Personal construct and family systems theories can profit from an exchange of ideas concerning the relationship between their personal and interpersonal aspects of construction. This article examines three possible points of contact between the two orientations. First, we suggest that personal construct psychology could profit from addressing the important contributions of the family context to the development of each individual’s system. Second, we address the impact of the person’s constructions on the larger family system. Third, we suggest that the family system itself develops a system of shared constructions that define and bind its identity and interactions. Each of these areas of interface carries implications for therapy, and specific intervention techniques corresponding to each of these are discussed.

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.

This article is a critical analysis of Maturana’s recent works as applied to the social and behavioral sciences. It proposes that there is a major contradiction in Maturana’s “structure determinism” which prevents a consistent epistemological and ontological perspective. The concept of change is viewed as crucial to understanding Maturana’s work and to extending his ideas to form a consistent philosophical viewpoint, which is defined as the third epistemology for the social and behavioral sciences. Accordingly, the idea of structure is abdicated. It is proposed that the new perspective on Maturana’s work has practical application to the social and behavioral sciences, in general, and family therapy, in particular.

The schema mechanism is a general learning and concept-building mechanism intended to simulate aspects of Piagetian cognitive development during infancy. A computer program that implements the schema mechanism, MARCSYST I, has replicated several early milestones in the Piagetian infant’s invention of the concept of permanent object. In Piaget’s constructivist theory, an infant first represents the world only in terms of simple sensory and motor elements; initially, there is no concept of persistent, external objects-objects that exist even when not perceived. The infant must construct this concept, working backward from the perceptions that manifest external objects. This conceptual leap is first of a long series of such constructions, extending through adult-level intelligence. The schema mechanism connects to a simulated body in a microworld. The mechanism learns from its experiences by processes of induction, abstraction, and invention. A novel induction technique builds schemas, each of which asserts that a given action, in certain contexts, has particular results; contexts and results are expressed in terms of binary state elements called items. Crucially, the schema mechanism not only thus discovers relations among existing representational elements (actions and items), but also constructs new such elements. For any achievable result, the mechanism can define a new, abstract action, the action of achieving that result. Most important, the mechanism can synthesize new state elements to designate aspects of the world that the existing repertoire of representations fails to express, thus inventing new concepts. The schema mechanism builds schemas, expressing the context-dependent results of actions, by an induction technique called marginal attribution. Discovering the results of actions is complicated by the fact that a particular action typically has different effects on different occasions. Until the corresponding context conditions have been identified, a result is therefore difficult to identify as such, and vice versa. The marginal attribution facility solves this chicken-and-egg problem by identifying a relevant state transition-one which, even if it follows a given action only rarely, is even more rare in the absence of the action. Then, the mechanism searches for conditions under which the relevant result follows more reliably. The schema mechanism can define a new state element to represent the validity conditions of an unreliable schema. For example, suppose a given schema asserts that moving the hand to a certain body-relative position results in a tactile sensation. The schema mechanism defines a new state element to represent whatever unknown condition must hold for the schema to be valid; in this case, the condition is that there be a palpable object at that position. The concept of palpable objects is not built in; rather, this synthetic item itself implements the mechanism’s first approximation to that concept, thus reifying the schema’s validity conditions, treating the schema’s validity as a thing-in-itself. Having defined a new state element, the mechanism begins an open-ended process of finding the element’s verification conditions, which tell about its state.

This chapter presents a constructivist perspective on learning in science and discusses the implications of this perspective for teaching and learning in classrooms.