Two aspects of Vico’s constructivist epistemology are germane to contemporary cognitive developmental psychology. These aspects are Vico’s account of cognitive operations and of the limits to human knowledge of the world. Drawing on Vico’s epistemological treatise, and on contemporary commentary on Vico, it is argued that this eighteenth-century constructivist epistemology is useful in two ways. First, by being a consistent, and so radical, constructivism it may be helpful in clarifying the meaning of the environment in Piaget’s theory. Second, the description of mental operations may provide a way of overcoming objections to the overly formal quality of Piaget’s basic concrete-operational structures.

Key words: Cognitive development, Genetic epistemology, Piaget, Realism, Theory formulation, Vico

Context: This article describes the educational and personal context in which the author met Ernst von Glasersfeld at the University of Georgia in 1975. Problem: The aim is to situate von Glasersfeld’s work from 1975 in its context and show how some of the well-known strands of this work emerged and their implications in many fields. Method: The social context of the educational scene in the 1960s and 1970s is described together with a variety of incidents and plans and seminars in which the author was involved. Results: Von Glasersfeld’s work as a philosopher of constructivism with an empirical method for analysing concepts came at a time when psychologists and educationalists were ready to see how best to work with Piaget’s theory. Ernst’s insights into his radical constructivism, and his historical understanding of Vico’s epistemology nourished a generation of scholars beginning at the University of Georgia. These insights quickly permeated into the field of psychotherapy. On a personal note, the insights influenced the author’s own life’s research and professional work. Implications: By examining the origins of some of Ernst von Glasersfeld’s key ideas in their diversity, the aim is to show how broadly his ideas have been used in fields from child centred learning to psychotherapy.

Key words: constructivism, Giambattista Vico, Jean Piaget, education, psychotherapy

Vico’s constructivist epistemology is compared with that of Piaget with a view to clarifying Piaget’s theory of knowledge. Piaget’s interpreters often show a lack of concern with the metaphysical foundations of cognitive structures. Vico’s emphasis on the limitations of human knowledge, therefore, is helpful in avoiding interpretive inconsistency. In Vico’s and in Piaget’s radical constructivism, knowledge is non-ontological in the sense that no claims may be made about the relation between cognitive structures and reality. Structural adequacy is derived from the consistency of the self-referencing cognitive system.

Key words: radical constructivism, history

Within the limits of one chapter, an unconventional way of thinking can certainly not be thoroughly justified, but it can, perhaps, be presented in its most characteristic features anchored here and there in single points. There is, of course, the danger of being misunderstood. In the case of constructivism, there is the additional risk that it will be discarded at first sight because, like skepticism – with which it has a certain amount in common – it might seem too cool and critical, or simply incompatible with ordinary common sense. The proponents of an idea, as a rule, explain its nonacceptance differently than do the critics and opponents. Being myself much involved, it seems to me that the resistance met in the 18th century by Giambattista Vico, the first true constructivist, and by Silvio Ceccato and Jean Piaget in the more recent past, is not so much due to inconsistencies or gaps in their argumentation, as to the justifiable suspicion that constructivism intends to undermine too large a part of the traditional view of the world. Indeed, one need not enter very far into constructivist thought to realize that it inevitably leads to the contention that man – and man alone – is responsible for his thinking, his knowledge and, therefore, also for what he does. Today, when behaviorists are still intent on pushing all responsibility into the environment, and sociobiologists are trying to place much of it into genes, a doctrine may well seem uncomfortable if it suggests that we have no one but ourselves to thank for the world in which we appear to be living. That is precisely what constructivism intends to say – but it says a good deal more. We build that world for the most part unawares, simply because we do not know how we do it. That ignorance is quite unnecessary. Radical constructivism maintains – not unlike Kant in his Critique – that the operations by means of which we assemble our experiential world can be explored, and that an awareness of this operating (which Ceccato in Italian so nicely called consapevolezza operativa) can help us do it differently and, perhaps, better.

The paper proposes a way of distinguishing rational, scientific language from the discourse of poets, mystics, and metaphysicians, based on the description of two kinds of metaphor suggested by Vico. It concludes with the suggestion that scientific fundamentalism is as misguided as the religious versions and that a proper balance of the scientific and the mystical is crucial for the future of our world.

Key words: philosophy, science

The paper proposes a way of distinguishing rational, scientific language from the discourse of poets, mystics, and metaphysicians, based on the description of two kinds of metaphor suggested by Vico. It concludes with the suggestion that scientific fundamentalism is as misguided as the religious versions and that a proper balance of the scientific and the mystical is crucial for the future of our world.

Key words: science, poetic wisdom

Excerpt: I briefly want to explain my interpretation of certain key ideas proposed by three among the thinkers from whom I drew as I was formulating the radical theory of knowing. Vico and Berkeley have been dead for almost two and a half centuries, Piaget for a decade. None of them, I suspect, would agree whole­heartedly with my interpretation of what they intended to say. This does not greatly worry me. All three tended to disagree with most, if not all, of the interpretations of their work that came to their eyes during their life time. Had they witnessed the most recent developments in the philosophy of science, they might have been radicalized themselves.

Key words: Vico, Berkeley, Piaget, being, reality, truth, radical constructivism

In recent years a new movement in the philosophy of education has arisen. It flies the banner of “constructivism, ” taking its name, Ernst von Glasersfeld tells us, from comments of the eighteenth century Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico. Vico was an admirer of the work of René Descartes, the seventeenth century philosopher, mathematician, and scientist, who offered rational explanations of a wide range of natural phenomena, for which he is famous to this day. Unfortunately, Descartes’ writings had been banned by the Church, suffering the same fate as those of Copernicus and Galileo. And that region of the Italian peninsula was then ruled by a Spanish viceroy, who, like the king he served, had little tolerance for ideas that might be seen as challenging religious authorities. For this reason, Vico faced a difficult problem in publishing his philosophy of history, which sought rational and historical explanations of the origin of human cultures from early primitive beginnings to the complexities of European states of that day. Such explanations might seem to conflict with the conventional wisdom that human societies were the work of Divine providence, being properly ruled by kings responsible only to God. His solution was to tell us that, as God had created the world, only He could truly know it. The best that mere humans could do was to construct their own ideas about it, without pretending that these could ever reach the stature of His knowledge. By putting matters in this way, Vico was successful in getting the publication of his work permitted by the Church, and his philosophy of history stands today as a historical landmark on its own.

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

To better appreciate the contribution of the ‘paradigm of complexity’ in Educational sciences, this paper proposes a framework discussing its cultural and historical roots. First, it focuses on Giambattista Vico’s (1668–1744) critique of René Descartes’ method (1637), contrasting Cartesian’s principles (evidence, disjunction, linear causality and enumeration), with the open rationality of the ‘ingenium’ (capacity to establish relationships and contextualize). Acknowledging the teleological character of scientific inquiry (Bachelard) and the inseparability between ‘subject’ and ‘object’, the second part of the text explores the relevance of ‘designo’ (intentional design) implemented by Leonardo da Vinci (1453–1519) in order to identify and formulate problems encountered by researchers. Referring to contemporary epistemologists (Bachelard, Valéry, Simon, Morin), this contribution finally questions the relationships between the ‘ingenio’ (pragmatic intelligence), the ‘designo’ (modeling method) and ethics. It proposes one to conceive the paradigm of complexity through the relationships it establishes between (pragmatic) action, (epistemic) reflection and meditation (ethics).