Constructivism: What does it mean to know?

Bertram C. Bruce

Search for a discourse

Abstraction: information organization access literacy technology community media data

email hypertext video xml bandwidth ebook webpage napster bboard virtual-reality cyborg data-base morphing security

Grounded theory

Need for foundations

multiple discourses competing methodologies rapidly changing technologies
yet, common themes

Against method
Science is an essentially anarchistic enterprise The only principle is: anything goes We may advance by proceeding counter-inductively The consistency condition is unreasonable; proliferation of theories is beneficial Any idea, however ancient and absurd, is capable of improving our knowledge
Feyerabend, Paul (1975). Against method

Problems with
metaphysics, ideologies, methodologies, epistemology
what can we do?

What shape is the earth?

1.

2.

3.

Is the World Round?

Child: I can see it. The world is flat. Adult: No, the world is round. Child: Its round? Oh, a pancake! Adult: No, no... a ball! Look at this photo of earth from outer space. Child: Oh! Two earths! The round one in space and the flat one.

Adelbert Ames
The room that Adelbert Ames designed challenges our perception. We see it as rectangular and we see objects within it at sizes other then they appear outside the room, even when we know how it is constructed. The trapezoidal window is even more disturbing.
--Ames, A. (1952). The Ames demonstrations in perception

Necker cube

How many ways can you see the Necker cube?

Nothing is simply "there"

But in truth there is nothing that is simply "there." Everything that is said and is there in the text stands under anticipations. This mean, positively, that only what stands under anticipations can be understood at all, and not what one simply confronts as something unintelligible. The fact that erroneous interpretations also arise from anticipations and, therefore, that the prejudices that make understanding possible also entail possibilities of misunderstanding could be one of the ways in which the finitude of human nature operates. A necessarily circular movement is involved in the fact that we read or understand what is there, but nonetheless see what is there with our own eyes (and our own thoughts). Gadamer, H.-G. Philosophical hermeneutics, p 121

Hegel
reality is the Absolute unfolding dialectically in a process of self-development thesis antithesis

synthesis

Mikhail Bakhtin
writing as "a striving to depart from one's own words, with which nothing essential can be said." Any understanding of live speech, a live utterance, is inherently responsiveThe listener becomes the speaker. --The problem of speech genres If we anticipate nothing from the word, if we know ahead of time everything that it can say, it departs from the dialogue and is reified --The

problem of the text

Dialogism
No utterance in general can be attributed to the speaker exclusively; it is the product of the interaction of the interlocutors, and broadly speaking, the product of the whole complex social situation in which it has occurred.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. Freudianism: A Marxist critique, p. 118

Intertextuality
No member of a verbal community can ever find words in the language that are neutral, exempt from the aspirations and evaluations of the other, uninhabited by the others voice. On the contrary, he receives the word by the others voice and it remains filled with that voice. He intervenes in his own context from another context, already penetrated by the others intentions. His own intention finds a word already lived in.
Bakhtin, MikhailProblems of Dostoevskys Poetics, p. 131

Dialogical reading
dogmatic exegetical agnostic diaolgical
Kaufman, Walter. The art of reading in The

future of the humanities

Phronesis
following Aristotle's critique of Plato, phronesis (the platform upon which practical reason is exercised) is not a techne that follows a blue print pursuant to some use. Neither is it teachable nor learnable in any formulaic way nor, one dares to say, programmable. Rather, it is a "different kind of knowing" that concerns itself with concrete situations: not just knowing what is on the balance sheet, but determining what the numbers may mean for a human life.
Blacker, David

Situated Perception
Thinking, or knowledge getting, is far from being the armchair thing it is often supposed to be. The reason it is not an armchair thing is that it is not an event going on exclusively within the cortex or cortex and vocal organs....Hands and feet, apparatus and appliances of all kinds are as much a part of it as changes within the brain. (pp. 13-14)
Dewey, John (1916). Essays in experimental logic. Chicago: University of Chicago.

The Human Skin

The philosopher, having no open truck with the skin, leaps from essence to essence -- from the essential knower to the essentially known. He leaps with never so much as the twitch of an eye-lash to mark that he glimpses anything of significance lying inbetween. Yet it is simple to show that the skin -and indeed skin in its primitive anatomical character -- dominates every position the philosopher occupies and every decision he makes. Stripping off the subtle philosophical veilings lets us get down to the naked truth (p. 2)
Bentley, Arthur F. (1941). The human skin: Philosophy's last line of defense. Philosophy of Science, 1-19.

Disclosure of context
Understanding, then, is not a mere collection of discovered facts (Entdecktheit). Instead, it is the disclosure (Erschlossenheit) of context
Hoy, David Couzens (1993). Heidegger and the hermeneutic turn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Purpose in Perception
Our perceptions do not come simply from the objects around us, but from our past experience as functioning, purposive organisms (p. 34) ... always wrong in any particular instance [book example]
--Kelley, E. C. (1947). Education for what is real

The Four Incapacities

Cartesianism: 1. 2. 3. 4. Philosophy begins with universal doubt Certainty is in the individual consciousness A single thread of inference Some things are inexplicable
--Peirce, Charles S. (1868). Some consequences of four incapacities. J. of Speculative Philosophy, 2, 140-157.

Community of inquiry
We each see the world in different ways The individual sees the world in different ways at different times The phenomena are always changing
--Charles Sanders Peirce

Continuity of experience (Dewey)

Hegels philosophy Developmental psychology Evolutionary biology

Implications of continuity
Individual growth Link experience & nature; theory & practice; all lived situations Forward movement; creative temporality Generic trait of the natural world
--Phillips, Alan (2001, July). Insights

Consequences
Learning Information ecologies Situated studies Observer as participant Ethics

Learning...
Finding problems Integrating knowledge Thinking critically Collaborating, community of inquiry Learning how to learn

Communication is educative
Not only is social life identical with communication, but all communication (and hence all genuine social life) is educative. To be a recipient of a communication is to have an enlarged and changed experience. One shares in what another has thought and felt and in so far, meagerly or amply, has his own attitude modified. Nor is the one who communicates left unaffected.
--J. Dewey, Democracy & Education, pp 5-6

Information ecologies
Design Distribution Use Interpretation
Bruce/Hogan model

Situated studies
reading as a productive act re-creation of innovations adoption as a learning process (e.g., CBAM) multiple perspectives design through use

Alternate realizations
A

C Idealization D

Observer as participant
the reader constructs the text, the author, the context, and the reader --Freund, Elizabeth. The

return of the reader

the interview is the unit of analysis, not the interviewee -- Mishler, Elliot G. Storylines:

Craftartists' narratives of identity

Ethics
effective historical consciousness diversity, standpoint epistemology social justice