Constructivist Approaches

Suggested by Alexander Riegler (2005Riegler A. (2005) Editorial. The Constructivist Challenge. Constructivist Foundations 1(1): 1–8., 2015Riegler A. (2015) What does the future hold for radical constructivism? In: Raskin J. D., Bridges S. K. & Kahn J. S. (eds.) Studies in meaning 5: Perturbing the status quo in constructivist psychology. Pace University Press, New York: 64–90.), Constructivist Approaches is a generic umbrella term for positions that share most or all of the following ten denominators:

1. Questioning the Cartesian separation between the objective world and subjective experience

2. Including the observer in scientific explanations

3. Rejecting representationalism: knowledge is a system-related cognitive process rather than a mapping of an objective world onto subjective cognitive structures

4. Defining reality as being brought forth by the subject rather than passively received

5. Claiming that any reference to a mind-independent reality beyond one’s cognitive horizon is metaphysical speculation

6. Moving the focus of research from the world that consists of matter to the world that consists of what matters

7. Defining cognitive systems as self-referential and organizationally closed: They strive for control over their inputs rather than their outputs

8. Favoring a process-oriented approach rather than a substance-based perspective: Systems are defined by the processes whereby they constitute and maintain their own organization

9. Defining sociality as accommodation within the framework of social interaction

10. Asking for an open and less dogmatic approach to science in order to generate the flexibility that is needed to cope with today’s scientific frontiers

Enactivism has long and diverse roots in various disciplines (McGee 2005McGee K. (2005) Enactive Cognitive Science. Part 1: History and Research Themes. Constructivist Foundations 1(1): 19–34.), especially in second-order cybernetics (Froese 2010Froese T. (2010) From Cybernetics to Second-Order Cybernetics: A Comparative Analysis of Their Central Ideas. Constructivist Foundations 5(2): 75-85.). The approach was first systematically introduced as a new paradigm for cognitive science by Varela, Thompson, and Rosch in their book The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (Varela , Thompson & Rosch 1991Varela F. J., Thompson E. & Rosch E. (1991) The embodied mind: Cognitive science and human experience. MIT Press, Cambridge.). That original proposal is best known for two contributions:

1. The key theoretical claim was that the mind is not best understood in representational terms but rather as embodied and situated, and in particular that perceptual experience is constituted by perceptually guided action in the world. This claim has been developed into a philosophical position that explicitly rejects internalism as an adequate foundation of epistemology (Noë 2009Noë A. (2009) Out of our heads: Why you are not your brain. Hill and Wang, New York.; Hutto & Myin 2013Hutto D. D. & Myin E. (2013) Radicalizing enactivism: Basic minds without content. MIT Press, Cambridge MA.; Beaton 2013Beaton M. (2013) Phenomenology and Embodied Action. Constructivist Foundations 8(3): 298-313.). This later development therefore also is in tension with radical constructivism, especially with regard to the constitutive role of the other in shaping our experiential world (Di Paolo 2008Di Paolo E. A. (2008) A Mind of Many. Constructivist Foundations 3(2): 89–91.).

2. The main methodological proposal was to take the phenomenology of our first-person experience seriously as a source of data and insights for cognitive science, but with the caveat that this phenomenology must be analyzed by means of qualitative methods based on disciplined reflection on our own conscious experience, such as phenomenological epoché and meditative expertise. More recently, the paucity of trained subjects has led to a greater emphasis on the use of semi-structured interviews to guide introspection (Petitmengin 2006Petitmengin C. (2006) Describing one’s subjective experience in the second person: An interview method for a science of consciousness. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 5(3): 229–269.; for a review, see Froese , Gould & Barrett 2011Froese T., Gould C. & Barrett A. (2011) Re-Viewing from Within: A Commentary on First- and Second-Person Methods in the Science of Consciousness. Constructivist Foundations 6(2): 254–269.).

In the years following the original proposal enactivism has been applied to an increasingly broad set of disciplines, and has become diversified into a range of mutually sympathetic yet distinctive strands of enactivist research (see Stewart , Gapenne & Di Paolo 2010Stewart J., Gapenne O. & Di Paolo E. A. (eds.) (2010) Enaction: Toward a new paradigm for cognitive science. MIT Press, Cambridge MA. and the special issue on Exploring the Diversity within Enactivism and Neurophenomenology). There are three prominent ones:

1. The key theoretical claim regarding perceptual experience has been systematically studied by sensorimotor enactivism, albeit more in the tradition of psychology and analytic philosophy of mind without concern for disciplined methods of phenomenological reflection (O’Regan & Noë 2001O’Regan J. K. & Noë A. (2001) A sensorimotor account of vision and visual consciousness. Behavioral and brain sciences 24(5): 939–1031.; Noë 2004Noë A. (2004) Action in perception. MIT Press, Cambridge MA.).

2. The emphasis on the importance of embodiment and phenomenology was further developed into autopoietic enactivism (Thompson 2007Thompson E. (2007) Mind in life: Biology, phenomenology. Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA.), which has restricted the concept of embodiment to the living body (Noë 2009Noë A. (2009) Out of our heads: Why you are not your brain. Hill and Wang, New York.) and has grounded the enactive approach to perception in the concept of sense-making (Weber & Varela 2002Weber A. & Varela F. J. (2002) Life after Kant: Natural purposes and the autopoietic foundation of individuality. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 1(2): 97–125.; Di Paolo 2005Di Paolo E. A. (2005) Autopoiesis, adaptivity, teleology, agency. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 4(4): 429–452.).

3. The non-representational stance has found its most systematic expression in radical enactivism, which claims that basic minds are contentless minds (Hutto & Myin 2013Hutto D. D. & Myin E. (2013) Radicalizing enactivism: Basic minds without content. MIT Press, Cambridge MA.).

