Constructivism in education, an approach that depicts learners as actively constructing their own knowledge, continues to influence content areas such as math and science education as well foundation areas such as educational psychology.2 It is a contested view, with advocates suggesting that it is a better framework for effective education and critics countering that it is relativistic with respect to truth.
In this chapter I will agree with constructivist criticisms of traditional epistemologies and their correspondence theories of truth. However, I will also agree with traditional criticisms concerning constructivism’s relativism. Maintaining these two critiques requires developing an alternative understanding of truth. My alternative conceptualizes truth in terms of disclosure, based on the recent work of Lambert Zuidervaart. I believe that this notion of truth gives educational theorists a way to accept major educational insights of constructivism without having to relinquish a robust notion of truth.
There are many versions of constructivism in education, including cognitive, critical, and social.3 Rather than attempting to cover this diverse waterfront, I will explore what is arguably its most extreme version, radical constructivism, and limit my examination to the work of its most well-known advocate, Ernst von Glasersfeld. He most clearly combines philosophical discussions of epistemology with elaborations of innovative educational practices.
Von Glasersfeld advocates teaching practices that encourage the learner to be an active participant in the learning process.4 He believes that learning, a conceptual activity, requires action by the learner, including reflection, verbalizing, and conversation. Although he recognizes memorization as a form of learning, he draws our attention to the activity of conceptualization, which is central to learning. Knowledge, he argues, cannot be transferred from teachers to students simply by teachers putting it into words and students receiving those words. Instead, knowledge develops internally by means of learners’ cognitive self-organization, through which they transcend particular conceptual structures through reorganization.5 This often requires “presenting students with situations in which their habitual thinking fails,”6 which creates settings in which the “student’s network of explanatory concepts clearly turns out to be unsatisfactory.”7 The situation, as devised by the teacher, calls the students’ current conceptual patterns up short so that they can initiate new thoughts. In this approach, the teacher does not transfer knowledge to the students, but creates opportunities for them to reconceptualize their experiences and thereby construct their own knowledge.
Von Glasersfeld’s approach to teaching is innovative and inviting. He enhances the role of the teacher in education and gives a central place to the student in the learning process. His ideas help educators move away from a content-driven model of instruction to an active student-driven one. Exploring how students see problems and imagining their possible paths toward conceptual resolutions is innovative. These explorations help educators get beyond judgments about student work in terms of right or wrong and move toward understanding how students come to their particular answers in order to discover hitches in their procedures and conceptualizations. He argues for the need to provide students with opportunities to understand that they themselves need to discover how things do or do not work. Von Glasersfeld does not reduce learning to performance by the student, as the student’s understanding is what counts. But neither does he take learning as mere personal opinion about experienced reality.8 His many educational suggestions often embody what seems exactly right about teaching.
Von Glasersfeld’s educational practices are not just practical tips given in a theoretical vacuum. He calls his view radical to distinguish it from the position that learning involves construction but does not imply anything about epistemology. He argues that his pedagogical insights follow from his theoretical approach to knowledge and truth. Moreover, he situates his theoretical approach between the radical environmentalism of the behaviourists and the radical geneticism of the sociobiologists.9 In contrast to both, he argues that humans have only themselves to thank for the world in which they find themselves. By this he means, “epistemic agents can know nothing but the cognitive structures they themselves have put together.”10 The world in which we find ourselves is a function of those cognitive structures. If we wish to improve our understanding, we must investigate the mental processes that construct those cognitive structures. Situating this approach in his understanding of the Kantian tradition, he believes exploring the mind is key to understanding our experience of the world. He argues, “Radical constructivism maintains – not unlike Kant in his Critique – that the operations by means of which we assemble our experiential world can be explored, and that an awareness of this operating . . . can help us do it differently and, perhaps, better.”11 Von Glasersfeld’s epistemological stance can be summarized as the process of making more deliberate the conscious construction of the cognitive structures by which the experiencing subject understands.12 For von Glasersfeld, this stance centrally involves a critique of the correspondence theory of truth, which depicts knowledge as a relation between cognition and mind-independent reality. He believes the correspondence theory involves the impossible task of comparing one’s cognitive structures to some mind-independent reality. Von Glasersfeld argues, “God alone can know the real world, because He knows how and of what He has created it. In contrast, the human knower can know only what the human knower has constructed.”13 The best we can claim, as a human knower, is knowledge of our own cognitive constructs.
