Constructivism: What does it mean to know?

1
Constructivism What does it mean to know?

• Bertram C. Bruce

2
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
3
Need for foundations

• multiple discourses
• competing methodologies
• rapidly changing technologies
• yet, common themes

4
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

5
Problems with

• metaphysics,
• ideologies,
• methodologies,
• epistemology
• what can we do?

6
What shape is the earth?
7
1.
2.
3.
8
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.

9
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

10
Necker cube
11
How many ways can you see the Necker cube?
12
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

13
Hegel

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

14
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

15
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

16
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

17
Dialogical reading

• dogmatic
• exegetical
• agnostic
• diaolgical
• Kaufman, Walter. The art of reading in The
  future of the humanities

18
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

19
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.

20
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 in-between. 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.

21
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.

22
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

23
The Four Incapacities

• Cartesianism
• 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.

24
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

25
Continuity of experience (Dewey)

• Hegels philosophy
• Developmental psychology
• Evolutionary biology

26
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

27
Consequences

• Learning
• Information ecologies
• Situated studies
• Observer as participant
• Ethics

28
Learning...

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

29
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

30
Information ecologies

• Design
• Distribution
• Use
• Interpretation
• Bruce/Hogan model

31
Situated studies

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

32
Alternate realizations
33
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

34
Ethics

• effective historical consciousness
• diversity, standpoint epistemology
• social justice