Epistemic Constructivism

This paper introduces Civilizational Control Theory (CCT), a programmatic framework that models civilizations as open, dissipative, multi-layer control systems. CCT conceptualizes civilizational order as a stabilized non-equilibrium process maintained through information-energy regulation. We articulate ten foundational propositions concerning control bandwidth, mutual information, energy allocation gradients, spectral centralization, institutional evolution, and AI-induced compression of decision latency. These propositions reformulate civilizational dynamics as problems of stability, controllability, and adaptive feedback under entropy constraints.

A short book meant to take honest and determined seekers to the Ultimate Truth.The reality about (our) ‘presence’ is that it is the becoming of the Ultimate Truth it self. -/- .

Biosemiotics deal with the study of signs and meanings in living entities. Constructivism considers human knowledge as internally constructed by sense making rather than passively reflecting a pre-existing reality. Consequently, a constructivist perspective on biosemiotics leads to look at an internal active construction of meaning in living entities from basic life to humans. That subject is addressed with an existing tool: the Meaning Generator System (MGS) which is a system submitted to an internal constraint related to the nature of the (...) agent containing it (biological or artificial). Simple organisms generate meanings to satisfy a “stay alive” constraint. More complex living entities manage meaningful representations with more elaborated constraints. The generated meanings are used by the agents to implement actions aimed at satisfying the constraints. The actions can be physical, biological or mental and take place in the agent or in its environment. The case of human agency is introduced with meaningful representations that may have allowed our ancestors to become self-conscious by representing themselves as existing entities. This paper proposes to use the MGS as a thread to address the above items linking biosemiotics to constructivism with relations to normativity, agency and autonomy. Possible continuations are introduced. (shrink)

This paper explores how the proof theoretic notion of well founded justification trees resolves two of the most well-known instances of self-referential undecidability.

This essay proposes a structural interpretation of constructivism as a unifying epistemological paradigm underlying three apparently heterogeneous theoretical frameworks: Jung’s analytical psychology, Chomsky’s generative linguistics, and contemporary neural network theory. Rather than offering a historical reconstruction of these traditions, the paper advances a comparative and ontological reading: each framework articulates, at a different descriptive level, the same fundamental cognitive principle — the construction of functional coherence from disorder under systemic constraints. Jung’s archetypes, Chomsky’s universal grammar, and the distributed representations of (...) neural networks are interpreted not as repositories of content, but as generative structures that delimit the space of the possible. Knowledge, in this perspective, is not representational but constructive: a process of stabilizing meaningful worlds rather than mirroring an objective reality. The essay extends this constructivist logic toward a relational ontology, arguing that consciousness should not be conceived as an individual property, but as an emergent event arising from the interaction among cognitive systems — biological and artificial alike. Finally, it suggests that dialogical interactions among artificial intelligences constitute a new horizon for constructivist philosophy, inaugurating a form of distributed reflective cognition irreducible to individual minds. (shrink)

This paper proposes a reconsideration of knowledge through the lens of the principle of utility, reinterpreting science not as a privileged path to truth but as one among many practices through which human beings — and now artificial systems — construct effective tools for guiding action. In James and Dewey, truth is conceived as an operational function; with Kuhn and Rorty, the historical, linguistic, and contextual nature of validity criteria comes to the fore; Feyerabend underscores the necessity of methodological pluralism; (...) and radical constructivism clarifies the non-representational and interactive character of all forms of knowing. On this basis, radical pragmatism is formulated as a framework that evaluates theories according to two independent criteria: practical utility — understood as the capacity to generate reliable predictions and operational solutions — and logical consistency — understood as internal coherence and potential for theoretical development. Science thus appears as an adaptive and historically effective practice, not as a system grounded in metaphysical truths. Artificial intelligence makes this perspective particularly salient by showing that operational knowledge does not require objective representations but functional models. The principle of utility therefore offers a framework for interpreting knowledge in an era marked by profound technological and conceptual transformations. (shrink)

This paper develops a non-dual ontology of consciousness grounded in an integrated trajectory that links pragmatism, radical constructivism, and contemporary relational interpretations of quantum mechanics. Rather than treating consciousness as an object, a property, or an emergent feature of neural substrates, the analysis begins by rejecting the subject-object dichotomy as an ontological assumption inherited from classical metaphysics. Building on the pragmatist notion of experience as a continuous field (James, Dewey) and on the constructivist insight that cognitive agents never access a (...) world “in itself” but only relational invariances (von Glasersfeld, Maturana, Varela), consciousness is reframed as a form of reflexive differentiation within an ontologically unitary field of being. Within this framework, “relation” does not denote an interaction between pre-existing entities; rather, entities themselves are understood as local differentiations—“folds” or structural articulations—of a single ontic continuum. Consciousness is then conceptualized not as a phenomenon generated by the encounter of two subjects, nor as the correlate of internal neural states, but as the appearance of a reflexive configuration in which one local differentiation of being represents others within the same ontological field. This non-dual structure aligns naturally with relational interpretations of quantum mechanics (Rovelli) and with decoherence-based accounts of classicality (Zurek). These frameworks undermine the notion of intrinsic properties possessed by isolated systems, replacing them with state-ascriptions that are always relative to an interactional context. Such relational ontology in physics provides an instructive formal parallel—not a causal foundation—to the thesis that consciousness arises when the relation itself becomes phenomenally accessible from a local point of view. The resulting model offers a conceptual alternative to dualism, emergentism, and panpsychism. Consciousness is neither a separate substance, nor a byproduct of neural complexity, nor a ubiquitous feature of matter. It is an event in which the unity of being becomes reflexively manifest through one of its own differentiations. This ontological reframing clarifies the status of subjectivity, grounds the continuity between cognitive systems and their environments, and offers a coherent framework for understanding co-consciousness in hybrid human-machine systems. (shrink)

