This article offers a brief response to Hine’s article, “On Reading the Stamford Papers on Constructivism: A Physicist’s Reactions” (1993, pp. 45–47).

Expressions like “constructivism,” “construction of knowledge,” “learners construct meaning,” and similar ones are starting to become part of the language of science education. We are liable to hear them in professional meetings or inservice workshops and to read them in articles in the professional journals. As the term constructivism becomes more widespread, different people tend to use it with slightly different meanings, and some use it in a loose way to designate a complex of different pedagogical, psychological, or philosophical tendencies. (The ideas about constructivism explained in this chapter are in no way to be taken as an attempt to define the “orthodoxy” of constructivism. Consistent with a constructivist view, they are simply a model of what it means to know. The claim of this model is to be a viable view of knowledge. This chapter aims at presenting the model and exploring from there some relations with teaching and learning of science.) These tendencies seem to have in common the central assumption that all we come to know is our own construction.

Excerpt: Although I do not agree with the author’s claim that the schema mechanism corresponds to Piaget’s constructivist theory, I nonetheless consider Drescher’s approach as a kind of Constructivism and his research as a pioneering contribution to the application of Constructivism in AI tasks.

There are many varieties of epistemological and cognitive constructivism. They have in common an appreciation of the failures of centuries of attempts to realize a correspondence notion of truth and representation, and they all propose some constructivist programme as an alternative. The programmatic proposals, however, can differ greatly. Some contemporary constructivisms that are being vigorously advocated propose a social form of idealism with a consequent relativism. Such proposals risk giving constructivism a bad name. The main burden of this article is to show that such an idealism and relativism is not forced by constructivism, but, instead, is the result of an additional and questionable presupposition. Constructivism per se is a strong epistemological position that is fully compatible with realism.

Key words: cognition, constructivism, correspondence, encoding, epistemology, idealism, realism, relativism, representation

This article reviews recent work in socio-historical technology studies. Four problems, frequently mentioned in critical debates, are discussed – relativism, reflexivity, theory, and practice. The main body of the article is devoted to a discussion of the latter two problems. Requirements for a theory on socio-technical change are proposed, and one concrete example of a conceptual framework that meets these requirements is discussed. The second point of the article is to argue that present (science and) technology studies arc now able to break away from a too academic, internalistic perspective and return to the politically relevant “Science, Technology & Society” issues that informed much of this work more than a decade ago.

The new discipline of cybernetics expanded exponentially in the period 1943–70. Unlike traditional scientific disciplines, its practitioners claimed (to varying degrees) that they were producing a new universal science. This paper anatomizes the claim to universality, details some rhetorical strategies used to support that claim, and examines some practical consequences for the general economy of the sciences argued by cyberneticians. It concludes by characterizing cybernetic strategies in terms of a form complementary to the obligatory passage point – the ‘distributed passage point’.

From the perspective of second order cybernetics this paper examines in which respects psychology can claim to be a science. It focuses on the limits of mechanistic description in the behavioral sciences. Through the Danish psychologist Iven Reventlow’s works, the article analyzes the use of the Galilean concepts of law in psychology. Reventlow attempts to create basic methods and concepts for a Galilean (law determined) psychology in the tradition of Kurt Lewin through work with animal models in the tradition of ethology. His standard experimental model is the male Stickleback guarding its nest – a small fish in its partly self-created world. Reventlow’s aim is to describe the “behavioral personality” of the organism keeping description and causal analysis and explanation on the behavioural level. To this end he works with a statistical model which do not hide the individuals characteristics by rolling them into an average. In this process, however, he finds that he cannot make a final separation of the organism and the environment. It is not possible to carry through either the mechanistic or the dualistic point of view. This finding is discussed in the light of von Foerster’s and Maturana’s second order cybernetic positions on the observer, observation, autopoiesis and the multiverse. The limitations of these theories carries the analysis further. A realistic, non-reductionistic and constructivistic viewpoint is developed from some of N. Luhmann’s formulations.

In the late 1950's Gordon Pask constructed several electrochemical devices having emergent sensory capabilities. These control systems possessed the ability to adaptively construct their own sensors, thereby choosing the relationship between their internal states and the world at large. Devices were built that evolved de novo sensitivity to sound or magnetic fields. Pask’s devices have far-reaching implications for artificial intelligence, self-constructing devices, theories of observers and epistemically-autonomous agents, theories of functional emergence, machine creativity, and the limits of contemporary machine learning paradigms.

Key words: Epistemology, cybernetics, self-organizing systems, emergence, sensory evolution, machine creativity, evolutionary robotics, artificial intelligence, artificial life, autonomous agents.

Excerpt: Constructivism is a concept that in recent years has garnered considerable attention among science education researchers. Essentially, constructivism is a model of how learning takes place. Yager (1991, p. 53) called it a “most promising model” of learning. Yeany (1991, p. 1) alluded to a Kuhnian paradigm shift and suggested that constructivism may lead “to a gelling of existing thought as well as the stimulation of new ideas.” We do not believe this is hyperbole. In fact, we would add that the potential extends far beyond the bounds of science education (see e.g., Aderman & Russell, 1990). It seems to us that constructivist thought is applicable in any learning situation, including educational and psychological consultation. In this column, we first briefly describe constructivist thought as it has developed in the field of science education. Second, we suggest that constructivism can provide a promising conceptual framework for organizing research and practice in the various fields in which consultation is practiced.