of systems differentiations. Its methodology throughout is an application of epistemological constructivism and second-order systems theory.

In the reception of Josef Mitterer’s writings up to now, there are two predominant types of motifs: the radical constructivist background of his philosophy and the ontological and epistemological foundations and consequences of non-dualism. The critics are focused rather on some problematic consequences of non-dualism, ranging from the problem of infinite regress up to the thesis assuming that Mitterer’s philosophy presupposes a world reduced to descriptions. However, these two types of readings are founded on dualizing assumptions which are not coherent with non-dualism. \\Thus, in the present paper I interpret non-dualism in the frame of non-dual-ism, based on non-dualizing assumptions. I argue that non-dualism is a rhetorical project resulting in far-reaching consequences in the field of academic and scientific debates, poetics and practice of negotiations and deliberations, as well as in ordinary discourse. Non-dualism fulfills Richard Rorty’s dream of culture as a never-ending conversation in which the argument of power is successfully replaced by the power of argument. Mitterer makes transparent the rhetorical techniques performed in the dualizing discourse (not only in situations of conflict) in order to present an alternative – the non-dualizing mode of discourse. Mitterer’s philosophy – reread in the context of Rorty’s pragmatism, Foucault’s conception of discourses, Perelman’s new rhetoric – offers the new vocabulary (in Rorty’s meaning) which may change the practice of speaking

Key words: non-dualizing mode of speaking, description “so far” / “from now on, ” constructivism, rhetoric, discourse.

The paper presents a short story of radical constructivism and its applications in the field of Polish humanistic research. The authors claim that it is impossible to establish the coherent definition of radical constructivism due to its variability and changeability. There are rather different radical constructivist positions connected by the common assumptions (for example: the constructivist character of human cognition). The works of the founder of radical constructivism, Ernst von Glasersfeld, are still unknown in the Polish reception, however the authors find the excellent works inspired by the radical constructivist theses, also in the field of literary research.

Key words: radical constructivism, glasersfeld, empirical literary research.

Jakob von Uexküll’s (1864–1944) account of Umwelt has been proposed as a mediating concept to bridge the gap between ecological psychology’s realism about environmental information and enactivism’s emphasis on the organism’s active role in constructing the meaningful world it inhabits. If successful, this move would constitute a significant step towards establishing a single ecological-enactive framework for cognitive science. However, Uexküll’s thought itself contains different perspectives that are in tension with each other, and the concept of Umwelt is developed in representationalist terms that conflict with the commitments of both enactivism and ecological psychology. One central issue shared by all these approaches is the problem of how a living being experiences its environment. In this paper, we will look at Uexküll’s reception in French philosophy and highlight the different ways in which the concept of Umwelt functions in the work of Georges Canguilhem, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Gilles Deleuze. This analysis helps clarify different aspects of Uexküll’s thought and the deeper philosophical implications of importing his concepts into embodied cognitive science. This paper is part of a recent trend in which enactivism engages with continental philosophy in a way that both deepens and transcends the traditional links to phenomenology, including most recently the thought of Georg W. F. Hegel and Gilbert Simondon. However, no more than a brief outline and introduction to the potentials and challenges of this complex conceptual intersection can be given here. Our hope is that it serves to make more explicit the philosophical issues that are at stake for cognitive science in the question of experienced environments, while charting a useful course for future research.

Key words: deleuze, enactivism, world, merleau-ponty, von Uexküll

Excerpt: In 1955, two heavy volumes containing 1218 pages of The Psychology of Personal Constructs landed on the desks of psychologists. Kelly’s ‘brief introduction’ in the previous chapter is, in relation to the two volumes, indeed brief. The reception of this revolutionary work was mixed. We discuss some of the difficulties experienced by reviewers and subsequent readers later in this chapter. But, first, a word about the man who created this work.