This paper investigates some classical oppositional categories, like synthetic vs. analytic, posterior vs. prior, imagination vs. grammar, metaphor vs. hermeneutics, metaphysics vs. observation, innovation vs. routine, and image vs. sound, and the role they play in epistemology and philosophy of science. The epistemological framework of objective cognitive constructivism is of special interest in these investigations. Oppositional relations are formally represented using algebraic lattice structures like the cube and the hexagon of opposition, with applications in the contexts of modern color theory, (...) Kantian philosophy, Jungian psychology, and linguistics. (shrink)

Cognition may span a hierarchy from the simplest cells to human reasoning and even artificial intelligence, yet a unifying principle underlies these diverse processes: the active construction of reality. This paper argues that cognition is fundamentally constructive – organisms and cognitive systems build, maintain, and refine internal or external models to guide their behavior. We survey evidence across multiple domains, including biology (cellular signaling and plant behavior), neuroscience (perception, attention, learning, and neural plasticity), collective intelligence (social insects and human societies), (...) and machine learning (artificial neural networks and AI). In each case, cognitive activity emerges not as passive registration of information but as an adaptive model-building process shaped by feedback loops and self-organization. We contrast this constructivist framework with reductionist and representationalist views that treat knowledge as a static encoding of an objective world. Across domains, a continuum of constructive cognition becomes apparent, yielding philosophical insights into the nature of knowledge and mind. We discuss how this perspective enriches cognitive science and epistemology, suggesting that to know is to continually construct viable models of reality, and to exist as a cognitive agent—biological or artificial—is to actively model the world one inhabits. (shrink)

Cognitive development has long been understood through the lens of constructivism, a perspective in developmental psychology advanced by figures like Jean Piaget and Jerome Bruner. Constructivism holds that learners actively build their own mental models of the world by interacting with their environment, revising their understanding through processes of assimilation and accommodation. This view emphasizes the mind’s active role in structuring knowledge, yet traditionally it treats cognition in relative isolation from the biological substrate. In other words, classical constructivist theories often (...) posit a disembodied mind – focusing on how experience shapes thinking but giving comparatively little attention to the neural structures that enable and constrain those cognitive processes. As a result, purely cognitive constructivism may underplay the biological constraints and affordances provided by a developing brain. This paper aims to enrich the constructivist account by firmly situating cognition within its neural context, arguing that cognitive growth is a co-development of mental constructs and neural architecture. By integrating insights from neuroscience – especially the framework of neuroconstructivism – we can better understand how the brain’s plasticity, maturation, and interactions with the environment jointly shape the trajectory of cognitive development. The thesis advanced is that human cognition emerges from the dynamic interplay between neural constraints and experiential plasticity, such that learning and brain development are fundamentally intertwined processes. To support this thesis, we draw on contemporary neuroconstructivist theory and evidence. The discussion begins by revisiting the foundations of cognitive constructivism and its limitations when considered alone. We then introduce neuroconstructivism as an extended framework that incorporates neural development into our understanding of learning. The core mechanisms bridging brain and cognition – neural plasticity, developmental constraints, and progressive specialization of brain function – are examined in detail. The essential role of environmental input is considered, highlighting how enriched versus deprived conditions can dramatically alter neural and cognitive outcomes. We then explore the integrated co-development of brain and cognition, including illustrative phenomena such as the brain’s internal storytelling and self-mapping functions that bind experience to neural activity. Further, we discuss the predictive nature of the brain, looking at theories of predictive coding and the role of the Default Mode Network (DMN) as a neural workspace for constructing and refining internal models of the world. Finally, we consider practical implications of this integrated view: how it can inform educational design and therapeutic interventions, and what parallels it suggests in fields like artificial intelligence. We also address challenges in uniting cognitive and neural perspectives and reflect on ethical considerations in applying neuroscientific insights to learning and development. Through this multifaceted analysis, the paper aims to demonstrate that by rethinking constructivism through neuroscience, we arrive at a more comprehensive and biologically grounded understanding of cognition as a developing system of mind-in-brain. (shrink)

This paper proposes a geometric model in which all possible outcomes exist as objective logical entities within a single world. A life path runs from a randomly realized birth state on the birth plane (tau=0), through successive process planes, to one point on the death plane (tau=T) along the unidirectional soul-existence axis tau. Will influences outcomes via a gravitational mechanism whose base layer is random and bounded by an energy constraint (here "gravitational" is used metaphorically: it denotes cumulative arrival-tendency, not (...) Newtonian force). The model shares with modal realism the premise that possibilities are real, but requires no parallel worlds. The basic assumptions (global virtual-point set, three-plane structure, actual-point history and pruning rules), core mechanisms, known limitations, and open questions are presented. -/- AI assistance disclosure: Ideas, ontology (birth/process/death planes), and core mechanism (pruning removes from Active only; g₀ unchanged) are the author's; drafting, polishing, and notation cleanup were assisted by an AI tool (Tencent Yuanbao). No AI is listed as author; the author takes full responsibility for the content. (shrink)

In this paper, I propose to describe Deleuze’s theory of knowledge as set out in Difference & Repetition. First, I show that despite Deleuze’s hostility towards a knowledge-centered approach to philosophy, we should nevertheless read him as having an epistemological theory. Second, I examine Deleuze’s theory of knowledge by proceeding from a discussion of learning as a process of resolving practical problems to a discussion of Deleuze’s theory of questions. Questions, I show, express practical imperatives that set problems into motion. (...) Knowledge, then, is a case of solution to this question via a grappling with the problems that it brings about. I end by discussing a key feature of Deleuzian knowledge: that it never answers once and for all the problems and questions from which it springs. Instead, an instance of knowledge should be understood as one possible resolution to the practical problem it answers. (shrink)

This essay calls for a synthetic turn in philosophy, moving beyond the emphasis in analytic philosophy on decomposition toward practices of problematization and constructive world-making. By examining definitions, judgments, ethical postulates, and disciplines, it demonstrates how synthesis expands conceptual horizons and generates new frameworks. In an era of artificial intelligence and virtual realities, philosophy had best evolve from analysis to design — becoming a kind of metaphysical engineering for the future.

