The development of a constructivist theory of knowing has been the focus of my interest for several decades. It was a philosophical interest that arose originally out of work concerning first the structure and semantics of several languages and later cognitive psychology. Therefore, the title of this chapter may need ...

Heinz von Foerster had a knack for statements that sounded paradoxical. In fact, they made a lot of sense when they were unpacked. At the very beginning of our joint recollections in “Wie wir uns erfinden”, a book we published together a few years ago, he said for example: “It’s ...

So let me start my talk by saying I sincerely hope that a knowledgeable scholar will collect and record the history of the first ten or fifteen years of cybernetics before too many of the fascinating personal and intellectual details of its inventors are irrevocably forgotten. I, unfortunately, am anything ...

Ernst von Glasersfeld has dedicated a lot of effort to trying to define just where his views and those of his friend Humberto Maturana part company, epistemologically speaking (Glasersfeld 1991, 2001).As a contribution to unravelling this puzzle I propose in this article to delineate just where they seem to differ ...

| Oikos

Po dobu 2500 let vykazoval Západní svět převažující tendenci k chápání poznání jako představy organismu o vnějším světě, jeho struktuře a jak funguje. Představa nemusí být úplně perfektní, ale v principu byla chápána jako perfektního schopná. V každém případě se předpokládalo, že její správnost záleží na stupni shody mezi ní ...

Jean Piaget was born in Neuchâtel in August 1896. Last year’s centenary of his birth was an occasion for celebration in many places of the Western world. The basic reason for this international attention was the unquestionable fact that Piaget was the founding father of a branch of psychology that ...

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Když se lidé ptají po smyslu života, musí jim být dána metafyzická odpověď. A zda bude odpověď vnímána jako přijatelná nebo ne, závisí na jejich myšlení. To nelze zkontrolovat v oblasti zkušeností, protože tato otázka výslovně vede za danou oblast.

Western philosophers have with few exceptions perpetuated the belief that true knowledge exists apart from the knower. Although they have been unable to show how it might enter the human head, they have staunchly condemned as ‘genetic fallacy’ any investigation of how the knower might generate it. The essays in ...

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Like any apparently novel approach to the basic epistemological problems of 'knowledge', the constructivist ideas that have spread in the last twenty years continue to generate a host of negative as well as a few positive reactions. I shall focus on some aspects of Radical Constructivism, as distinct from 'trivial' ...

In the philosophical tradition of the Western World, it is held that knowledge forms a sharp contrast to belief, opinion, hypothesis, and illusion. What is called “knowledge,” is supposed to be not only unquestionable but also independent of the knowing subject. Knowledge, therefore, is considered much more than know-how. It ...