Deliberately revising cognitive constructs is guided by something he calls “fit,”14 which involves “explanation, prediction, or control of specific experiences.”15 When we successfully explain, predict, and control, our conceptual constructions fit our experiences. In his words, “we form concepts and then we try to fit experiences into them.”16 Fit is not a direct relation between mind and some mind-independent reality, but a relation within the mind, i.e., between concepts and experience. Von Glasersfeld uses the idea of fit to mark conscious cognition of the world, i.e., knowledge. The relation of fit means we can best characterize knowledge with terms such as “useful, relevant, viable,”17 determining “what one can and what one cannot do.”18
Fit suggests a set of constraints, experienced in the first person, as we operate in the world, something von Glasersfeld phrases as the idea that “the world is full of obstacles which we do not ourselves deliberately place in our way.”19 Knowledge is a cognitive construct whose role is to help the individual navigate experienced constraints successfully through a predictable, regular understanding of the world. Knowledge does not represent a mind-independent world, but is a tool within the world of experience – a set of coherent, non-contradictory conceptualizations that negotiate the experienced obstacles.20 The result is “knowledge [that] we ourselves have found useful and thus viable in our own dealings with experience.”21 The notion of addressing experienced constraints puts a practical edge on knowledge construction, where success is associated with organized mental constructs. The world is navigated successfully because the subject has mentally constructed experiences in a particular organizational pattern.
For von Glasersfeld, the crucial insight of constructivism requires locating mental activity within the consciousness of the individual subject. He states, “constructivism necessarily begins with the (intuitively confirmed) assumption that all cognitive activity takes place within the experiential world of a goal-directed consciousness.”22 Any particular activity of mental construction takes place within individual consciousness. Thus, central to understanding knowledge production is its location within the individual mind, including its construction of a stable, familiar world by organizing the mind’s experience.23 It follows for von Glasersfeld that “knowledge, no matter how it is defined, is in the heads of persons, and that the thinking subject has no alternative but to construct what he or she knows on the basis of his or her own experience.”24 This epistemological individualism gives rise to his idea that knowledge is relative to each person, involving “constructs that each user has to build up for him- or herself. And because they are individual constructs, one can never say whether or not two people have produced the same construct.”25 Clearly, von Glasersfeld holds to a form of relativism, in which different minds construct different cognitive structures in dealing with experience.
Von Glasersfeld’s position on knowledge and truth has been strongly contested by many educational theorists. Although von Glasersfeld appeals to experience in lieu of access to the objective world, Peter Davson-Galle suggests that experience is not an adequate substitute.26 Aharon Aviram goes further, and argues that Von Glasersfeld’s relativism will ultimately be self-defeating in that it entails denying the existence of objective reality.27 Although constructivism must embrace the idea of progress in knowledge development to be a learning theory, William Cobern and Kathleen Loving maintain that von Glasersfeld’s denial of a reality beyond an individual’s construction blocks the possibility of such improvement.28 Derek Meyer, more strongly, concludes that this denial leaves von Glasersfeld with the self-undermining position that knowledge is simply the creation of mental objects and cannot exclude fallacies, psychotic states, or hallucinations.29 These criticisms can be generalized. Michael Matthews’s concern is that von Glasersfeld confuses knowledge with belief, and takes knowledge to involve evidence-based justifications connecting it to a mind-independent reality, in contrast to beliefs, which are merely individual subjective mental constructs.30 These criticisms hinge on von Glasersfeld’s denial of a correspondence conception of knowledge and charge him with a problematic relativism.
These are important criticisms of von Glasersfeld. Because for him knowledge is in the mind of each person, making it impossible to tell whether any two people build the same cognitive construct, the charge of relativism seems warranted. Critics such as Matthews come to this conclusion from the perspective of a correspondence theory of truth and knowledge. Matthews appeals to an understanding of knowledge as justified true belief, where knowledge is a belief under particular conditions, namely, that it is true and that the believer has good evidence to judge it as such.31 Although Matthews is critical of von Glasersfeld, they share a basic assumption: both frame their thinking within a representationalist theory of mind, where knowledge is understood as a (mental) proposition about which something is claimed. Matthews argues propositional knowledge corresponds with a mind-independent reality, whereas von Glasersfeld argues it does not. The basic difference is not about the centrality of cognitive states as such, but about the possibility of correspondence. Matthews’s and the other critics’ stances are examples of the realist position in that regard, and von Glasersfeld’s constructivism is an example of anti-realism.