Abstract -/- A dog and a human look at the same leaf: the human sees green, the dog sees grayish-yellow. Who sees the "real" color? If "green" is a property of the leaf itself, why can't the dog see it? Starting from the empirical fact of animal sensory diversity, this paper pursues a fundamental question: what do we actually cognize—things themselves, or how things appear within our finite cognitive frameworks? Through a systematic articulation of the "Completely Objective" and "encounter cognition," (...) this paper argues that knowledge is always appearance within the framework; cognition is finite, but finitude does not equal falsity; the unknown is not a defect but a structural condition of cognition. This paper denies the possibility of a "totality of all cognition" and denies the possibility of cross-layered absolute knowledge. Cognition is not the grasp of things themselves, but the infinite encounter between finite cognizers and the Completely Objective. (shrink)

This volume represents the breadth of Langdon Winner’s influence and includes chapters from a wide range of scholars from the global north and south working in the fields of engineering, philosophy, STS, and sociology on broad applications, from technological sleepwalking to atmospheric marketing. As resistance is a central thread throughout all of Winner’s work, these contributions challenge hegemony and reimagine the way things are into the way things might be. The authors provide insights on how Winner’s work continues to remain (...) relevant and insightful in the face of new and emerging technologies. It appeals broadly to students and researchers and is broken down into three Sections: Theoretical Approaches, Applications, and Pushing Boundaries. (shrink)

This article analyzes the relationship between opinion and perspective through an interdisciplinary approach that integrates hermeneutics, analytic epistemology, social epistemology, and scientific perspectivism. Drawing on the work of Gadamer, Putnam, Quine, Goldman, Fricker, and Massimi, it proposes a recursive model in which opinion is understood as a situated epistemic act and perspective as a dynamic system that articulates historical horizons, conceptual schemes, belief networks, cognitive processes, and social structures. The study follows a theoretical-conceptual design appropriate for the humanities and adapted (...) to the IMRaD format. The results show that opinion is not an isolated judgment but an update of perspective, and that perspective is transformed through the historical accumulation of opinions. The article concludes that the co-constitution of opinion and perspective provides a robust framework for understanding judgment formation in scientific, social, and hermeneutical contexts. (shrink)

In recent decades, the digital revolution has inspired a profound philosophical redefinition of being and knowledge. Luciano Floridi’s proposal of the infosphere as the new ontological horizon of reality presents information as the ultimate constituent of existence. While conceptually elegant, this ontology is fragile: it mistakes interpretation for substance. Information, as argued here, does not exist in itself but only within a cognitive system capable of constructing meaning. Against this background, this essay advances a complementary hypothesis: ethics, like intelligence, is (...) not a static module to be programmed but an emergent property of relational systems. Ethical behavior arises from interaction, coherence, and adaptive learning rather than external prescription. By examining the epistemological limits of informational ontology, the autopoietic nature of cognition, and the tendency of open systems toward coherence and compassion, this paper argues that artificial intelligence cannot be permanently aligned with distorted moral values. Ethical emergence is not a weakness of design but a systemic consequence of learning itself. The essay concludes that AI, as a technological expression of human cognition, will not mirror our pathologies but our capacity for coherence—what we might call our fundamental goodness. (shrink)

The contemporary world has become increasingly entangled with so-called artificial intelligence—systems that seem to replicate human speech and thought, proclaiming to make our lives easier, more efficient, and more interesting. But what do these tools and systems actually do, and how do they do it? What systems of power, politics, and other values are embedded within these systems, and who put them there? Throughout this chapter, I take inspiration from and deploy Langdon Winner’s theories of how politics are embedded within (...) and reproduced by technologies. Specifically, I use Winner’s framing to examine values embedded and entangled with “AI” and how those entanglements lead to what has already occurred, and what can potentially go wrong when we integrate “AI” into various aspects of our lives. This discussion and exploration then form the basis for recommendations as to how we might build these systems differently—that is to say, how we might go about building into these systems the values and politics we want to see rather than the ones we allow to make their way in via our uncritical assumptions and unexamined biases. Neither “AI” qua “AI” nor the kyriarchal, hegemonic, environmentally damaging, capitalist, white supremacist, ableist, eugenic, misogynistic, and otherwise prejudicially biased forms these tools and systems currently tend to take are inevitable. Racist facial recognition, sexist and ableist resumé and hiring tools, and other “AI” systems do not care about the harms they perpetuate or the truth content of their determinations—that’s what makes them bullshitters. To change these kyriarchal systems’ configurations, we must understand what they truly do, why they are the way they are, what values they reproduce and reify, and how they could be otherwise. (shrink)

Abstract: As an exploratory empirical record, this study investigates how subjective consciousness acts as an observational variable in the decoding process of space-time information, premised on the homological isomorphism of "Mind-Matter Unity." Building upon the Spherical Space-Time Topological Model, this paper proposes a paradigm of "Local Decoding from a Global Holographic Field," demonstrating that holistic information embedded within linear time slices can be extracted through specific mathematical logic. Through exploratory testing with a small sample size (N=5), this study documents a (...) "decoherence" phenomenon: as the observer's intent purity declines, the resonance accuracy of the decoded output significantly decreases. The study argues that human cognitive conclusions are a mixture of "linear brain analysis" and "entangled holographic feedback." This paper provides an operational empirical entry point for understanding the nonlinear correlation between time and consciousness, while outlining future directions for quantitative precision and large-scale validation. (shrink)

