Abstract
In one of his first papers, Thomas Kuhn (1959) addressed the “essential tension” implicit in scientific research, i.e., the contrast between convergent and divergent thinking. He considered both to be central to the advance of science. Convergent thinking is what scientists do in their daily “normal research projects,” where the “scientist is not an innovator but a solver of puzzles, and the puzzles upon which he concentrates are just those which he believes can be both stated and solved within the existing scientific tradition” (ibid., p. 234). The convergent mode is “neither intended nor likely to produce fundamental discoveries or revolutionary changes in scientific theory” (ibid., p. 233). As he would describe in greater detail in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1970), this is because students are already discouraged from developing divergent-thinking abilities, partly because their education is based on textbooks, which “exhibit concrete problem solutions that the profession has come to accept as paradigms… Nothing could be better calculated to produce ‘mental sets’ or Einstellungen” (Kuhn, 1959, p. 229). Clearly, from this perspective, mental sets (or “mental inertia”) play an important role in paradigms as they prevent the normal scientist from gazing beyond the limits of her paradigm. Kuhn also emphasized the importance of convergent thinking as “no part of science progressed very far or very rapidly before this convergent education and correspondingly convergent normal practice became possible” (ibid., p. 237). However, Kuhn also recognized the divergent method because in order to assimilate new discoveries and theories “the scientist must usually rearrange the intellectual and manipulative equipment he has previously relied upon, discarding some elements of his prior belief” (ibid., p. 226).
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Notes
- 1.
In his autobiography, von Glasersfeld (2010, p. 245) described how Kuhn grew indignant over von Glasersfeld’s comment that Fodor’s talk about “representations” was irresponsible if it did not add that they could never be representations of reality. So we can assume that in the above quote Kuhn interpreted “different worlds” as hypothetical or even fictitious worlds that are not corroborated by experiments whereas for von Glasersfeld these were different experiential worlds with no ontological connotation (Marco Bettoni, personal communication, 2011).
- 2.
- 3.
It should be emphasized that this is the very same Ernst Mach whose name was used for the Verein Ernst Mach, which later became known as the Vienna Circle of the logical positivists. However surprising this “double life” might be, in his first publication on radical constructivism, von Glasersfeld (1974) already considered Mach (together with Percy Bridgman) an ally. They both neglected developmental aspects, which are crucial for constructivism.
- 4.
Some 100 years later, Francisco Varela shared Mach’s strong emphasis on the first-person perspective. Having a complementary interest in phenomenology and neuroscience (rather than physics, as was the case with Mach), he developed neurophenomenology (Varela, 1996). It combines systems neuroscience with a pragmatic approach to becoming aware of our lived experience (Froese, Gould, & Barrett, 2011).
- 5.
A simple example often used by von Foerster himself is that of repeatedly applying the square root operator to the result of its own operations, which at its limit will always result in one irrespective of the initial number.
- 6.
In the terminology of complexity research it is called an “attractor.”
- 7.
Cf. Mach, “We have become accustomed to regarding an object as existing permanently.” (Mach, 1970, p. 30).
- 8.
This criticism is also applied to evolutionary epistemology, cf. Riegler (2005b).
- 9.
In the German-speaking literature on constructivism, the distinction is often made between wirklichkeit (from the German “wirken”, meaning “to have an effect on”) – the world as the domain of our experience – and reality (from Latin “res” = thing) – the world as the domain of things in themselves.
- 10.
Similarly, George Kelly (1963) emphasized that a “person’s processes are psychologically channelized by the ways in which he anticipates events.”
- 11.
The last part distinguishes these action schemata from stimulus-response schemata used for example by behaviorists.
- 12.
This is not to say that mentals sets have to be changed in an everyday context as they play a crucial role, e.g., in personal identity.
- 13.
Von Glasersfeld admitted that we “build that world for the most part unaware, simply because we do not know how we do it” (Glasersfeld, 1984, p. 17). However, we claimed that this ignorance was quite unnecessary because “the operations by means of which we assemble our experiential world can be explored” (ibid.). He referred to Silvio Ceccato’s notion of “consapevolezza operativa”, i.e., to become aware of one’s own mental operations, which can lead to different and perhaps better constructions.
- 14.
This notion refers to the phenomenon that we forget our experiences from our earliest childhood until the age of three or four.
- 15.
His watchmakers are building clocks consisting of n parts. Each time their work is interrupted at random moments of probability p an unfinished clock falls apart. For the watchmaker who tries to assemble each watch in one go, the probability of actually finishing one is p 1 = (1 − p)n. However, for a watchmaker whose watch consists of stable subassemblies of k parts each, the probability of completing a watch is p 2 = (1−p)k. For example, for n = 1,000 parts and probability p = 0.01, the second watchmaker will produce watches 3,775 times faster than his colleague.
- 16.
This is reminiscent of Piaget’s claim that “all knowledge is tied to action and knowing an object or an event is to use it by assimilating it to an action scheme” (quoted in Glasersfeld, 1982, p. 613).
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Acknowledgments
I wish to express my gratitude to Marco Bettoni, Jeremy Burman and Armin Scholl for their helpful comments on a previous draft version of this article. Furthermore, I acknowledge the financial support from the Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO).
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Riegler, A. (2012). Constructivism. In: L'Abate, L. (eds) Paradigms in Theory Construction. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-0914-4_13
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