Radical constructivism

Radical Constructivism

Why People Dislike Radical Constructivism
Ernst von Glasersfeld • University of Massachusetts • evonglas@hughes.net
> Problem • Radical constructivism, although having a very successful base in research on mathematics and science education, has not become a generally accepted theory of knowledge. > Purpose • This paper discusses possible sources of aversion. > Results• The first section makes explicit the unavoidability of accepting the responsibility for one’s thinking and acting, a responsibility that under stressful circumstances one would rather avoid. Another section suggests the origin of the human quest for certain knowledge. The third section introduces the notion of “stickiness of beliefs.” > Implications • Constructivism has powerful implications foreveryday attitudes and social relations with others. This paper, it is hoped, may induce some readers to investigate these implications. > Key words • Epistemology, resistances (conscious and unconscious), beliefs.

Introduction
Constructivist epistemology, although having a very successful base in research on mathematics and science education (e.g., Leslie Steffe at the University of Georgia,Paul Cobb at the University of Tennessee, Jere Confrey at North Carolina State University, Andreas Quale at Oslo University, Dewey Dysktra at Boise State University, Marie Larochelle and Jacques Désautels at the Université Laval, and Hugh Gash at St. Patrick’s College in Dublin), has not become a generally accepted theory of knowledge. In this paper I explore possible sources of aversion.

pointthat most people prefer to ignore is that in extreme situations there is still a choice you have to make: you can accept the threatening power and do as they demand, or you can force them to carry out their threat of physical injury or death. The fact that RC suggests that you are responsible even if you comply with what you are ordered or “forced” to do may be only dimly perceived but thesuggestion is an intuitive source of aversion against this way of thinking.

3. The stickiness of beliefs
Sigmund Freud coined the expression “Die Klebrigkeit der Libido [The stickiness of libido].” In plain words, what you have become attached to is difficult to detach. I am borrowing Freud’s expression because I think the same can be said of the so-called “justified beliefs” that we consider to beinfallible knowledge. If a coffee dispenser does not respond to your coin by serving the coffee you want, you kick it, convinced it has misbehaved. From the very beginning of our cognitive development we are given the impression that what we perceive is there as part of a real world, as a “thing in itself ” that generates our experience. Words are thought to mean the same for everyone because theyrefer to things of that real world. No one ever tells us that Kant, as Vaihinger put it, saw the “thing-in-itself ” and all the noumenal level as a heuristic fiction.
“ Jede Vorstellung als Erscheinung wird als von dem. was der Gegenstand an sich ist, unterschieden gedacht,… das Letztere aber, X, ist nicht ein besonderes ausser meiner Vorstellung existierendes Objekt, sondern lediglich die Ideeder Abstraktion vom Sinnlichen, welche als notwendig anerkannt wird.” (Kant Opus postumem, Vol. XXI, quoted in Vaihinger 1986: 723)1 1 | “Every representation as appearance will be thought as different from the thing in itself …

2. The thirst for certainty
The infant’s main task at the beginning of the cognitive career is to establish reliable relations between motor acts and what seem to betheir effects. Infants would never learn to walk if they did not come to trust and later take for granted that a particular way of moving their legs does in fact move them along. From infancy until well into the teens and often later, the cognitive apprentice abhors ambiguity in the interpretation of experiences and in linguistic expressions unless they are introduced as jokes. It usually takes...