All of these strands of enactivism jointly face the challenge of scaling up their theories from basic minds to specifically human minds. Overcoming this cognitive gap seems to require appeals to various forms of autonomous social dynamics (Froese & Di Paolo 2011Froese T. & Di Paolo E. (2011) The enactive approach: Theoretical sketches from cell to society. Pragmatics and Cognition 19(1): 1–36.) and cultural scaffolding (Gallagher 2013Gallagher S. (2013) The socially extended mind. Cognitive Systems Research 25: 4–12.), in particular those that enable subjects to go beyond immediate biological sense-making so as to navigate the non-sense inherent in arbitrary symbol systems that are regulated by conventional norms instead (Cappuccio & Froese 2014Cappuccio M. & Froese T. (eds.) (2014) Enactive cognition at the edge of sense-making: Making sense of non-sense. Palgrave Macmillan, Houndmills.).

Neurophenomenology is a research program put forward by F. J. Varela 1996Varela F. J. (1996) Neurophenomenology: A methodological remedy to the hard problem. Journal of Consciousness Studies 3(4): 330–349. with the aim of addressing the so-called hard problem of consciousness (Chalmers 1995), the problem of explaining why is it that (neuro)cognitive processes are accompanied by subjective or phenomenal experiences (qualia). Varela maintains that the hard problem of consciousness is not theoretical or metaphysical in nature, but needs to be tackled pragmatically, i.e. by devising “a rigorous method and an explicit pragmatics for its exploration and analysis” (Varela 1996Varela F. J. (1996) Neurophenomenology: A methodological remedy to the hard problem. Journal of Consciousness Studies 3(4): 330–349.: 330). To this end, the proposed research program seeks pragmatic ways of combining rigorous first-person (phenomenological) analyses (with special emphasis on methods developed by phenomenological movement and contemplative traditions) with cutting-edge neuroscientific accounts (with special emphasis on methods developed in the field of dynamical neuroscience). Varela construes the “working hypothesis of neurophenomenology” as follows: “Phenomenological accounts of the structure of experience and their counterparts in cognitive science relate to each other through reciprocal constraints” (Varela 1996Varela F. J. (1996) Neurophenomenology: A methodological remedy to the hard problem. Journal of Consciousness Studies 3(4): 330–349.: 343). Phenomenological and neuroscientific accounts are thus methodologically put on an equal footing, with the former guiding and shaping (“constraining”) the approaches taken by the latter, and vice versa.

See also special issues Neurophenomenology and Exploring the Diversity within Enactivism and Neurophenomenology.

Non-Dualism (or Non-Dualizing Philosophy) was suggested by Josef Mitterer (2011Mitterer J. (2011) Das Jenseits der Philosophie. Wider das dualistische Erkenntnisprinzip [The beyond of philosophy. Against the dualistic principle of knowledge]. With a new preface for this edition., 2011Mitterer J. (2011) Die Flucht aus der Beliebigkeit [The flight from contingency]. With a new afterword for this edition.) as an alternative to both realistic and idealistic positions. It dispenses with the categorical distinction between description and reality beyond description, Instead, it suggests a new way of utilizing language without the assumption of categorically extralinguistic objects denoted by language.

Operative Constructivism by sociologist N. Luhmann shares the epistemological agnosticism of an unknown reality (sensu Ernst von Glasersfeld), the autopoietic organization of systems (sensu Humberto R. Maturana) and the concept of second-order observation (sensu Heinz von Foerster and Ranulph Glanville). However, the integration of constructivist epistemology and constructivist logic into his theory of social systems challenges constructivist approaches: Luhmann insists on the social and systemic character of the observer (as an observing system) and disclaims the concept of an observer as a subject. He suspects that an observer regarded as a subject ends in a traditional philosophical subjectivism, which is just the opposite of objectivism and which ontologizes the observing subject. Instead, the difference between observing system and observed environment is meant to prevent from epistemological one-sidedness and from unintended ontologization. In contrast to Maturana’s limitation to living systems, Luhmann extends the concept of autopoiesis to the domain of social systems: The fundamental entities are not molecules but rather communications such that a social system is essentially an autopoietic network of communications. This violates the original definition of autopoiesis because in contrast to molecules, which reproduce themselves without exogenous help, communications need human beings in order to be brought into existence.

Coined by Ernst von Glasersfeld (1974Glasersfeld E. von (1974) Piaget and the radical constructivist epistemology. In: Smock C. D. & Glasersfeld E. von (eds.) Epistemology and education. Follow Through Publications, Athens GA: 1–24.), Radical Constructivism (or "RC") is “an unconventional approach to the problems of knowledge and knowing. It starts from the assumption that knowledge, no matter how it is defined, is in the heads of persons, and that the thinking subject has no alternative but to construct what he or she knows on the basis of his or her own experience. What we can make of experience constitutes the only world we consciously live in … all kinds of experience are essentially subjective, and though I may find reasons to believe that my experiences may not be unlike yours, I have no way of knowing that it is the same…” (Glasersfeld 1995Glasersfeld E. von (1995) Radical constructivism: A way of knowing and learning. Falmer Press, London.: 1).

Glasersfeld defines the two principles of RC as follows: "(1) a. Knowledge is not passively received either through the senses or by way of communication; b. knowledge is actively built up by the cognizing subject. (2) a. The function of cognition is adaptive, in the biological sense of the term, tending towards fit or viability; b. cognition serves the subject's organization of the experiential world, not the discovery of an objective ontological reality." (Glasersfeld 1995Glasersfeld E. von (1995) Radical constructivism: A way of knowing and learning. Falmer Press, London.: 18).