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: It’s 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 responsive…The 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 other’s voice. On the contrary, he receives the word by the other’s voice and it remains filled with that voice. He intervenes in his own context from another context, already penetrated by the other’s intentions. His own intention finds a word already lived in. • Bakhtin, MikhailProblems of Dostoevsky’s 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) • Hegel’s 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