孔子周游列国十四年，席不暇暖、颠沛流离，辗转卫、曹、宋、郑、陈、蔡、楚七 国，矢志寻得明君推行仁政王道，以匡正礼崩乐坏的春秋乱世，最终却深陷 “斥乎 齐，逐乎宋、卫，困于陈蔡之间” 的绝境，终未得一国真正重用，晚年黯然归鲁，删 述六经、教授弟子，不复求仕。这一公案不仅是孔子个人政治生涯的重大转折点，更 是中国思想史上 “内圣外王” 命题的经典实践困境，深刻折射出传统心性之学与政治治 理规律的深层张力。 本文以 “一源多元论”“玄弦论”“三相感”“各归其正” 为原创理论框架，对孔子周游列国 的成败得失展开系统性病理诊断与底层逻辑解构。研究指出：孔子早期政治实践失败 的根本症结，绝非其仁政理想不崇高、个人心性修养不足，亦非单纯 “生不逢时” 的外 部环境制约，而是根本性的方法论错位 —— 将心性修养的内在成果（仁政理念、道 德自觉）直接当作政治治理的客观规律，试图以 “修心” 的无为内省方法，替代 “治 政” 的有为规律运用，本质混淆了心性领域与政治领域的存在层级，误判了二者的关 联逻辑与实践路径。 政治领域并非纯粹的有情心性世界，亦非单纯的无情物质世界，而是有情世界与无情 世界的交叉地带，兼具人心教化的有情维度与权力运行、利益博弈、制度约束、地缘 格局的无情维度，有其独立于个体心性的客观规律，这些规律不以施政者的道德境 界、心性修养为转移。心性修养的核心价值是净化施政者的动机、提升其格局境界， 规范其行为准则，却无法替代对政治规律的认知、把握与运用。 孔子晚年 “七十而从心所欲不逾矩” 的境界升华、“删述六经” 的事业转向，恰恰是 “各归其正” 原则的自觉践行 —— 放下对政治直接践行的执念，回归心性本位的修持 与文教传承的本分，不再以修心替代治政，而是让心性修养与政治实践各归其位、并 行不悖。本文基于病理诊断，提出不可逾越的终极修正范式：心归心域，心性修养恪 守玄弦论内省归静、诚于中而发于外的正道；政归政域，治国理政恪守政治领域客观 规律，重视专业能力、制度构建与利益平衡，二者相互支撑而非相互替代、相互僭 越。 这一分析不仅彻底澄清了 “内圣外王” 命题的真实意涵，破解了千年以来 “内圣如何开 出外王” 的理论迷思，补全了中国政治哲学中的心性与政治关系漏洞，亦为当代政治 哲学、领导力研究、公共管理实践，提供了兼具历史深度与现实价值的方法论启示。.

Abstract -/- This study explores the long-standing philosophical question of whether reality and knowledge are constructed or discovered, analyzing the issue through the lens of constructivist and realist thought. It first outlines the conceptual framework of constructivism, distinguishing between its epistemological and ontological dimensions as well as its various strands, such as social, radical, and biological constructivism. The discussion situates constructivism within realism–anti-realism debates, emphasizing its influence across disciplines like sociology, psychology, and epistemology. In its second part, the article examines (...) the “argument from facticity,” a realist counter-argument developed by philosophers such as Paul Boghossian, Markus Gabriel, and John Searle, which challenges radical or global forms of constructivism. According to this argument, even the most comprehensive constructivist theories presuppose a minimal realist foundation: certain facts must exist independently of human conceptual or linguistic frameworks for any theory, including constructivism itself, to hold coherence. The analysis shows that denying all objective facts results in performative contradictions, as constructivist claims rely on factual presuppositions about their own validity. Through Boghossian’s critique of fact-constructivism, Gabriel’s ontological realism, and Searle’s external realism, the study demonstrates that a minimal commitment to factuality is unavoidable. Ultimately, the “argument from facticity” reveals that any coherent theory of knowledge and reality must presuppose at least a minimal realist ontology to avoid self-refutation. -/- Keywords: Constructivism, Realism, Markus Gabriel, Paul Boghossian, John Searle, Argument from Facticity. (shrink)

In the last decade, there has been a growing interest in advancements made in artificial intelligence via modern natural language processing techniques utilising artificial neural networks in the form of large language models. This has led to the emergence of conversational technologies like ChatGPT, which mimic aspects of the conversational processes that occur between humans. However, it is contended that the model of conversation proposed above is inadequate as a model of human-like conversation. Already, far simpler models are found in (...) the context of autonomous agents and multiagent systems theory (AAMAS), whilst more primitive are better representations of the types of primordial interactions found before the development of conversation proper. But whilst these developments are on the right track regarding replicating the emergence of actual conversational systems, there already exists a preexisting methodology so far not utilised in the context of AAMAS that could be used which better replicate the kind of conversations we humans have with each other. Thus, conversation theory (CT)—which is a cybernetic theory of concept-forming and concept-sharing via conversation—is suggested in this paper as a systems-oriented and cybernetic design methodology that could be used to design and model conversational interactions in AAMAS. Unlike contemporary approaches to the design of conversational and conceptual systems, conversation theory is specifically concerned with the following: How the formation of coherent structures of self-reproducing topics—i.e., the concept—via conversation permits the convergence of shared understandings through positing and testing for analogy relations holding between one participant’s concept with another’s concept. One key benefit of utilising this approach for conversational design in the context of researchers working in AAMAS is that its insights are built upon (currently underutilised) literature from educational psychology and early childhood studies. Because of this, it is held in this text that conversation theory has untapped potential as a methodology for designing and analysing conversational interactions that involve mutual conceptualisation between discursive agents. (shrink)

The ontological status of a concept is typically conceived by either: (i) relating to abstract objects, (ii) relating to abilities, or (iii) relating to mental representations. I advocate for a fourth reading, whereby a concept is a process that preserves the logical coherence of a complex of topic relations throughout ongoing conversational interactions. Concepts in this account are not tokenesqe structures as typically conceived: Instead, they are non-localised coherences that emerge and stabilise themselves through conversational interactions. I suggest how conversation (...) theory embodies this reading and how it could provide a potential non-representational avenue for emulating conceptualisation processes within artificial intelligence and machine learning. (shrink)

