There seem to be as many definitions of constructivism as there are minds to construct them. At least this is how it felt after reading the chapters by Duit (chap. 14), Saxe (chap. 15), and Spivey (chap. 16). Or perhaps there are as many questionings of constructivist ideas as practices in the field of education. For example, a teacher experiences a different set of constraints than a researcher or a designer, and these constraints in turn shape theories of learning in different ways.

Functional and pragmatic approaches to grammar, and to language more broadly, are well known. All of these approaches, however, accept a core aspect of sentences, or utterances, as consisting of encodings of propositions. They proceed on their functional and pragmatic explorations with this much, at least, taken for granted. I wish to argue, to the contrary, that the functional characteristics of utterances penetrate even to the level of the structure – the grammar – of supposed propositional encodings. More specifically, I argue that the structure that is taken as a structure of propositional encodings is not that at all, but is instead a structure of functionally organized action. Constraints on such structures, in turn – constraints on grammars – emerge as intrinsic constraints on that functional organization. My point will of necessity be made programmatically, since to fill it out completely would be to complete a functional version of universal grammar. The mere logical possibility of intrinsic constraints on the grammatical possibilities of language refutes attempts to construe grammatical constraints as logically arbitrary. Typically, because grammatical constraints are construed as being (logically) arbitrary, some additional explanation of the constraints is required should those constraints be shown or argued to be universal. That additional explanation is usually some equally logically arbitrary innateness postulate. I will show that the possibility of intrinsic grammatical constraints invalidates standard arguments for such innateness – specifically, that such a possibility invalidates the poverty of the stimulus argument. Grammatical constraints are not the only characteristics of language that are intrinsic to its nature. I also show how phenomena of implicature, the hermeneutic circle, and forms of creative language can be understood as being naturally emergent in the functional nature of language. Most broadly, then, intrinsic constraints constitute a rich realm for exploration in attempting to understand language.

There are many issues presented, touched on, and presupposed in the chapters in this volume-issues that have, in some cases, ancient historical roots and many variants and complexities. In searching for a framework within which I felt I could approach these chapters in some integrated way, I was forced back to these historical roots. This volume is a moment in a very long conversation (Melchert, 1991), and it cannot be understood outside of the context of that conversation. Consequently, I elaborate on the general historical issues, commenting on and criticizing them as well as their instances herein.

From an ecological perspective, humans are built to detect important meanings in their life spaces. These meanings are not so much imposed on reality as already there in reality. However, humans still construct their realities in the sense that what patterns of meaning they respond to are differentially determined by what they attend to. Thus they configure their realities. Humans experience their realities primarily in terms of nonverbal, nonconceptual detection of meaning patterns. Perception needs to be distinguished from cognition, and it is argued that the “human as aesthetic experiencer” is a better model of how humans function than the “human as naive scientist”. Implications for psychotherapy, such as for the concepts of resistance and transference, are discussed.

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.

This paper discusses how the second order cybernetics of von Foerster, Maturana, Varela and Luhmann, can be fruitfully integrated with Peirce’s semiotics through the bio-semiotics of Hoffmeyer. The conclusion is that what distinguish animals from machines is that they are autopoietic, have code-duality and through their living organization constitutes a biological interpretant. Through this they come to inhabit a new life world: their games of life take place in their own semiotic Umwelt (von Uexküll). It is the biological context and the history of the species and the individual the determine the meaning of signs in the structural couplings that constitutes the channels of communication. Inspired by Wittgenstein’s theory of language games as the context that determines semantic content of the expressions of sentences, we suggest that animals participate in sign games.

The following basic question is studied here: In the relatively stable molecular environment of a vertebrate body, can a dynamic idiotypic immune network develop a natural tolerance to endogenous components? The approach is based on stability analyses and computer simulation using a model that takes into account the dynamics of two agents of the immune system, namely B-lymphocytes and antibodies. The study investigates the behavior of simple immune networks in interaction with an antigen whose concentration is held constant as a function of the symmetry properties of the connectivity matrix of the network. Current idiotypic network models typically become unstable in the presence of this type of antigen. It is shown that idiotypic networks of a particular connectivity show tolerance towards auto-antigen without the need for ad hoc mechanisms that prevent an immune response. These tolerant network structures are characterized by aperiodic behavior in the absence of auto-antigen. When coupled to an auto-antigen, the chaotic attractor degenerates into one of several periodic ones, and at least one of them is stable. The connectivity structure needed for this behavior allows the system to adopt particular dynamic concentration patterns which do not lead to an unbounded immune response. Possible implications for the understanding of autoimmune disease and its treatment are discussed.