The debate between anti-realism and realism is an enduring philosophical controversy regarding the relation between knowledge and reality. There are many varieties of realism, but we do not need to adjudicate among them in order to identify the above critics of von Glasersfeld as realists. These critics are what I will call representational realists, a group that includes what can be called semantic and ontological realism. Semantic realism involves the idea of truth as correspondence between mental representation and thing, and ontological realism involves the notion of a mind-independent reality with objective, knowable features. By representational realism I mean the general position that portrays knowledge as representational, usually as justified true belief. Knowledge is thus a particular sort of cognitive, mental representation, in other words, one that is said to bear a correspondence to, and is caused by, some mind-independent object with determinate features. The object’s salient properties and features are, or can be, captured as the content of those representations. Here, knowledge involves a set of beliefs that are true because their content formally corresponds with some mind-independent reality, where truth is rightfully claimed because of some justification.32 Thus, a realist such as Matthews frames knowledge as beliefs that have satisfied an “evidence condition.”33 He maintains that this condition creates a correspondence between two extant things, a mental representation and some mind-independent reality, which justifies the claim that the representation is true. Robert Nola points out that the correspondence between a mental representation and some external reality does not need to entail a picture or some other imitative duplication in the mind of objective reality – a more “minimal notion of correspondence” will suffice, such as a Tarskian “one-to-one” pairing between proposition and reality.34
I agree with von Glasersfeld that a realist’s correspondence account of truth is not an adequate answer to his relativism – representational realism is not up to the task. Its basic flaw is its inability to adequately answer the enduring question of how mental representations can be known to accurately depict mind-independent reality, given that one’s access to such reality is through cognitive processes and products. Radical constructivists such as von Glasersfeld are right to argue that evidence and justification are always already mind-dependent, and so cannot establish an independent foothold on the objective features of a mind-independent reality. Michael Lynch gives the classical persuasive objection when he states, “we cannot step outside of our skins and compare our thoughts to the world as it is in itself.”35 To be able to do so, he argues, requires evidence to enter the mind as absolute facts, namely, facts whose contents are not relative to any conceptual scheme. And having such evidence would mean having access to something completely outside of our conceptual schemes and being able to identify it for what it is rather than in relation to a conceptual scheme. Lynch argues that nothing presents itself in this manner, as there are no schema-independent facts.36 Because of this, he rightly concludes, the correspondence theory falters on the criterion of justification.
However, von Glasersfeld’s constructivism is also an inadequate attempt to answer this weakness. It fails because he does not go far enough, and merely replaces a “realist conception of truth with some epistemic surrogate.”37 Indeed, constructivism’s “arguments get almost always caught within an old epistemological framework, which constructivism precisely tries to abandon.”38 This applies to von Glasersfeld’s radical constructivism particularly well. Rather than transcend the problems of realism, he retains too much of the realist’s framework while attempting to give a different answer, and hence can rightly be accused of having an epistemic surrogate. Von Glasersfeld’s problem is not that he is too far removed from semantic realism, but that he is not removed enough. Although he wishes to replace the correspondence theory of truth with one of fit, the language of subjective construction means that he continues to accept representationalism’s basic framework as a way to think about the cognizing subject’s relation to the world. His modification is merely to advocate for an epistemic substitute, replacing correspondence with fit, in order to relieve some of the pressure to access mind-independent reality.
In short, both von Glasersfeld’s constructivist anti-realism and his critics’ representational realism remain framed by what Habermas calls a philosophy of consciousness.39 This is the idea that our primary contact with the world is as a conscious, individual subject – a mind – that stands in cognitive relation to a world. The argument between educational realists and anti-realists is between correspondence and fit, while both remain framed in terms of consciousness and cognition. The dispute between representational realists and radical constructivists is whether the conscious cognizing mind can access the mind-independent world, or whether it has to make do with conscious experience. What is taken for granted in both is the construal of the human subject as primarily a conscious cognizing mind. Von Glasersfeld does not question this depiction of the subject, and so his stance on the relation between world and mind becomes relativist, for he believes the cognizing mind is not able to access mind-independent reality. The relativism associated with his radical constructivism is a function of remaining within a philosophy of consciousness.
Overcoming relativism without falling back into representational realism requires getting more completely beyond philosophy of consciousness. This alternative involves an expanded understanding of the human subject in its relation to the world. Rather than depicting the subject primordially as a conscious mind, it requires understanding the subject first of all as an embodied being.40 In this view, cognition is always already embodied, where thought emerges from our bodily capacities and actions in the world.41 This expanded understanding of the human subject allows for a more robust notion of truth.
To get beyond a philosophy of consciousness, I will expand my critique of von Glasersfeld’s constructivist anti-realism via the work of philosopher of science Joseph Rouse. He holds a view of (scientific) knowledge that follows along Heideggerian lines, where “science [is] a way of acting on the world, rather than a way of observing and describing it.”42 This is an attractive alternative for knowledge development, for it provides a vantage point from which to critique both realism and anti-realism. Rouse’s critique of realism centres on distinguishing between the (embodied) practical success of scientists acting on the world and the validity of the correspondence theory, where realists too quickly equate “practical validity with a realist construal of truth as correspondence.”43 The latter is a claim about the way that scientific theories refer to mind-independent entities, namely, that they “have the characteristics the theories ascribe to them.”44 For a realist, truth is not about practical validity, but about the accuracy of a conceptual picture. A realist construal relies not only on being able to distinguish neatly between observational elements and conceptual ones, but also on being able to tell a convincing story of how observational data connect to real properties of mind-independent objects. Rouse’s central insight is that these issues do not really matter for science. Realists misconstrue science as a theory-generating enterprise, rather than seeing it as a practical engagement with the world.
As I have shown, von Glasersfeld readily accepts practical validity without a correspondence theory, which he associates with his notion of fit. Thus his reminder in his interview with Cardellini that “constructivism is definitely anti-realist”45 should be no surprise. Von Glasersfeld maintains that experience constrains a subject’s mental representation of that world and that a subject has access to that experience only through those cognitive constructions. This argument accords with Rouse’s depiction of constructivists as anti-realists, for central is their denial of “sharp distinctions between observational and theoretical statements.”46 But that denial is an in-house argument with realists, according to Rouse, for the anti-realist concern is still at the level of theory or concept formation rather than a truly practical engagement with the world.