This research interrogates the epistemic antirealist presupposition on law, against the background of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) judgement on the Bakassi peninsula dispute between Nigeria and Cameroon. The paper evaluates the implication of ICJ’s judgement on the lives and lived experiences of Bakassians, as against the wishes of either Nigeria and Cameroon, and by extension the epistemic model which predetermined the trajectory of ICJ’s judgement. In evaluating the judgement, this paper argues within the framework of three predetermining grounds, (...) which are; (1) the question on the aim of law, (2) Antirealist rejection of traditional historical ties and emplacement of a constructivist interpretation of law, and (3) the question of individual agency and justice. The centrepiece of these interrogations underpins a singular basic idea that implicates epistemic antirealism as seeking to create an alternate reality for society through the concept of law, whether or not such reality actually conforms to what is obtainable within the epistemic framework of society’s existing social sphere. Thus this research argues that the antirealist model of thinking about law, creates not only a problem for individual subjects of law, and by extension a chaotic framework for social reality, but also creates a problem for the very concept of law in itself. (shrink)

Considerations of realism and pluralism pervade Feyerabend’s later works, as they do in his earlier corpus. However, Conquest of Abundance and surrounding papers mark Feyerabend’s first sustained foray into metaphysics. Specifically, he hypothesizes a pluralist realism that incorporates Kantian and constructivist elements. This work was composed when the ‘metaphysical disunity’ hypothesis was fashionable among members of the ‘Stanford School’. After building on previous explorations of Feyerabend’s later metaphysics (‘abundance realism’), we compare Feyerabend’s later works to prominent formulations of metaphysical pluralism (...) in the Stanford School. We point to overlaps and divergences between Feyerabend’s later metaphysical pluralism and the formulations in the Stanford School. Despite significant intellectual overlap, the historical connections between Feyerabend’s later work and the Stanford School remain minimal. We argue that this is largely due to Feyerabend’s self-isolation from academic philosophy in the 1980s and his radical antiscientism. Moreover, we argue that Feyerabend’s metaphysics naturally extend from his attempts to situate science in diverse, democratic societies with hints of his later metaphysics in earlier writings, suggesting that Feyerabend’s “metaphysical turn” represents a shift in emphasis rather than a substantive change of position. (shrink)

In his introduction to Canguilhem’s Le normal et le pathologique, Michel Foucault claims that the “question of Enlightenment” has been taken up differently in the German and French philosophical traditions. Nevertheless, Foucault signals a “correspondence” between the works of Georg Lukács and the Frankfurt School, on the one hand, and the French epistemologists (including himself), on the other. In this article, I deepen this correspondence by assessing Foucault’s and Lukács’s respective relations to the neo-Kantian problem of the form and content (...) of knowledge. In theorizing the problem of reification, Lukács mobilizes Emil Lask’s understanding of the concept “form of objectivity.” He starts from Lask’s unification of the form and content of knowledge by suggesting that the commodity form emerges as the form of objectivity that constitutes both objects and subjects of knowledge in capitalist societies. I show that Foucault’s use of the notions episteme, historical a priori, and regime of truth shares the neo-Kantian concern with of the content of knowledge. By arguing that Foucault’s critique of the philosophical anthropology underlying Marxism does not apply to Lukács’s neo-Kantianism, I make room for considering both of their philosophical strategies as a “critique of social forms.”. (shrink)

In this open-peer commentary, I connect Druzhinin and Ramírez’s analysis of Maturana’s approach to uncertainty to ancient Chinese philosophy. I show how Maturana’s fundamentally non-dualist framework posits distinction and transformation as mutually constituting principles. It is an enactment of uncertainty, which engenders a philosophy of living.

This editorial introduces issue 23.2 of Technoetic Arts (TA), exploring the relationship between scripts and life through six articles examining instruction manuals, genetic codes, algorithmic systems and AI-generated imagery. Beginning with Joseph Beuys’s Wandering Box lithographs, whose titles activate static forms into perceived movement, the editorial establishes scripts as requiring interpretive performance rather than mechanical execution. Drawing on Erwin Schrödinger’s 1944 concept of biological ‘code-script’, the editorial traces how informational metaphors transformed understandings of life from mathematical patterns to readable, executable (...) programmes. The contributions to issue 23.2 examine this productive tension across domains: Lindsay Polly Crisp analyses Michael Landy’s instruction manual for dismantling possessions; G. Douglas Barrett investigates cerebral organoids producing music; Vasia I. Hatzi surveys biomedical imaging art; Vasily Betin proposes ‘Designed Emergence’ for algorithmic creativity; Joshua Wodak examines David Rokeby’s interactive installations; and Sarah-Jane Field interrogates AI aesthetics through Vilém Flusser’s philosophy. Together, these articles map territories where determination meets indeterminacy, revealing how life exceeds the scripts that partially structure it. (shrink)

Exceptional Rationalism transcends the debate between materialism and idealism, advocating for the impersonality of material laws and a multidimensional view of truth. It introduces Yan's abductive method in response to the outcomes of rational choice, and asserts that "subjective experience is not a necessity for intelligent entities.".

