QUESTION:

 

Dear professor Von Glasersfeld,

 

What is the relation between radical constructivism and

postmodernism? I think your opinion that our knowledge is

subjectively constructed may be considered postmodernist, but, on

the other hand, you save yourself from radical relativism proposing

viability as a criterion for "truth".

 

Closely related with the concept of viability is your acceptance

that there are restrictions to our actions, and so, to our

constructions. Nevertheless, you deny the existence of an outer

ontic world. I think, however, that our experience that there is an outer

world comes precisely from our experience of restrictions, so in some way

to accept there are restrictions is to accept there is an independent

outside. I'll explain now what I am thinking.

 

I have the metaphorical image of a plaster cast. Its final shape is the

resultant of all the restrictions that the original object (a human face,

for example) opposes to the free flow of the plaster. Plaster doesn't

"know" what material is made of the original face, its ontic reality, but

plaster "knows" there is a face shape out there. From the internal point

of view of the plaster, we can even deny there is an external object at

all and define the face shape, not as a copy of something external but as

a limit. I use here the word limit similarly as it is used in maths. A

limit is an object that is constructed indirectly through the

approximations to it, even if the object itself does not exist

previously.

 

So, maybe we can define the outer world as the limit of all our

possible viable constructions?

This limit would exist only if our viable constructions converge to

something. I am thinking again the concepts of convergence and divergence

in their mathematical sense. Hence, our constructions tend to a limit if

it is possible to merge any different viable constructions into a new

synthetical construction that absorbs the old ones into a more

comprehensive and accurate one.

 

It seems that classical sciences as Physics are convergent because

all new ideas and new empirical data can be assimilated to

reconstruct a best model of the world. On the other hand, some

sciences as Psychology seem to be divergent in the sense that they

are increasingly fragmenting in hundreds of mutually incompatible

schools of thinking. First case would put constructivism closer to

classical realism, second closer to postmodern relativism.

 

What do you think, our viable constructions are convergent or divergent?

 

Best regards

 

Pedro P. Rivas Soriano

Spain

 

ANSWER:

Dear Mr. Soriano,

 

I didn't know that "postmodernism" was so homogeneous a movement

that all of it could be said 100% relativist. I accepted the term

because I thought it referred to the anti-traditionalist quality of RC.

 

You clearly have read more comments on my writings than the writings

themselves. It is a popular fiction that I "deny reality". I have never

said or written anything of the sort. I merely reiterate that we have no

access to it and no idea what "existence" might mean outside the domain

of our experience.

 

Your metaphor of the plaster cast is quite ingenious, but the

plaster has no "point of view". We may have one, but we have no

"ontic" knowledge of what may have constrained it. If you say it was the

object we used to make the cast, well that is no less our construct than

the table we bump into when we want to sit down. The fact that objects

resist our movements and those of plaster is part of the experiential

reality we have constructed on the basis of experience and with concepts

and relations derived from experience and not from ontology.

 

You may, indeed, refer to the "outer" world as ONE limit of all our

possible viable constructions, but there is also the limit of our ability

to construct, And, more importantly, viability is not an absolute, it

always depends on the goals we happen to have chosen.

 

Best wishes,

Ernst von Glasersfeld
 

 

BACK | TORNA INDIETRO