Context: For many people, religion and/or spiritual experiences are an important part of their daily lives - shaping their thinking and actions. Studying these experiences relies on qualitative religious studies (RS) research that engages respondents on a deeply personal level. Problem: Researchers are unable to provide an apolitical, value-free approach to research. There lacks a rigorous methodological approach to qualitative RS research that addresses this epistemological obstacle. This is particularly relevant when studying a cohort with radically different beliefs from the researcher. Method: Researcher coupling is presented as a topic that defines the researcher and her participants as a systemic entity. By demonstrating how the researcher’s worldview is tied to her research, an argument for personalised and relational observer-dependent research is presented. Five reflexive questions are proposed as a starting point for personalised research to demonstrate the relational and intersubjective nature of this activity. Results: By linking the researcher to her research and changing the goal of research from independent and objective research to one that is relational and contextual, the scholar can report on her research in an ethical and socially just manner by linking her worldview to her research. Implications: The traditional research activity is redefined as one that should embrace the scholar’s worldview instead of attempting to hide it. The scientific ideals of independence and objectivity are replaced by interdependence and hence a proposal is made for personalised research that embraces the intersubjective nature of this activity. This proposal is meant to alleviate some of the epistemological weaknesses in RS. This paradigm shift promotes rigour as a qualifier for methodology including changes to how research is categorised. Constructivist content: Margaret Mead’s ideas of observer dependence in anthropological research and how the observer constructs her research findings are discussed. The circularity that exists in this relational context is analysed according to Bradford Keeney’s ideas on recursion and resultant future behavioural correction. Ranulph Glanville’s ideas of intersubjectivity and his concept of “in the between” are used as a foundation for the researcher-participant relationship. Ross Ashby’s notion of experimenter coupling is used as a basis for researcher coupling.

Key words: Epistemology, ethics, personalised and relational research, religious studies, rigour, research methodology, worldview.

The Tree of Knowledge, by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, is a landmark attempt to integrate biology, cognition, and epistemology into a single science, reversing the dualism of fact and value, and of observer and observed, that has haunted the West since the seventeenth century. The authors see perception as a reciprocal and interacting phenomenon, a “dance of congruity” that takes place between a living entity and its environment. This, they argue, implies a relativity of worldviews (there are no certainties), as well as the existence of a biology of cooperation going back millions of years. Recognition of a lack of absolutes, and of the nature of perception itself, they assert, make it possible for us today to change things for the better, as a deliberate and conscious act. What is overlooked in this discussion, however, are the origins and nature of conflict. By being pointedly apolitical, the authors wind up implying that one worldview is as good as the next. Cognitively speaking, the substitution of Buddhism for politics is a serious error, leaving, as it does, too many crucial questions unanswered. It is thus doubtful whether the biological argument being advanced here can stand up to serious scrutiny, and whether the dualism of modern science has indeed been overcome. Yet The Tree of Knowledge remains an important milestone in our current efforts to recognize that science is not value-free, and that fact and value are inevitably tied together. We are finally going to have to create a science that does not split the two apart, and that puts the human being back into the world as an involved participant, not as an alienated observer.

We discuss a constructivist model of epistemic development based on the notion of increased complexity. This model proposes that as cognitive complexity increases by means of cycles of validation and invalidation, personal epistemic assumptions shift from positivism to constructivism, and preferred worldviews shift from mechanism to organicism – as defined by Pepper’s (1942) taxonomy of world hypotheses. We report two studies in which we found, as predicted, a significant relationship among overall cognitive complexity, constructivist epistemic assumptions, and an organicist worldview. However, our attempt to discriminate the effects of the two theoretical dimensions of cognitive complexity (differentiation and integration) was not successful. Our data also indicate a dichotomy of ways of knowing: One is characterized by cognitive simplicity, objectvist epistemic assumptions, and a mechanistic/formistic worldview; the other is characterized by cognitive complexity, constructivist epistemic assumptions, and an organicist/contextualist worldview.

Open peer commentary on the article “A Temporal Puzzle: Metamorphosis of the Body in Piaget’s Early Writings” by Marc J. Ratcliff. Abstract: We follow Ratcliff in explicating and justifying the method Piaget used to study the developmental pathways of emerging skills in infancy. We move toward justifying this method by showing how it follows from his constructivist, process worldview.