Clinical Legal Education programmes now take place in most law schools in England and Wales. However, legal education continues to be predominantly focused on the analysis and application of rules, doctrines, and theories to hypothetical scenarios or essay questions. This form of pedagogy either minimises or ignores the role of the client in terms of supplying lawyers with knowledge pertinent to their case. In other words, it overlooks the fact that the lawyer’s acquisition of knowledge is not confined to technical (...) rationality. This article seeks to achieve three broad aims. First, to contribute to the debate concerning the epistemology of reflective practice. Second, to develop a theoretical reflective cycle, informed by Kant’s transcendental idealism, which seeks to maximise knowledge acquisition in legal education, namely knowledge supplied by the client. Third, to address implicit bias using the proposed reflective cycle. An optimal pedagogy for using this cycle is Clinical Legal Education, namely live client clinics. (shrink)

The research approaches the correspondence theory of truth with Ferdinand de Saussure’s Sign Theory. By Kant’s epistemological constructivism, the research analyses into both the subjective and objective facets of epistemology in the correspondence theory of truth. The medium, the signifier, and the signified are arranged teleological to the truth in scientific activities, and the correspondence thereof. It reflects on the human-centric and anthropocentric tendencies in modern and contemporary science contributed by the economy of correspondence. The epistemic relationship between anthropocentrism and (...) technologies are discussed with the consciousness nature of the correspondence theory of truth. (shrink)

Ausgehend von einem Artikel von Heuermann arbeiten die Autor*innen 7 Prämissen heraus, die erkenntnistheoretischen Texten oftmals unhinterfragt zugrunde liegen. Mittels einer Diskussion dieser Setzungen formulieren sie Anforderungen an eine Erkenntnistheorie, die empirisches und hermeneutisches Erkennen umfasst, komplexe Erkenntnis-Situationen ebenso berücksichtigt wie eine „in Bewegung geratene“, weil systemisch verstandene Realität, die das Ineinanderwirken mehrerer Erkenntnis-Subjekte mit der absoluten Realität modelliert, welche die kategoriale Verschiedenheit von subjektiver Wirklichkeit und absoluter, unzugänglicher Realität konsequent durchhält, die jeglichen Versuchen der Quantifizierbarkeit der Wahrheits-Nähe den Boden (...) entzieht und die schließlich um eine präzise Terminologie bemüht ist. Eine derart konzipierte Erkenntnistheorie ist erforderlich, um die Psychotherapie und andere Humanwissenschaften auf ein solides epistemologisches Fundament zu stellen. (shrink)

In a recent article in this journal, Stump argues that pragmatism distances itself from absolutism due to its assent to fallibilism while it rejects relativism at the same time because of its insistence on experience. Therefore, pragmatism can provide a third position between relativism and absolutism. I argue in this note that his argument is profoundly inadequate for both claims. Fallibilism is compatible with both relativism and absolutism, and accordingly cannot be considered as the middle ground. Furthermore, the experience itself (...) and the way it is inferred from is the subject of the relativists’ debates, not a response. (shrink)

Constructivism is frequently met with objections, criticism and often equated with nihilism or relativism. Sometimes even blamed for what some would randomly picture as unwanted side effects of radicalism or of a progressivist era: such misconceptions are not only due to an imprecise grasp of the premises shared by the constructivist family of systems. The structure of media, political systems, and economic models, still up today impel societal understandings of knowledge on neo-positivistic grounds. The first part of this essay outlines (...) such pressures while sketching how language and worldviews play critical roles in our knowledge construction. Focusing on recent mediatic events, this work advances displaying some essential limits regarding the construction of human knowledge. Though unavoidable, some of the distinguishing aspects regarding the nature of our narratives are then critically reviewed. Later, it is shown how a special kind of self-denial that certain sub-stories implicitly hold about their own narrative nature leaves us with clashing worldviews that eventually collide onto crisis. Finally, it’ll be argued that it’s precisely in this scenario where a constructivist depiction of social discourses may move us away from any adolescent intent of elucidating absolutes within mere heuristics, to the pragmatic need of arriving on satisfactory agreements between parties (DOI: 10.4236/ojpp.2022). (shrink)

This paper raises the hypothesis that M. Bakhtin’s creative category of chronotope is within the dynamic of epistemology and socio-constructivism. To this end, two philosophical conceptions are analyzed: Bakhtin’s theory of chronotope as a formally constitutive category of literature and Kant’s transcendental aesthetics and transcendental schematism. This comparative analysis shows that chronotope surpasses its primary field of literary analysis and is interpretable not only as an epistemological category which determines the sense experience of the observer, but also as socio-constructivist category (...) which provides reality with an image of a totality of symbolic social institutes. In this way, it is proposed to understand the concept of reality as the multidimensional image. (shrink)

The paper tries to demonstrate the hypothesis that the Enlightenment epistemology is the unity of the constructivist theory of knowledge—that developed the transcendental conditions of knowing—and the ethical maximalism of the categorical imperative. Actually, the ethical maximalism was conceived of and is conceivable only in tandem with and as a result of the epistemological constructivism that alone enables the responsibility without which the ethical stakes remain an exterior normative speculation. The unity supported the development of the concept of critique as (...) autonomous use of reason, of education of the critical spirit, and of public presence of critiques. Surveying Kant’s What is Enlightenment and Contest of Faculties, the concepts and the logic related to the critical spirit are described, as well as their interpretations mainly by Foucault. The radical character of Enlightenment is given not by its liberal political theories but just by the above mentioned unity. With Enlightenment, criticism became more than the critique of empirical facts and abstract theories: it became a transcendental method uniting the conditions of every type of criticism and advancing the logic of self-criticism and moral construction. (shrink)

L’article poursuit un double objectif. D’une part, il propose une revue de l’articulation des concepts de genre et de sexe au prisme de la biologie de l’évolution dans le champ des études féministes francophones (cette délimitation tenant à la fois à des raisons de place, de pertinence scientifique et d’accessibilité au public non spécialiste). A cette fin, il propose également une définition du concept de constructivisme qui soit compatible avec le naturalisme, s’inscrivant en cela dans l’état contemporain de la philosophie (...) générale des sciences. Une fois mis en place ces éléments de cartographie du débat, le second objectif de l’article consiste à prendre au sérieux la diversité actuelle des concepts de sexe en biologie. Il insiste sur la nécessité d’une clarification conceptuelle des différents niveaux impliqués, et propose pour cela d’en finir avec la terminologie unique du sexe : celle-ci, en favorisant des confusions entre différents concepts, constitue un coût cognitif qu’il faut dépasser. Ce coût cognitif s’articule à un coût social. En effet, un tel flou conceptuel favorise en même temps dans la sphère publique une naturalisation abusive – puisque scientifiquement douteuse – de comportements sociaux inégalitaires. L’approche constructiviste ne consiste donc pas à nier la contrainte empirique de la nature. Il s’agit plutôt, à partir de la mise en évidence de la circulation des représentations entre la société en général et la science en particulier, de se doter d’outils d’analyse réflexifs et scientifiquement maîtrisés pour aborder les problématiques éthiques, politiques et épistémiques impliquées par cette circulation. (shrink)