Rouse’s criticism of constructivist anti-realism comes from a different angle – a Heideggerian one. He argues that, prior to conscious experience (e.g., observing or theorizing), “we are already engaged with the world in practical activity, and the world simply is what we are involved with.”47 Von Glasersfeld supposes no access to the world except through conscious experiences, whereas Rouse argues embodied interaction with the world is primary. For Rouse, the world is not first of all what a mind consciously experiences and represents, but instead that with which the bodily agent interacts.48 Von Glasersfeld’s notion of constraints is too intellectualistic, relying exclusively on conscious experience and cognitive representation as the way to understand human interaction with the world. Rouse’s approach grounds knowledge in our embodied practices in the world, with what we can do as embodied beings.49 We connect to the world not via theoretical constraints (conceptual constructions) but with ordinary, everyday, bodily being in the world, where practical dealings with the world come before conscious conceptualizations.50 Rouse posits a way of engaging the world prior to (self-) consciousness, whereas both the representational realists and constructivist anti-realists have the conscious mind (subject) as the starting point for person/world interaction. For Rouse, the existence of a real world is already implied in our practical, embodied dealings with it, before we might consciously and cognitively represent it.
According to Rouse, the world that manifests itself to us in our practical dealings provides an enduring context for any conceptualization. In his words, “instead of saying that we construct the way the world is, we could just as well say that the world shapes the meaning of our words and deeds.”51 For this to work, our interactions with the world must come prior to the dichotomization between conscious subject and represented or constructed object. Active, bodily movement interacting with the world provides the enduring context for understanding the world.52 The notion of interpretation indicates this context. In particular, Rouse argues that “interpretation does not make the world the way it is; it allows it to show itself the way it is.”53 By this he means that interpretation plays the role of understanding the world with which we are already practically involved and in which we already live and move. As such, interpretation is not construction. Precisely because our embodied, interactive practices in the world are prior to our conceptualizations, we can portray the latter as interpretations rather than as constructions.
To move the discussion forward, Rouse points out that the quarrel between the representational realists and constructivist anti-realists, although significant, remains embedded in a philosophy of consciousness. More particularly, he alerts us to the fact that constructivism, too, still strongly relies on a position in which mind and world are dichotomized into conscious subject and cognized object. Although von Glasersfeld wishes to have the cognitive activity of construction replace realism’s representationalist spectator epistemology, his notion of fit ends up being, as Rouse might say, a kind of realism with scruples,54 where the constraints of experience on construction function as observable entities within consciousness. Rouse, by contrast, advocates a way of being in the world that gives us a better context for thinking about interpretation and alleviates some of the burden that von Glasersfeld’s constructivism places on cognitive activity in terms of constructing the world. In fact, Rouse’s analysis leaves us with the more manageable task of viewing understanding not as construction but as interpretation. This more hermeneutic view of understanding, because it involves an embodied interaction with the world, alleviates the need to choose between representational realism and von Glasersfeld’s anti-realism, leaving the possibility of a more robust understanding of truth.
But Rouse provides “a deflationary account of truth,”55 rather than a substantive one. He accepts a deflationary interpretation of Tarski’s semantic notion of the truth but acknowledges that, as a function of ordinary sentences, it “is almost never at issue in debates over realism.”56 Truth, he argues, is something that is applied only to sentences in a natural language, such as English or Dutch, and even then it does not add anything beyond the assertion itself. Instead, he argues that linguistic practices constituting sentence formation are situated in a “field of meaningful interaction . . . [which] allows things to show themselves as they are in a variety of respects.”57 Rouse does not develop this idea of disclosure, which allows things to show themselves, with respect to truth, however. Yet I believe that the Heideggerian insight of disclosure is key in developing a more robust conception of truth.
The Greek word aletheia connotes a state of affairs that discloses itself as it is. Heidegger appropriates the idea of aletheia for his understanding of truth as disclosedness.58 Things are not disclosed as pure givens, but rather as able to be concealed or suppressed. As a result, disclosure has a normative function with respect to knowledge. I wish to draw on these two features – disclosedness and normativity – for an alternative notion of truth. To elaborate this idea and develop these two dimensions, I will build on the recent work of Lambert Zuidervaart, who has developed a robust notion of truth by developing Heidegger’s account. Drawing on Heidegger’s concept of understanding, a mode of being in the world, Zuidervaart elaborates his own idea of the notion of disclosure. For Heidegger, understanding is a way that humans are in the world, which he takes as one mode of disclosedness.59 Central to being human is holding ourselves open in our relationship to ourselves, to other human beings, and to the world. Disclosedness through understanding involves what Heidegger calls projections of our potentials and possibilities. I argue, because projections are not conscious cognitive constructions, they are best understood as the way humans are bodily in the world. Understanding as disclosure is closely connected to embodied presence.