Theories and languages have in common that they aim at describing the world and the experiences made in the world. The specificity of theories is based on the fact that they code certain laws of nature. The specificity of languages is based on the fact that they code our worldview by means of their syntax. Also mathematics can be considered as theory in so far as it codes the constituting axioms. Language can achieve the objectivity postulated by analytical philosophy only if it can refer to a mathematics and logic being objective in the sense of platonism and based on a definitive set of axioms, or if the world-view concerned is definitive and based upon an objective (and therefore definitive) set of laws of nature. The first way is blocked by Goedel’s incompleteness theorem. The objectivity of the laws of nature being necessary for going the second way is questioned as well by what is called the constructivist evolutionary epistemology (CEE): the perceived patterns and regularities from which we derive the laws of nature is considered by the CEE to be invariants of inborn cognitive (sensory) operators. Then, the so called laws of nature are the result of cognitive evolution and therefore are human specific. Whether, e.g., we would identify the law of energy conservation which in physics results from the homogeneity of time, depends on the mental time-metric generator defining what is homogeneous in time. If cognitive operators are extended by means of experimental operators the result can be expressed in classical terms if both commute in the sense of operator algebra (quantitative extensions). Otherwise results would be inconsistent with the classical worldview and would require non-classical approaches such as quantum mechanics (qualitative extensions). As qualitative extensions can never be excluded from future experimental reasearch, it follows that the development of theories cannot converge towards a definitive set of laws of nature or a definitive ‘theory of everything’ describing the structure of reality. Also the structures of mathematics and logic we use have to be considered als invariants of mental operators. It turns out that the incompleteness theorem of Goedel has to be seen as analogy of the incompleteness of physical theories due to possible qualitative experimental extensions. Language, therefore, cannot be considered as an objective depiction of independently existing facts and matters but only as a theory generating propositions being consistent with our world-view. The competence of language is based on the fact that the mental mechanisms generating the ontology we use in our syntax are related to those generating our perceptions. Similar applies to the relationship between the operators generating perceived and mathematical structures enabling us to compress empirical data algorithmically (i.e. to transform them into mathematically articulated theories) and then to extrapolate them by means of the theory concerned (inductive inference). An analogue mechanism establishes our ability to compress verbal texts semantically (i.e. to reduce them to their meaning) and then to extrapolate them (i.e. to draw correct conclusions within the framework of the meaning concerned). This suggests a modified notion of meaning seing it as a linguistic analogy to theories. Similar to physical and mathematical theories also languages can be extended qualitatively particularly by means of metaphorical combinations of semantically noncompatible elements. The development of languages towards it actual richness can be seen as a process of ongoing metaphorosation. this leads to some parallels between verbal, cultural and genetic communication.

Constructivism is a wonderful philosophical breakthrough. It is also a perfect tool for praxis in the field of organizational management. Consider the organizational imperfections of miscommunications, incompetence, disorganization, disruption, disobedience, inequity, disloyalty, politics, unethical behavior, conflict, and cynicism. According to the Constructivist worldview...these do not exist. We construct them, and, if so, we can deconstruct them to creatively deal with them. Graymanship presents a constructivist answer to the question “Where do you draw the line” and applies that to the eleven imperfections above.

This paper describes a tentative model for how discrete memories transform into an interconnected conceptual network, or worldview, wherein relationships between memories are forged by way of abstractions. The model draws on Kauffman’s theory of how an information-evolving system can emerge through the formation and closure of an autocatalytic network. Here, the information units are not catalytic molecules, but memories and abstractions, and the process that connects them is not catalysis but reminding events (i.e., one memory evokes another). The result is a worldview that both structures, and is structured by, self-triggered streams of thought.

In this paper, I will discuss the application of Maturana and Varela’s theories of autopoiesis, cognition and language to the notions of worldview, worldview change and curriculum design. The context for this discussion is the education of systems concepts, thinking and practice. It has been argued that systemic thinking requires the adoption of particular assumptions into the worldview of the student, independent of the systems concepts under study. This raises the question of how best to structure a curriculum to meet this end. It will be argued that autopoietic theory, when applied to systems education has significant implications for curriculum design.

Key words: Autopoietic theory, systems education, worldview change, curriculum design, systems practice

Basing on scientific results Radical Constructivism and Evolutionary Epistemology claim to be able to answer the question concerning the epistemological status of our knowledge – but they arrive at opposite conditions regarding the constructive or realistic character of our worldview. A critical discussion of these two positions reveals that they don’t satisfy their own demands. The limits of an exclusively scientifically based epistemology are getting obvious when we bring up the genetic epistemology of Jean Piaget who ties the knowledge of the world down to acting in the world, which brings the actor back into epistemology and transcends the realm of science. This discloses at the same time the insufficiency of a bipolar questioning that turns constructivism and realism into an unsuperable antogonism. In a concluding reflection the necessity of a sociological enlargement of the analysis of the process of knowledge is being established.

This chapter reviews the research, focusing particularly on studies that support a new synthesis of learning theory, epistemology and philosophy of science. In physics, the earliest and most powerful studies investigated students’ conceptions of basic Newtonian mechanics. Many students, regardless of age or prior experience, appear to subscribe to a kind of Aristotelian notion of moving bodies. In contrast to the Newtonian view, these students hold that moving objects are kept in motion by a constant force, and in the absence of a force, the objects are either at rest or slowing down. These views have been elicited from many students who have been asked to forecast the course of a moving body acted on by an exterior force. The consequence, as diSessa describes it, is “a collision” between an Aristotelian worldview and a Newtonian reality. Students’ explanations of natural phenomena often resemble theories offered by previous generations of scientists and natural philosophers. The fundamental hypothesis of genetic epistemology is that there is a parallelism between progress made in the rational and logical organization of knowledge, and the corresponding psychological processes. Learning is the responsibility of the learner, and the conscious decision to learn meaningfully is one that only students can make.