Educacion

Volume 3, Number 2

March 2008
ISSN 1782-348X

CONSTRUCTIVIST

FOUNDATIONS

Target Article B Ernst von Glasersfeld Who Conceives of Society? With commentaries by Arne Kjellman · Siegfried J. Schmidt · Marco Bettoni · Jean-Louis Le Moigne · Reuben Hersh · Dewey Dykstra · Leslie Steffe · Vincent Kenny · Karl H. Müller · Peter Meyer · Andreas Quale · Jonathan D. Raskin · Leon R. Tsvasman ·Niels Birbaumer · Martin V. Butz · Ezequiel Di Paolo · Klaus Krippendorff · Sal Restivo · Dirk Baecker · Christian Fuchs · Kenneth J. Gergen B Humberto R. Maturana The Biological Foundations of Virtual Realities and Their Implications for Human Existence Book Reviews B Evelyne Andreewsky & Robert Delorme (eds.) Seconde cybernétique et complexité: Rencontres avec Heinz von Foerster, reviewed byFrédéric Erpicum B Evan Thompson – Mind in life. Phenomenology, and the sciences of mind, reviewed by Kevin McGee

Advisory Board DESCRIPTION
William Clancey
NASA Ames Research Center, USA

Ranulph Glanville
CybernEthics Research, UK

Ernst von Glasersfeld
University of Massachusetts, USA

Vincent Kenny
Accademia Costruttivista di Terapia Sistemica, Italy

Constructivist Foundations(CF) is an independent academic peer-reviewed e-journal without commercial interests. Its aim is to promote scientific foundations and applications of constructivist sciences, to weed out pseudoscientific claims and to base constructivist sciences on sound scientific foundations, which do not equal the scientific method with objectivist claims. The journal is concerned with the interdisciplinarystudy of all forms of constructivist sciences, especially radical constructivism, biology of cognition, cybersemiotics, enactive cognitive science, epistemic structuring of experience, nondualism, second order cybernetics, the theory of autopoietic systems, etc.

Klaus Krippendorff
University of Pennsylvania, USA

Humberto Maturana
Institute Matríztica, Chile

AIM AND SCOPE
The basicmotivation behind the journal is to make peer-reviewed constructivist papers available to the academic audience free of charge. The constructive character of the journal refers to the fact that the journal publishes actual work in constructivist sciences rather than work that argues for the importance or need for constructivism. The journal is open to (provocative) new ideas that fall within the scope ofconstructivist approaches and encourages critical academic submissions to help sharpen the position of constructivist sciences. The common denominator of constructivist approaches can be summarized as follows. • Constructivist approaches question the Cartesian separation between objective world and subjective experience; • Consequently, they demand the inclusion of the observer in scientificexplanations; • Representationalism is rejected; knowledge is a system-related cognitive process rather than a mapping of an objective world onto subjective cognitive structures; • According to constructivist approaches, it is futile to claim that knowledge approaches reality; reality is brought forth by the subject rather than passively received; • Constructivist approaches entertain an agnosticrelationship with reality, which is considered beyond our cognitive horizon; any reference to it should be refrained from; • Therefore, the focus of research moves from the world that consists of matter to the world that consists of what matters; • Constructivist approaches focus on self-referential and organizationally closed systems; such systems strive for control over their inputs rather thantheir outputs; • With regard to scientific explanations, constructivist approaches favor a processoriented approach rather than a substance-based perspective, e.g., living systems are defined by processes whereby they constitute and maintain their own organization; • Constructivist approaches emphasize the “individual as personal scientist” approach; sociality is defined as accommodating within the...