Zuidervaart argues that understanding involves an encounter with the world. To be human is to be open to the world, and through this openness we can encounter things as uncovered. Moreover, understanding involves interpreting the purposes for which an entity exists, doing so by elaborating its embeddedness in a purposeful whole.60 Thus an entity is disclosed by understanding its interrelatedness with other entities. I would argue that this practice depends on construing the knower as an embodied being, an engaged agent, who is continually open to the world. On that construal, understanding is not a mind constructing a mental representation but an embodied openness to the world, encountering entities as uncovered in their interrelatedness.
On the other side, the notion of disclosedness means that entities are in the open, standing in the disclosure associated with understanding.61 Zuidervaart argues that in its discoveredness the entity is available in many ways. In the context of a discussion about constructivism, of special interest is Zuidervaart’s claim that one of the ways an entity becomes available is as accessibility for assertions (say, in propositions). For Heidegger, an assertion involves an abstraction from the multiplicity of relations to the purposeful whole. Zuidervaart goes beyond this view, and argues that not only would it be fair to say that the asserted entity allows itself to be asserted, but also that the asserted entity “calls for the assertion.”62 The language of availability, allowance, and call indicates, at minimum, that the asserted is a not a construction by human minds, but instead relies on a kind of disclosure of the entity that has to do with its assertability. Zuidervaart calls this particular mode of being available the entity’s “predicative availability.”63 By this term, he means that entities are available in many ways for embodied human practices, one of which is making assertions; entities are available for humans to make assertions about.
Of interest here with respect to constructivism is the status of assertions for Zuidervaart. If someone makes an assertion about something, she or he does not intentionally construct the content of the assertion. We do not impose our assertions on entities and we do not construct the identity of those entities as such. That is, what is asserted is not a mental representation, a state of consciousness with meaning or content.64 The asserted is the entity itself, in a particular mode of disclosure. Zuidervaart’s formulation changes the status of propositions precisely because an embodied human makes the assertion about the world. Instead of cognitively constructing meaning, an assertor lets the asserted stand out as itself in a certain way of its being uncovered. Predicative availability is one way that entities in the world engage us. It is this availability that makes asserting an interpretive, rather than constructive, practice. That is, asserting something is one response to disclosure and to the way entities stand out in the open.
Assertion is only one kind of human activity in a whole range of practices that characterize the embodied way that we are in the world. For example, besides making assertions, we manufacture artifacts, organize communities, and govern political entities. To emphasize that asserting is not privileged, Zuidervaart argues for a variety of human practices that constitute our being in the world.65 This is important for him because he argues against privileging a notion of truth associated with assertions as found in the correspondence theory of truth. Yet, his rejection of such privileging does not mean he throws out the truth of assertions. Instead, he embeds a notion of asserted truth in a larger, more comprehensive theory of truth. In all cases, including asserting, Zuidervaart wishes to connect truth with disclosedness. As such, he says, we cannot make propositional validity the key to a general theory of truth.
Zuidervaart instead argues for a broad construal of truth as life-giving disclosure.66 This requires, he suggests, a variety of truth-marking principles, each of which discloses something as normative in connection with a particular set of human practices. Norms are principles, which a group of people holds jointly, that obtain or hold for sets of social practices. He suggests principles such as resourcefulness for the practices of production, solidarity for the practices of community building, justice for the practices of governing, and correctness for the practices of asserting – multiple ways of truth as disclosure. That is, “being in the truth” requires faithfulness to these sorts of principles. Each is true because it is life giving, namely, it leads to human and other creaturely flourishing. Thus fidelity to certain principles would shape these human practices toward societal, earthly well-being. For example, being faithful to the principle of justice would lead social practices and institutions toward increases in equity, including better distribution of resources and enhanced prospects for currently marginalized populations. Faithfulness to the principle of stewardship would shape particular social practices toward reduction of conspicuous consumption and environmental degradation. Ultimately, I suggest, human flourishing will involve not only current generations living meaningful lives with adequate resources, but doing so in a way that allows future generations to do the same. The life-giving disclosure through such faithfulness depends, says Zuidervaart, on how well those social practices align with these truth-marking principles.
This goes beyond the constructivist critique of truth as correspondence. For Zuidervaart, truth is “a calling that comes to us from beyond ourselves and beyond the entities and people with which we have dealings.”67 Truth is a process of life-giving disclosure that involves an enigmatic call from beyond the self, others, and the entities that populate the world.68 The call involves an unchosen responsibility toward doing what is right. In responding faithfully to the principles discussed above, we succumb to a felt responsibility and so we implicitly acknowledge that the call comes from beyond ourselves without needing to be clear about its origin. Zuidervaart’s alternative gets us beyond the constructivist’s notion that in the development of knowledge there are no truth claims. Von Glasersfeld focuses attention on the mental states of individual conscious subjects instead on something beyond ourselves. Zuidervaart’s theory of truth turns us back to something outside ourselves and our dealings in the world.
