The subtitle of Bernhard
Poerksen’s The Certainty of Uncertainty proposes the task of introducing
constructivism, in the form of dialogues with its founding fathers.  Now, one
might gladly welcome this, given that the recent vogue enjoyed by
constructivism as the answer to every important question has, unfortunately,
not prevented various answers, of wildly divergent plausibility, from being
posted by the trendy end of the academic world.  Some form of guide to
understanding constructivist claims would be a great aid.  But naturally, this
would depend on the quality and relevance of the discussion, and in this case,
a number of qualifications must be reviewed to judge the success of this book
at its assigned task.

The first qualification to note is that the dramatis
personae may not be readily recognizable to those who would expect to
recognize names in constructivism.  Few ‘founding fathers’ Poerksen interviews
would likely be associated with social construction by feminists, sociologists,
culture theorists, or even hermeneuts and postmoderns.  And not surprisingly,
as the cast consists mainly of European academics, with a couple of Chilean
biologists thrown in for good measure.  The most recognizable names are likely
to be Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, the Chilean biologists who made
something of a splash a while ago with the notion of autopoiesis.  But
most of the other names — cyberneticist/physicist Heinz von Foerester, psychologist
Ernst von Glasersfeld, brain scientist Gerhard Roth, communications scientist
Siegfried Schmidt and family therapists Helm Stierlin and Paul Watzlawick —
are unlikely to stand out even though most of them have been (or currently are)
associated with American universities at one time or another. 

Given the first, the second qualification has no
doubt been guessed at — these characters will be unlikely to be connected to
social construction because, whatever constructivism means here, it is not at all
the same thing.  The hard science backgrounds were probably enough to give this
away, but a little more probing reveals that the characters here are hard
science rebels, engaged in some form of interdisciplinary theorizing. 
There seems to be no effort to demonstrate the construction of scientific
entities (a la "the social construction of quarks"),
but rather the focus is on what the scientific examination of perception might
tell us about epistemology.  So, the sense in which constructivism is employed
here is that in which the brain constructs the world of the subject out of its
perceptual processes.  Why this isn’t just the neurophilosophy done by
cognitive scientists is not clear.  Further, it is hard to see how this is not
naturalism (in the sense of naturalizing epistemology by assimilating it to the
sensory processes of natural organisms), even though constructivism is
traditionally opposed to naturalism.  Constructivism in that sense would
assert that epistemic entities like ‘facts’ and ‘truths’ are not givens, but
are themselves products of interpretation (or ‘constructions’).  Poerksen and
colleagues may not oppose this, but neither can they do anything with it while
they focus on perceptual processes, which are not plausibly understood as identical
to epistemological processes.

The feature that seems intended to distinguish
constructivism is what Poerksen refers to as “concentration on the observer”.  
Apparently, this is the relevant connection with cybernetics and autopoiesis,
which attempt to describe cognition and living organisms as self-organizing and
self-regulating systems: the observer, as a self-organizing system, is trying
to understand other self-organizing systems.  Observation then depends on the
effects of the observer and the observed on each other.  This leads (all too
quickly) to the epistemological claim that the existence of external reality
can be neither confirmed nor rejected.  Constructivists will tell us at this
point that self-organizing systems are ‘organizationally closed’ and indeed, Poerksen
carefully informs us that ‘the brain has no direct contact with its environment’. 
Hence, deprived of correspondence with the external world, constructivists must
rely on assessing the coherence and consistency of belief systems.  However,
the constructivist school of thought also deals with the origin and creation of
conceptions of reality, as Poerksen claims, though what this means is hard to
make out.  It could be taken to propose a metaphysics — as the discussion of
self-organizing systems seems to — or should one to take it that the subject
matter is only the conception of and not the reality of reality? 
Overall, there is little clarity as to which claims are metaphysical and which
epistemological.

These first two qualifications are not meant to
reveal faults in the book.  Rather it is necessary to make clear what the topic
of the book is, for it will likely be misunderstood at a glance, by those
looking for answers in the social construction furor.  However it is also necessary
to say for whom the book is to be an introduction, and here a fault must be
identified.

The third qualification is that the overall
tenor of these discussions is somewhat lacking in rigor and a sense of
philosophical nuance.  This may be a result of the conversational format —
tone, familiarity, informality all conspire to make precision less likely.  But
for whatever the reason, the book will not likely be a satisfying read to the
trained philosopher or the trained scientist.  The dialogists are too fond of
unanalyzed paradox and too willing to decide on short notice that some matter
is ‘undecideable’, when a bit more consideration is needed.  Too often they
breezily skate over some glaringly thin philosophical ice, and substitute
undergraduate-level scepticism and relativism for detailed treatment of the
issues.  Now, this complaint might be as arbitrary as the back-cover
recommendation to put the book in the philosophy section of the bookstore —
the contributors may be doing something else.  Still, it is hard to say who
would get any better use of it — a couple of the dialogists discuss the
application of these ideas to family therapy, and it might serve as a first
glance at that topic for the interested practicing psychologist.  Anyone
serious about theory, though, cannot fail to be disappointed.

One final qualification.  Though the names and
issues here are not likely recognizable to social constructionists,
nevertheless Poerksen does not exclude social construction, seeming to tack it
on at the end of a discussion of the biological construction.  But this informs
little of the discussion, as much of the book assumes a solipsistic starting
point and not the social or collectivist viewpoint appropriate to social
constructivism.  Still, the diversity of topics over which the book ranges
might be a cause for worry.  A glance at the website for “Radical
Constructivism” will suggest that nothing is excluded in principle from
treatment as constructivism, for among the constructivisms listed are
pedagogical, literary, psychiatric, computational and even constructivism in
mathematics, which is not related in any way to the present themes.  This
appears to be a theory of everything, for only the loosest construal of ideas
could lump together perceptual processes of the brain, with family dynamics,
with primary socialization on the same epistemic/metaphysical level.  Little
wonder that clarity is lacking in a theory forced to cover that many issues.  A
theory willing to say this much plainly does so at the cost of the meaning of
any of it.

So, for whom is this an introduction and how
well does it succeed in its task?  Sadly, given the above qualifications, it
seems more likely to contribute only further murk to already muddied waters,
and to frustrate the scholar while confusing the student.

© 2005 George
Williamson

George
Williamson, Ph.D., Department of Philosophy, University of Saskatchewan

Categories: Philosophical