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.

In arguing that the philosophical works of Jean Piaget could be used as a `remedy’ for the flaws in those of Thomas Kuhn, Tsou overlooked some crucial aspects of the problem: the early history between them, the biological foundation supporting Piaget’s method, and a preexisting suggestion regarding the intended future extension of his work. There was also no mention of the existence of a `lost’ manuscript by Kuhn, which supposedly presents the mature articulation of his theory. This comment therefore proposes some `friendly amendments’ to Tsou’s exposition, with a view to helping achieve his synthetic vision once the `lost’ work has finally been published. Yet the basic message, in anticipation of this future endeavor, is also exceedingly simple: the implicit direction of Piaget’s (and Kuhn’s) epistemological constructivism can be characterized as evolutionary-developmental `progress from, ’ rather than vitalist-teleological `progress toward. '

In this chapter, I want to address two issues. The first one is a local issue within current debates about social cognition pertaining to differences between simulation theory (ST) and interaction theory (IT) in the understanding of intercorporeity. I then want to use this issue to address a larger, less local one concerning science. More specifically, depending on what one concludes about the debate between ST and IT, the implication is that either one can continue to do science as we have been doing it, or one has to do it differently. This distinction between ways of doing science is not the same as the distinction between normal and revolutionary science described by Thomas Kuhn (1962). Something different is at stake. It’s not simply a paradigm shift that would change our conception of nature (or in this case, the nature of human behavior) in a way that would allow us to do science as usual, but rather a change in our conception of nature that would suggest a different way of doing science. This change, I’ll argue, is prefigured in the thinking of Merleau-Ponty (1967, 2012) concerning the notion of form or structure in his early works.

Key words: social cognition, interaction theory, body schema, simulation theory, social cognitive function

Upshot: Jehane Barton Burns (now Jehane Kuhn) worked with Ernst von Glasersfeld in the 1960’s on semantic analysis for machine translation at Silvio Ceccato’s Centro di Cibernetica at the University of Milan. Among subsequent formative experiences, she lists Italian travels with Howard Burns, historian of architecture (who first told her about Vico), and a decade in the Office of Charles and Ray Eames (where Constraints was a talismanic word). She and Thomas Kuhn married in 1982; she still considers the English language her raison d’être.

Key words: Ernst von Glasersfeld

This paper is critical of constructivism. It examines the philosophical underpinnings of the theory, it outlines the impact of the doctrine on contemporary science education, it details the relativist and subjectivist interpretation of Thomas Kuhn���s work found in constructivist writings, it indicates the problems that constructivist theory places in the way of teaching the content of science, and finally it suggests that a lot of old-fashioned, perfectly reasonable educational truisms and concepts are needlessly cloaked in constructivist jargon that inhibites communication with educationalists and policy makers.

Key words: constructivism, epistemology, thomas kuhn.