Constructivist Epistemology - History

History

Constructivism stems from a number of philosophies. For instance, early development can be attributed to the thought of Greek philosophers such as Heraclitus (Everything flows, nothing stands still), Protagoras (Man is the measure of all things). Protagoras is clearly represented by Plato and hence the tradition as a relativist. The Pyrrhonist sceptics have also been so interpreted. (Although this is more contentious.)

Following the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, with the phenomenology and the event, Kant gives a decisive contradiction to Cartesians' epistemology that has grown since Descartes despite Giambattista Vico calling in "La scienza nuova" (the new science) in 1708 that "the norm of the truth is to have made it". The Romantic reaction to the Enlightenment's universalist tendencies involved an emphasis on the separate natures of races, species, sexes and types of human.

• Gaston Bachelard, who is known for his physics psychoanalysis and the definition of an "epistemologic obstacle" that can disturb a changing of scientific paradigm as the one that occurred between classical mechanics and Einstein's relativism, opens the teleological way with "The meditation on the object takes the form of the project". In the following famous saying, he insists that the ways in which questions are posed determines the trajectory of scientific movement, before summarizing "nothing is given, all is constructed" : "And, irrespective of what one might assume, in the life of a science, problems do not arise by themselves. It is precisely this that marks out a problem as being of the true scientific spirit: all knowledge is in response to a question. If there were no question, there would be no scientific knowledge. Nothing proceeds from itself. Nothing is given. All is constructed.", Gaston Bachelard (La formation de l'esprit scientifique, 1934). While quantum mechanics is starting to grow, Gaston Bachelard makes a call for a new science in Le Nouvel Esprit scientifique (The new scientific spirit).
• Paul Valéry, French poet (20th c.) reminds us of the importance of representations and action: "We have always sought explanations when it was only representations that we could seek to invent", "My hand feels touched as well as it touches; reality says this, and nothing more".
• This link with action, which could be called a "philosophy of action", was well represented by Spanish poet Antonio Machado: Caminante, no hay camino, se hace camino al andar.
• Ludwik Fleck establishes scientific constructivism by introducing the notions of thought collective (Denkkollektiv), and thought style (Denkstil), through which the evolution of science is much more understandable, because the research objects can be described in terms of the assumptions (thought style) that are shared for practical but also inherently social reasons, or just because any thought collective tends to preserve itself. These notions have been drawn upon by Thomas Kuhn.
• Norbert Wiener gives another defense of teleology in 1943 "Behavior, intention and teleology" and is one of the creators of cybernetics.
• Jean Piaget, after the creation in 1955 of the International Centre for Genetic Epistemology in Geneva, first uses the expression "constructivist epistemologies" (see above). According to Ernst von Glasersfeld, Jean Piaget is "the great pioneer of the constructivist theory of knowing" (in An Exposition of Constructivism: Why Some Like it Radical, 1990) and "the most prolific constructivist in our century" (in Aspects of Radical Constructivism, 1996).
• J. L. Austin that has been attributed the discovery that speech is not only passively describing a given reality, but it can change the (social) reality it is describing through speech acts, which for linguistics was as revolutionary discovery as for physics was the discovery that measurement itself can change the measured reality.
• Herbert A. Simon called « The sciences of the artificial » these new sciences (cybernetics, cognitive sciences, decision and organisation sciences) that, because of the abstraction of their object (information, communication, decision), cannot match with the classical epistemology and its experimental method and refutability.
• Gregory Bateson and his book Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972).
• George Kelly (psychologist) and his book The Psychology of Personal Constructs (1955).
• Heinz von Foerster, invited by Jean Piaget, presented "Objects: tokens for (Eigen-)behaviours" in 1976 in Geneva at a Genetic Epistemology Symposium, a text that would become a reference for constructivist epistemology.
• Paul Watzlawick, who supervised in 1984 the publication of Invented Reality: How Do We Know What We Believe We Know? (Contributions to constructivism).
• Ernst von Glasersfeld, who has promoted since the end of the 70s radical constructivism (see below).
• Edgar Morin and his book La Méthode (1977–2004, six volumes).
• Mioara Mugur-Schächter who is also a quantum mechanics specialist.
• Jean-Louis Le Moigne for his encyclopedic work on constructivist epistemology and his General Systems theory (see "Le Moigne's Defense of Constructivism" by Ernst von Glasersfeld).
• Niklas Luhmann who developed 'operative constructivism' in the course of developing his theory of autopoietic social systems, drawing on the works of (among others) Bachelard, Valéry, Bateson, von Foerster, von Glasersfeld and Morin.