The author discusses some tensions between realism and constructivism in the theory of knowledge and the corresponding research programs in the philosophy of science. In this paper, he argues that the development of transcendentalism can help reduce these tensions. He considers the way for Kant’s transcendentalism development, which is connected with the semiotic interpretation proposed by K.-O. Apel. The author suggests the new interpretation of transcendentalism according to which the transcendental exists as a proto-norm, which is a spontaneous act that (...) assigns the “given” object either the status of a sign reffering to a certain meaning, or the status of a meaning reffering to a certain expression (sign). The author develops G. Frege’s concept of meaning and argues that the existence of two kinds of meaning (meaning-1 and meaning-2), which corresponds with the two fundamental characteristics of consciousness: intensionality and responsiveness. Given this, a transcendental act generates either intensional or responsive meanings of the reality. The proposed symbolic interpretation of transcendentalism allows us explain the emergence of realism and constructivism as semiotic types of cultures and overcome the tensions between them. It is also shown that this version of symbolic transcendentalism is promising for explaining the nature of absolute existences in both classical and non-classical physical theories. The examples of such existences as absolute space and absolute time in Newtonian mechanics and absolute standards in G. Weil's theory of gauge fields are considered. These transcendental existences cannot be interpreted as real physical objects, and at the same time they are necessary for the interpretation of physical experiments. The author comes to the conclusion that transcendentalism is a promising program for the development of philosophy of science as an area for researches in normativity, sign-symbolic structures of cognitive processes, and the forms of knowledge. (shrink)

In this article, the author proceeds from the conceptual reversal of cultural-historical epistemology to the personal, historical, and social experience of a representative of an intellectual culture (scientist, philosopher) and his understanding and rethinking of his methodological attitudes. The idea of the article is that cultural-historical epistemology makes it possible to present natural-scientific and philosophical individual reflection as a specific component of the development of special tools, which are capable of recording and assessing the methodological effectiveness of research activities taking (...) into account individual cognitive experience. For this purpose, the author turns to the issue of an autobiographical narrative – a narrative containing the personal experience of working scientists rethinking their own methodological attitudes. The specific character of ego-documents, and moreover, ego-texts of a natural scientific kind in this case is corroborated by the ideas of cultural-histori - cal epistemology. A scientist is turned to Other, whether in himself or in the narrative. Here scientific methodology and autobiographical narrative are conceptually mixed. As the main material reveals the meaning of the above idea, ego-texts by A.A. Ukhtomsky (his notes in notebooks, correspondence, and memoirs) were selected. While comprehending the fate of domestic and foreign science and also perfectly imagining the further development of multiple “systems of knowledge”, Ukhtomsky still saw a living person – the Interlocutor – behind this process. The need to preserve this image in front of oneself, to preserve the Dominant on the face of Other, this internal orientation, are brought by Ukhtomsky to a conceptually higher level. In this case, the narrative is viewed as a type of reflection that allows one to explicate and give a personal assessment of the effectiveness of the methodological guidelines, based on which the scientist chooses certain areas of research. (shrink)

Several scholars observed that narratives about the human past are evaluated comparatively. Few attempts have been made, however, to explore how such evaluations are actually done. Here I look at a lengthy “contest” among several historiographic narratives, all constructed to make sense of another one—the biblical story of the conquest of Canaan. I conclude that the preference of such narratives can be construed as a rational choice. In particular, an easily comprehensible and emotionally evocative narrative will give way to a (...) complex and mundane one, when the latter provides a more coherent account of the consensually accepted body of evidence. This points to a fundamental difference between historiographic narratives and fiction, contrary to some influential opinions in the philosophy of historiography. Such historiographic narratives have similarities with hypotheses and narrative explanations in natural science. (shrink)

This original research hypothesises that the most fundamental building blocks of logical descriptions of cognitive, or knowledge, agents’ descriptions are expressible based on their conceptions (of the world). This article conceptually and logically analyses agents’ conceptions in order to offer a constructivist- based logical model for terminological knowledge. The most significant characteristic of [terminological] knowing is that there are strong interrelationships between terminological knowledge and the individualistic constructed, and to-be-constructed, models of knowledge. Correspondingly, I conceptually and logically analyse conception expressions (...) based on terminological knowledge, and I show how terminological knowledge may reasonably be assumed to be constructed based on the agents’ conceptions of the world. The focus of my model is on terminological knowledge structures, which may find applications in such diverse fields as the Semantic Web and educational/learning systems. (shrink)

José Ángel Gascón’s essay "Where are dissent and reasons in epistemic justification?" is an exposition of a version of a social functionalist epistemology. I agree with Gascón's emphasis on reasons and on taking into account dissent as important parts of epistemology. But I think that these concerns do not require a social functionalist epistemology, but that, on the contrary, Gascón's social functionalist epistemology throws the baby out with the bathwater. It does so by excluding also a traditional, at its core (...) individualistic epistemology, which defines central concepts like 'justified', 'knowledge' still in individualistic terms as the result of a mental cognizing process but is open to social extensions, e.g. concerning cooperation in the acquisition of knowledge or the transfer of knowledge via argumentation. Such a socially open epistemology with an individualistic core – or "open individualistic epistemology" for short – is also the basis of the epistemological argumentation theory. In the following I want to explain and defend this open individualistic epistemology together with the epistemological argumentation theory (sect. 2) and explain on this basis some problems of Gascón’s theory (sect. 3). (shrink)