The article presents the possibility of a dialogue between constructivism and the studies on historical reception. Based on the fixation on the location in historical epistemological efforts, it criticizes an unnecessarily radical constructivism with reference to evolutionary epistemology, and makes an appeal for a moderate ‘morphological constructivism’, which can be methodically applied in the form of ‘morphological imagology’. Subsequently, it illustrates a concrete example for the use of this morphological-constructivist method in the field of historical reception studies based on the Latin America reception of the German historian Georg Gottfried Gervinus. Even the argumentation of the representatives of radical constructivism is not able to negate the specific cognitive ambition of the historian to be able to make conclusive statements about the past. The historians’ obligation to the past, at least the right to veto the sources, prevails. Within this framework, however, the innovative potential of constructivist models and methods open a broad spectrum of possibilities for historical reception studies which take historical persons’ perceptions of reality seriously as a reality ‘sui generis’.

Context: Ernst von Glasersfeld’s radical constructivism (RC) develops two positions that are, for the founder of RC, necessarily linked: (1) all accessible realities are perceived realities, (2) perceived realities are “constructed” by “individuals.” Purpose: Von Glasersfeld refers quite often to the theory of evolution. Despite this frequent referring, he uses an evolutionary approach primarily when discussing the viability of constructs. Furthermore, although this use of evolutionary thinking is already restricted, it plays an even smaller part in the reception of RC. The first goal of this paper is to show that as a result of this restriction, individuals as “constructors” do not have enough properties to explain the production of behaviors that we observe. The second goal is to open a perspective on the much richer picture of human cognitive activities that results from the abolishment of this restriction. Approach: Starting with the difference between the interest of philosophers in the problem of “reality” and the problems that organisms have to solve in coping with their needs in varying environments, it is argued that, from an evolutionary perspective, only the perceived or “constructed” realities matter because they are the ones that allow organisms to survive, find partners, cooperate, etc. Hence, both the position of RC and the perception of the environment from an evolutionary perspective are compatible, as claimed by von Glasersfeld. Looking then at the individual, it is argued that RC mainly looks at the construction of realities as ontogenetic processes. Findings: As a result, the constructing individuals do not have enough properties to explain observable behavior or to predict the results of their cognitive constructions. Taking von Glasersfeld’s references to evolutionary theory seriously, it is argued that all organisms, and of course humans, have an evolutionary history that influences their construction of realities. Due to this broadly common background, all humans share an important number of inherited dispositions that influence the constructive processes of individuals. As a result, communication is possible, though not perfect, and there are transcultural (near-)universals and individual dispositions for solving reoccurring problems of social life, as shown by references to current research. Implications: The construct of the constructing individual in RC needs conceptual and interdisciplinary enrichment.

Key words: autopoiesis, communication, evolution, individual, regulation of social systems, universals

Ernst von Glasersfeld, *1917, studied mathematics in Zurich and Vienna, was a farmer in County Dublin during the War, and worked as a journalist in Italy from 1947. There he met the philosopher and cybernetician Silvio Ceccato who, in the beginning stages of the computer age, had gathered a team of researchers in order to carry out projects of computational linguistic analysis and automatic language translation. Ernst von Glasersfeld became a close collaborator of Ceccato’s, translated for him, and developed projects of his own. In 1966, he moved to the USA where he was made a professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Georgia in 1970. Three principal research interests have made him one of the well-known founders of constructivism. He systematically scoured the history of European philosophy for varieties of epistemological skepticism and set up an ancestral gallery reaching back to the insights of the ancient skeptics of the 4th century B. C. He replaced the classical realist concept of truth by the idea of viability: theories need not and do not correspond with what is real, he says, but they must be practicable and useful, they must be viable. Finally, he introduced the work of the Swiss developmental psychologist, Jean Piaget, into the constructivist debate. Jean Piaget, in his book La construction du reel chez l’enfant, constructs a model of how knowledge is created and developed through the confirmation or disappointment of expectations (or, more precisely, of particular patterns of action, so-called schemes). A model of this kind has profound consequences for the conception of learning and teaching: it eliminates the reification of information and knowledge, the conception of knowledge as a substance that can be transferred from the teacher’s head to the empty heads of students. The mechanical idea of teaching evaporates. We must face the ineluctable subjectivity of meanings and given cognitive patterns. From this perspective, the acquisition of knowledge no longer appears to be a passive reception of information but a creative activity. The upshot is that teaching someone something will only be successful if it is oriented toward the reality of that someone. Ernst von Glasersfeld is, at present, with the Scientific Reasoning Research Institute of the University of Massachusetts. There he works on models of teaching and learning that apply the theory of constructivism to school practice.