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The history of Western thought is characterized by a quest for knowledge of objective truth by means of a strictly rational inquiry. That our knowledge should correspond to an aspect of reality-in-itself (a ‘fact’), is an integral tenet of metaphysical realism. What is meant by ‘truth’ in this context? Constructivist Epistemology: The Role of Viability Constraints Tom Froese C.C.N.R. & P.A.I.C.S., Dept. of Informatics, University of Sussex, UK. E-mail: [email protected] Hume, D. (1748), An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Beauchamp, T.L. (ed.), reprinted at Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1999 Maturana, H. (2002). ‘Autopoiesis, structural coupling and cognition: A history of these and other notions in the biology of cognition’, Cybernetics and Human Knowing, 9(3-4), pp. 5 – 34 Russell, B. (1912), Problems of Philosophy; reprinted at Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1971 Stewart, J. (1992), ‘Life = Cognition: The epistemological and ontological significance of Artificial Life’, Towards a Practice of Autonomous Systems, Varela, F.J., & Bourgine, P. (eds.), Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press Varela, F.J. (1995), ‘The Re-Enchantment of the Concrete. Some biological ingredients for a nouvelle cognitive science’, The Artificial Life Route to Artificial Intelligence, Steels, L., & Brooks, R. (eds.), Hove, UK: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, pp. 11-22 Von Foerster, H. (1973), ‘On constructing a reality’, Environmental Research Design, vol. 2, Stroudsburg: Dowden, Hutchinson and Ross, pp. 35-46 Von Glasersfeld, E. (1984), ‘An Introduction to Radical Constructivism’, The Invented Reality: How do we know what we believe we know?, Watzlawick, P. (ed.), New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, pp. 17-40 Von Glasersfeld, E. (1995), Radical Constructivism: A Way of Knowing and Learning, New York, NY: Routledge-Falmer The Quest for Truth Skepticism Radical Constructivism Constraints Conclusions References D. Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 1748, 12.12 While studying the neurophysiology of color vision in pigeons in the 1960’s, H. R. Maturana realized that to make sense of the experimental results “meant abandoning the notion that there was an external independent world to be known by the observer” (Maturana 2002). But can we ever have ‘true’ beliefs? And how would we be able to know if we did? From experience? “Epistemology thus becomes the study of how intelligence operates, of the ways and means it employs to construct a relatively regular world out of the flow of its experience.” (Von Glasersfeld 1984) “The nervous system is organized (or organizes itself) so that it computes a stable reality.” (Von Foerster 1973) The Postulate of Cognitive Homeostasis: “It is a question of fact, whether the perceptions of the senses be produced by external objects, resembling them: How shall this question be determined? By experience surely; as all other questions of a like nature. But here experience is, and must be entirely silent. The mind has never any thing present to it but the perceptions.” The organization of the nervous system is characterized by operational closure. Epistemology Viability Since we cannot know the truth of our hypotheses we are forced to conceive all of them as equally valid. Does this mean that all of our knowledge is entirely arbitrary? No, of course not! There can be a vast number of equally valid ways of dealing with a situation, but depending on the context some may be more viable. They could have more adaptive, pragmatic, or theoretical value, for example. The Reality Principle: The constraints which limit the viability of our knowledge and behavior are sometimes attributed to an underlying ‘reality principle’ (Stewart 1992). An encounter with a viability constraint often manifests itself in our experience as a break-down of expectations. This is “the birthplace of the concrete” (Varela 1995). It can be tempting to deduce that the experience of a viability constraint can provide us with objective knowledge of the structures of reality-in-itself. However, constraints and break-downs of expectations are always experienced from within the context of a particular activity and point of view. Thus, the experience of a viability constraint enables us to know what was not the case in a given situation, but it does not provide us with special epistemic access to an observer-independent reality. “We never get to see the constraints of the world, with which our enterprises collide.” E. Von Glasersfeld, Radical Constructivism, 1984 Von Glasersfeld (1984) explains why metaphysical realism is so persuasive: “The experiencing consciousness creates structure in the flow of its experience. And that structure is what conscious cognitive organisms experience as ‘reality’ – and since that reality is created almost entirely without the experiencer’s awareness of his or her creative activity, it comes to appear as given by an independently ‘existing’ world.” Does all of this not entail absurd consequences? For example, does this poster in front of you not really exist? Note that radical constructivism does not make the ontological claim that it is impossible for the ‘external’ world to exist independently of your actions as an observer. It makes the epistemological claim that, even if it did, you could not know that this was the case: its metaphysical status would be of no consequence to your experience. This rejection of metaphysical realism makes it evident that your experience of this poster as an ‘independently existing external object’ is something which needs to be explained. What we need to better understand is how we manage to construct such stable experiential ‘realities’ without having special epistemic access to observer-independent truth. “A belief is true when there is a corresponding fact, and is false when there is no corresponding fact.” B. Russell, The Problems of Philosophy, 1912 “When we perceive our environment, it is we who invent it.” H. Von Foerster, ‘On constructing a reality’, 1973 The epistemological rejection of a correspondence theory of truth must inevitably lead to skepticism about the existence of an observer-independent reality resembling our external world: the required correspondence between our knowledge and reality-in- itself is not ascertainable.