Zuidervaart’s idea is appealing because of its normative dimension. For him, truth as a call from beyond ourselves gives rise to the possibility of intersubjective agreement, something people hold in common. Thus, succumbing to the call of the principle of correctness gives rise to possible intersubjective agreement about assertions. Additionally, fidelity to the principle of solidarity makes possible intersubjective agreement about how to live together in community. At the same time, for Zuidervaart, truth is also the call that itself pulls people together in concert and commonality.69 Thus, being held by the principles of solidarity and correctness will bind people together. This double hold – actively coming together in agreement and passively being held in mutuality – is key for Zuidervaart’s notion of truth as normative: “What helps distinguish true disclosure from false is life-promoting and life-sustaining fidelity to principles that people hold in common and that hold them in common.”70 Fidelity to truth-marking principles implies faithfulness to that which will open up avenues that lets humans and other creatures flourish.
However, this is not to say that truth exists, as it were, by itself, in some specialized transcendent (or metaphysical) realm. Instead, it occurs for Zuidervaart in conjunction with the opening that constitutes disclosure. He states, truth “is a calling that urges upon us the necessity and desirability of practices and institutions that are attuned to that which sustains validity.”71 Truth involves the felt responsibility for orienting social practices that sustain human flourishing. Truth does not transcend time and place, but rather it is within the temporal-spatial world and directs human practices toward life giving disclosure. But to avoid reducing truth to a merely human response, Zuidervaart distinguishes between disclosure and validity – validity is our response to truth as disclosure. This distinction allows him to assign responsibility to humans for the difference between right actions and unjust ones, sustainable practices and environmentally damaging ones, correct assertions and mistaken ones.72 He argues, “the facts that entities resist and exceed our grasp [what Heidegger calls ‘refusal’] and that entities present themselves as other than they are [what Heidegger calls ‘obstructing’] are humbling reminders of human finitude and fallibility.”73 Humans are the source of misunderstanding and error in our interpreting that which is disclosed. The validity of knowledge claims is on the human side, in response to disclosure. Zuidervaart cautions, “all the human practices and institutions in the world, no matter how well they support discovery, understanding, reorientation, and right conduct, cannot guarantee that what needs to be disclosed is disclosed.”74 Knowledge constituted by particular human social practices consists of human responses that attempt to interpret that which is disclosed.
Zuidervaart’s notion of truth as life-giving disclosure, distinct from validity and human practice, is a good alternative to constructivism’s philosophy of consciousness. It is the latter that forces von Glasersfeld to abandon a notion of truth and retreat to a notion of fit to describe the knowledge-world relation. By contrast, Zuidervaart’s notion of truth as disclosure follows from the idea that humans are always already bodily in the world, rather than from the idea that truth must be established through argumentation about how the conscious mind might contact mind-independent reality. Bodily being in the world allows for Zuidervaart’s notion of truth as something that comes as a call from beyond humans, as life-giving disclosure in the world. This approach still makes humans responsible for the development of knowledge since, as previously stated, validity is not the same as disclosure. For example, a particular asserted claim – say, within biology – may be valid according to certain commonly held criteria and yet not settle once-and-for-all questions of disclosure. What appears disclosed – say, the discovery of a new structure in the cell’s cytoplasm – might well be beyond our present grasp, or manifest itself in ways that in hindsight were misleading. The roots of such non-disclosures are not the entities themselves, but the finiteness of the human grasp and the fallibility of human interpretation. That is, invalid claims or practices are not the fault of the world, but fall on the side of human finiteness and fallibility, as von Glasersfeld also would assert. The responsibility for getting things wrong epistemologically lies on the human side of things. Because humans can make mistakes, overreach, and go astray in our engagement with the world, there is a difference between the call of truth in disclosure and the validity of human responses.
Zuidervaart’s position thus does not undermine von Glasersfeld’s educational insights. Instead, I suggest that Zuidervaart’s approach can actually form a better conceptual ground for von Glasersfeld’s constructivist learning practices than his own anti-realist epistemology. Zuidervaart’s emphasis on human responsibility conceptually grounds von Glasersfeld’s insistence that students must be active in knowledge development. Yet Zuidervaart’s argument for responsibility in the human response to disclosure, connected to the idea that such responses involve embodied engagement in the world, alleviates the need to interpret student learning as cognitively constructing knowledge in the head. Rather, learning involves actively responding in the context of the truth-marking principles that call the student to, for example, correctness in assertions or solidarity in community. At the same time, Zuidervaart’s notion of validity, which recognizes the finiteness and fallibility of human practices, gives a natural place for von Glasersfeld’s emphasis that students can and do make mistakes in the process of developing knowledge.