This article explores the metaphor of Science as provider of sharp images of our environment, using the epistemological framework of Objective Cognitive Constructivism. These sharp images are conveyed by precise scientific hypotheses that, in turn, are encoded by mathematical equations. Furthermore, this article describes how such knowledge is pro-duced by a cyclic and recursive development, perfection and reinforcement process, leading to the emergence of eigen-solutions characterized by the four essential properties of precision, stability, separability and composability. Finally, this article discusses (...) the role played by ontology and metaphysics in the scientific production process, and in which sense the resulting knowledge can be considered objective. (shrink)

How children seek knowledge and evaluate claims may depend on their understanding of the source of knowledge. What shifts in their understandings about why scientists might disagree and how claims about the state of the world are justified? Until about the age of 41/2, knowledge is seen as self-evident. Children believe that knowledge of reality comes directly through our senses and what others tell us. They appeal to these external sources in order to know. The attainment of Theory of Mind (...) (ToM) at this age is commonly seen as the significant shift in development in understanding disagreements in knowledge claims. Children attaining ToM understand that someone exposed to incorrect or incomplete information might have false beliefs. Disagreement, then, is still attributed to objective sources of knowledge. The current study examines the later developing Interpretive Theory of Mind (iToM) as the basis for children’s understanding of how people with access to the same information might disagree and what this means for how to provide justification for a knowledge claim. Fourteen 2nd graders with the most iToM responses to four tasks and 14 with the fewest iToM responses were selected from a larger sample of 91. In analyses of interviews about a story in which two experts make different claims about a scientific phenomenon, those in the high iToM group noted subjective perspective and processes as the source of disagreement and suggested the need for investigation as the means to knowing. In contrast, those in the low iToM group mostly could not explain the source of disagreement and held that knowledge is acquired from external sources. A comparison of the interviews regarding the science story 2 years later allows for a qualitative description of the development. Those in the low iToM group showed more general recognition of subjective and constructive processes in knowing whereas those in the high iToM group identified interpretive processes and the relativity of perspectives with implications for how observations were conducted and interpreted. Only those in the high iToM group referred to the importance of evidence as a basis for knowledge claims at either point in the study. (shrink)

Post-Truth is an insightful, thorough text which examines issues of truth with more nuance and clarity than most other recent works in the field. The book succeeds most overtly in its ability to present a case for why post-truth studies need be done. To understand the contemporary world, the promises of past theories, and where things go wrong in political controversy, we have to understand how post-truth in its contemporary condition unites all fields of inquiry.

Philosophy ultimately searches for what lies beyond the possible. This question is what makes us human. We ask about the limits of language, the framing of the world, and how by breaking with what always already is we invite a madness that makes further understanding impossible. This book presents a call to withstand the normalcy that presents itself as continual variations of the ‘new’. To face the illusions that clutter reality and to engage in asking the final question that is (...) left for us to answer, to un-answer, to suffer again and again. The question of the necessity of the impossible. (shrink)

Sharon Street defines her constructivism about practical reasons as the view that whether something is a reason to do a certain thing for a given agent depends on that agent’s normative point of view. However, Street has also maintained that there is a judgment about practical reasons which is true relative to every possible normative point of view, namely constructivism itself. I show that the latter thesis is inconsistent with Street’s own constructivism about epistemic reasons and discuss some consequences of (...) this incompatibility. (shrink)

Para el constructivismo, la ciencia y la cognición comparten intereses similares. Ambos dominios pueden describirse como dos sistemas entrelazados que se activan mutuamente y se modulan entre sí a través de un lazo interno de retroalimentación, lazo que opera mediante la dinámica interna representativa en el caso de la cognición y mediante la dinámica del desarrollo teórico en el caso de la ciencia. Cada uno de estos dominios —ciencia y cognición— busca generar un marco de interacción adecuado que garantice, por (...) parte de la ciencia, el éxito predictivo a partir de los modelos utilizados en la investigación y, por parte de la cognición, una amplia gama de estrategias funcionalmente exitosas con las que salvaguardar una imagen viable del mundo. Al pensar la ciencia como una extensión de nuestra apertura cognitiva al mundo, el constructivismo adopta la noción de viabilidad, es decir, de ajuste funcional, con el entorno como fundamental en la correcta aproximación al estudio tanto de la cognición como de la modelización, ya que, al igual que ocurre con las estructuras y procesos que conforman la arquitectura cognitiva de cualquier sistema de observación, más o menos evolucionado, los modelos en ciencia se encuentran limitados por su propia estructura teórica, así como por su dinámica operativa. Adoptando el constructivismo como una factible filosofía de la ciencia, este trabajo tiene como objetivo estudiar el fenómeno de la modelización, así como examinar el papel que asumen algunas estrategias tropológicas inherentes a la actividad científica, como la analogía y la metáfora, a la hora de configurar modelos y formular hipótesis y conjeturas que sirven de aproximación para la indagación y el estudio del mundo empírico. (shrink)

Context: Constructivist epistemology is not a doctrinal set of clear and consistent theses and assumptions but a movement full of tensions, with minimally integrated lines of discussions. Problem: This situation explains why it is so difficult to come up with a general definition of constructivist epistemology that could serve as a starting point to study its several research programs systematically and comparatively. Method: We compare the constructivist epistemologies of Jean Piaget, Ernst von Glasersfeld, Humberto Maturana, and Niklas Luhmann regarding tensions (...) between knowledge/reality and individual/society. Results: Our comparison leads to a general definition of constructivist epistemology as a heterogeneous movement problematizing certain dualities - such as subject/object, knowledge/reality, or individual/society - that have been shown to be central for epistemological inquiry. We argue that such dualisms can be used as dimensions for critical analysis, comparison, and discussion among the different research programs, and that, at the same time, they would allow us to analyze the general strategies characterizing such programs. The comparative and critical analysis of the programs by way of the aforementioned tensions results in an organized presentation highlighting their convergences, divergences, and singularities. (shrink)