Constructivism

Conceptual Overview and Discussion

Two different traditions are distinguishable in constructivist/constructionist thought: the biological-systemic approach (including the French School of constructivism, the work of the Palo Alto School, and radical constructivism) and the sociocultural approach (including strong constructivism and social constructionism).

The biological-systemic approach draws on Kant's questioning of the sources of knowledge and his argument that a priori categories of thought shape the impressions formed of experience (sense-data). It resonates with early 20th-century concerns of philosophers of science, historians, and ethnologists with the workings of the Mind and materializes the strong influence of evolutionary theory until the beginning of the cybernetic revolution. The biological-systemic approach is accordingly concerned with the mental operations involved in knowing and thinking that contribute to the construction of knowledge and reality in interactive situations between subjects, or subjects and objects.

Jean Piaget and Gaston Bachelard made the earliest constructivist contributions and are regarded as the founders of the French constructivist school. Piaget's genetic epistemology is an isomorph of Piaget's earlier psychological work from structures of individual thought to structures of scientific knowledge, which he considers “constructions of the human mind.” Piaget's landmark developmental approach to intelligence (psychogenesis) from the 1920s onward is a biofunctional answer to the evolutionary problem of the generation of new structures in living systems. It conceptualizes how human intelligence develops, auto-organizes, and [Page 221]structures itself through the increased differentiation and complexification of individual structures of thought (schemas). This is embedded in an adaptive and systemic view of relations of exchange between individual subjects and an ambient environment (what can be known). Knowledge is part of a system of adaptive transformations resulting from the need by individual subjects both to auto-regulate and develop, that is, explore, expand, act upon, and eventually master their environment. The gradual development of more complex, inclusive, and integrative schemes of thought (progress) results from an increased ability by the knowing subject to balance two conflicting dynamics: assimilation (a conservative tendency to preserve existing knowledge structures and shape perceptual inputs accordingly) and accommodation (which facilitates the transformation of interpretative schemes to take into account constraints of the environment). Such dynamic equilibrium (equilibration or adaptation) evolves as human thinking and intelligence progressively structure in simultaneous moves of exteriorization (through action and sensory-motor experience) and interiorization, from an unDifferentiated egocentric psychology to more abstract, conceptual, generalized, and objective forms of thinking (allowing causal reasoning to take place). This occurs conjointly with the development of both self-awareness of one's distinctiveness as a subject and objective ways of knowing the world (realism).

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