Put more robustly, Zuidervaart’s emphasis on the life-giving character of truth as disclosure gives a normative orientation to education itself, and thereby situates von Glasersfeld’s insights into teaching and learning within education as a normative practice. Education might be a site of particular social practices that responds to a variety of truth-marking principles. The validity of education, in its particular response to truth as life-giving disclosure, might require actively engaging students in multiple projects in which they jointly respond to the call of resourcefulness in production, solidarity in community, justice in governance, and correctness in assertion. That is, education’s task might be to engage students in many ways of being in truth, where teaching might be construed as invitations to fidelity to these sorts of principles. What would make them valid is the evidence of their life-giving orientation. Teaching might then involve questioning, opening, unsettling, and more generally transforming students’ engagement with the world toward such an orientation. This would likely employ many of von Glasersfeld’s educational insights in order to lead students toward practices that foster personal, communal, and other creaturely flourishing. Thus education’s fidelity to normative principles could shape the next generation’s practices toward human flourishing. Since principles for Zuidervaart are themselves historically learned, contested, formulated, ignored, and misunderstood, and truth is thus historical,75 education would also be the site for discourse and debate about the principles themselves. To co-opt Zuidervaart’s insight, normative education could involve a “process of life-giving disclosure marked by human fidelity, to which a differentiated array of cultural practices and products . . . can contribute in distinct and indispensible ways.”76 The principled character of such education is what makes it normative. And the necessary involvement of the student’s active participation is what makes it sympathetic to many educational insights of constructionism.77
1 An earlier version of this chapter was published as “Ernst von Glasersfeld’s Radical Constructivism and Truth as Disclosure” in Educational Theory 61 (2011): 275–93.
2 See, by way of comparison, Anoop Gupta, “Constructivism and Peer Collaboration in Elementary Mathematics Education: The Connection to Epistemology,” Eurasia Journal of Mathematics, Science & Technology Education 4 (4, 2008): 381–6; Andreas Quale, Radical Constructivism: A Relativist Epistemic Approach to Science Education (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2008); Greg S. Goodman, Educational Psychology: An Application of Critical Constructivism (New York: Peter Lang, 2008).
3 D.C. Phillips, “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: The Many Faces of Constructivism,” Educational Researcher 24 (7, 1995): 5–12.
4 Ernst von Glasersfeld, “Learning as a Constructive Activity,” AntiMatters 2 (3, 2008): 33–49.
5 Ernst von Glasersfeld, “Cognition, Construction of Knowledge, and Teaching,” Synthese 80 (1, 1989): 136.
6 Ernst von Glasersfeld, “Radical Constructivism and Teaching,” Ernst von Glasersfeld Homepage, 2001, 9, http://www.univie.ac.at/constructivism/evg/papers/244.2.pdf.
7 Ibid., 10.
8 Ernst von Glasersfeld, “Aspects of Radical Constructivism and Its Educational Recommendations,” in Theories of Mathematical Learning, ed. Leslie P. Steffe et al. (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1996), 307–14.
9 Ernst von Glasersfeld, “An Introduction to Radical Constructivism,” AntiMatters 2 (3, 2008): 5–20.
10 von Glasersfeld, “Cognition, Construction of Knowledge, and Teaching,” 123.
11 von Glasersfeld, “An Introduction to Radical Constructivism,” 6. He goes on to say, “our knowledge can never be interpreted as a picture or representation of that real world [in itself].” His approach builds on Vico’s idea that the human mind can know only what it has made, and he uses Piaget’s genetic epistemology or developmental constructivism to situate his idea of individual knowledge construction.
12 Ernst von Glasersfeld, “The Radical Constructivist View of Science,” Foundations of Science 6 (1, 2001): 36.
13 von Glasersfeld, “Cognition, Construction of Knowledge, and Teaching,” 124.
14 Ibid.
15 von Glasersfeld, “An Introduction to Radical Constructivism,” 8.
16 Liberato Cardellini, “The Foundations of Radical Constructivism: An Interview with Ernst von Glasersfeld,” Foundations of Chemistry 8 (2, 2006): 181.
17 von Glasersfeld, “An Introduction to Radical Constructivism,” 9. See also von Glasersfeld, “Cognition, Construction of Knowledge, and Teaching,” 124, 126.
18 Ernst von Glasersfeld, “Facts and the Self from a Constructivist Point of View,” AntiMatters 2 (3, 2008): 23.
19 von Glasersfeld, “An Introduction to Radical Constructivism,” 18.
20 Ernst von Glasersfeld, “Why Constructivism Must Be Radical,” in Constructivism and Education, ed. Marie Larochelle, Nadine Bednarz, and Jim Garrison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 24.
21 von Glasersfeld, “Facts and the Self from a Constructivist Point of View,” 23.
22 von Glasersfeld, “An Introduction to Radical Constructivism,” 14.
23 Stephen Campbell, “Constructivism and the Limits of Reason: Revisiting the Kantian Problematic,” Studies in Philosophy and Education 21 (6, 2002): 422.
24 Ernst von Glasersfeld, Radical Constructivism: A Way of Knowing and Learning (London: RoutledgeFalmer, 1995), 1.
25 Ernst von Glasersfeld, “Introduction: Aspects of Constructivism,” in Constructivism: Theory, Perspectives, and Practice, ed. Catherine Twomey Fosnot (New York: Teachers College Press, 1996), 5.
26 Peter Davson-Galle, “Constructivism: ‘A Curate’s Egg,’ ” Educational Philosophy and Theory 31 (2, 1999): 212.
27 Aharon Aviram, “Beyond Constructivism: Autonomy-Oriented Education,” Studies in Philosophy and Education 19 (5, 2000): 465, 476.
28 William Cobern and Cathleen Loving, “An Essay for Educators: Epistemological Realism Really is Common Sense,” Science & Education 17 (4, 2008): 435, 436.
29 Derek Louis Meyer, “The Poverty of Constructivism,” Educational Philosophy and Theory 41 (3, 2009): 338.
30 Michael R. Matthews, “Constructivism and Science Education: A Further Appraisal,” Journal of Science Education and Technology 11 (2, 2002): 127.
31 Ibid. Of course, not all correspondence theories rely on an “inside the mind” mental representation. Some, such as Frege, locate thoughts in a third realm. However, it is not clear whether this move would escape all of the criticisms rightly aimed at the more traditional idea of knowledge as mental representation.
32 Barry Allen, Truth in Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Jerry A Fodor, Psychosemantics: The Problem of Meaning in the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 100.
33 Matthews, “Constructivism and Science Education,” 127.
34 Robert Nola, “Constructivism in Science and Science Education: A Philosophical Critique,” Science & Education 6 (1, 1997): 71.
35 Michael P. Lynch, Truth in Context: An Essay on Pluralism and Objectivity (Boston, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 145. Comparing our thoughts to the world would require the “priority of nature over culture,” Allen, Truth in Philosophy, 9.
36 Lynch agrees that some facts might appear to be absolute, independent of all conceptual schemes, but maintains that this is illusionary. Instead, these are what he calls virtual absolutes, because they fit within every conceptual scheme. He argues that virtual absolutes always need an appeal to a conceptual scheme in order to understand the fact (proposition), whereas no such appeal is needed for absolute facts, as they are understandable outside of all conceptual schemes. Virtual absolutes always already require concepts to be understood, unlike absolute facts.
37 Ilkka Niiniluoto, Critical Scientific Realism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 11.
38 Raf Vanderstraeten and Gert Biesta, “Constructivism, Educational Research, and John Dewey,” The Paideia Archive, 2004, sec. 1, http://www.bu.edu/wcp/papers/amer/amervand.htm.
39 Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 138.
40 See Brady Heiner, “The Recorporealization of Cognition in Phenomenology and Cognitive Science,” Continental Philosophy Review 41 (2, 2008): 115–26; Shaun Gallagher, How the Body Shapes the Mind (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005).
41 Mark Johnson, The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 113; Alva Noe, Action in Perception (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 1.
42 Joseph Rouse, Knowledge and Power: Towards a Political Philosophy of Science (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), 129.
43 Ibid., 141.
44 Ibid., 127.
45 Cardellini, “The Foundations of Radical Constructivism,” 180.
46 Rouse, Knowledge and Power, 128.
47 Ibid., 143.
48 Shaun Gallagher, “Intersubjectivity in Perception,” Continental Philosophy Review 41 (2, 2008): 164.
49 Rouse, Knowledge and Power, 145.
50 Ibid., 155.
51 Ibid., 157. See also Johnson, The Meaning of the Body, 10.
52 Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, “Animation: The Fundamental, Essential, and Properly Descriptive Concept,” Continental Philosophy Review 42 (3, 2009): 375.
53 Rouse, Knowledge and Power, 159.
54 Ibid., 147.
55 Ibid., 142.
56 Ibid.
57 Ibid., 160.
58 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1996), sec. 44. See also Anne-Marie Power, “Truth and Aletheia in Heidegger’s Thought,” De Philosophia 14 (1, 1998): 109–20.
59 Lambert Zuidervaart, Artistic Truth: Aesthetics, Discourse, and Imaginative Disclosure (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 79.
60 Ibid., 81.
61 Ibid., 106.
62 Ibid., 89. Here, Zuidervaart creatively appropriates Heidegger’s idea that propositions are grounded in the more fundamental notion of disclosure.
63 Ibid., 88.
64 Ibid.
65 Ibid., 97.
66 Ibid., 96.
67 Ibid., 108.
68 I have elaborated elsewhere the enigmatic character of such a call; see Clarence W. Joldersma, “A Spirituality of the Desert for Education: The Call of Justice Beyond the Individual or Community,” Studies in Philosophy and Education 28 (3, 2009): 193–208.
69 Zuidervaart, Artistic Truth, 108.
70 Ibid., 207.
71 Ibid., 108.
72 Ibid., 107. Lambert Zuidervaart, “Truth Matters: Heidegger and Horkheimer in Dialectical Disclosure,” Telos: A Quarterly Journal of Critical Thought 145 (2008): 158.
73 Zuidervaart, Artistic Truth, 115.
74 Ibid.
75 Zuidervaart, “Truth Matters,” 158.
76 Zuidervaart, Artistic Truth, 207.
77 I would like to thank Darren Walhof for his helpful critique of this chapter.