KARL JASPERS FORUM

TA78 (Müller)

Commentary 31 (to C30 by E. Von Glasersfeld)

CONSTRUCTIVISM DE-RADICALIZED
by David Kenneth Johnson
31 March, 2005, posted 9 April 2005

<1>
I wish to thank Ernst von Glasersfeld (EvG) for his recent reply (TA78, C30). He writes: "It is now well over ten years that David Johnson has been campaigning against radical constructivism and it’s proof of remarkable stamina and inventiveness that he can still come up with new derogatory expressions…. His present commentary C25 is relatively concise and thus manifests quite clearly the semantic confusions that invalidate much of his logic" (C30, 1).

<2>
The campaign is in its 16^th year, a mere fraction of the time EvG has devoted to his unrelenting assault on the sort of realism I favor: Proof positive of much greater stamina on the part of my esteemed interlocutor. Allow me to take a moment to clarify once again, and in the process validate, the logic of my claim that radical constructivism is self-reflexively inconsistent.

<3>
EvG writes: "In C25<2>, DKJ "exposes RC's ‘ontological agnosticism’ as yet another incarnation of von Glasersfeld's embarrassing ‘pronoun problem’ ... In this instance, his linguistic lacuna amounts to an equivocation between two radically opposed doctrines: (i) selective agnosticism with respect to any particular ontological claim to know of some experiencer-independent object or relation (a position indistinguishable from the moderate skepticism that suffuses RC); and (ii) global ontological agnosticism, or the rejection of all claims to know of any experiencer independent object or relation." And he [DKJ] goes on to say: "To my knowledge, no one -- no modernist or postmodernist epistemologist or metaphysician -- has ever been inclined to reject (i)." [EvG asks]: Does he mean "quantifier" when he says "pronoun"?" (C30, 2).

<4>
In this case, the two are inseparable: To equivocate between singular and plural pronouns is at the same time to mishandle quantifiers, given the obvious quantitative difference between "I" and "we." The contrast of note in these two sentences (i and ii) is between selective agnosticism and global agnosticism, the first a commonplace expression of a knower’s fallibility (with respect to any particular empirical claim), the second a doctrine that rejects on principle all references to things external to the one knower, including, of course, others. So, a knower committed to the second thesis is logically barred from using plural pronouns (given any normal understanding of what these terms denote) to describe his or her "cognitive isolation" (EvG’s phrase) from the rest of the world.

<5>
That doesn’t deter EvG. He writes: "The 1994 Encyclopedia Britannica explains ‘agnosticism’ as the doctrine that ‘humans cannot know of the existence of anything beyond the phenomena of their experience.’ This happens to describe exactly the way in which I am using the term.’" (TA 78, C20, 2). The self-reflexive inconsistency of this claim should be obvious: Describing ontological agnosticism in terms of "humans" and "their" experience is already to make reference to the existence of things (that is, others) outside of any particular knower; hence to confound any globally agnostic ambitions. So, as I pointed out in my earlier reply, EvG’s preferred characterization of his agnosticism emerges as a nonsensical phrase, akin to "no sentence has exactly six words." (In contrast, however problematic in other respects, "I cannot know of the existence of anything beyond my experience" is at least not self-refuting – more about that later.) EvG clearly wants and needs others to make his story go. Yet the normal understanding of these others (as independently existing beings) threatens to undo his radicalism. The solution? To have and not to have others, of course! All claims involving constraining others must be reparsed in terms of claims about EvG’s experience. In that case, his position appears to be that some of his constructions are invariably and necessarily constrained by other of his constructions – a kind of internal, yet inexplicably complex and frustrating, tug-of-war between viable conceptions within his experiential world. There can be no rational appeal to anything external to EvG’s experience to make sense of his experience of recalcitrant others, of not being able to predict the weather, of there being no WMD in Iraq, of human birth, death, and every other apparently extra-subjective feature of reality. I suppose, in some other instantiation of the world where I didn’t exist externally to EvG, his exchanges with me on KJF, for example, might be explained in this convoluted way; but, skeptical games aside, there is no need to go to such extremes. There is a much simpler explanation: EvG is engaging real, independent, flesh-and-blood others in a world that contains and constrains him; that is, the conventional understanding of the world and others as denoting autonomously existing things and relations is – as I suspect EvG knows -- required to make any sense of sociality, the "consensual domain," collaboration, communication, the "missing" WMD in Iraq, and our experience of the world generally.

<6>
EvG continues (in C30, 2): "Anyway, on what grounds did and do all these worthy people decide which are the items they can afford to be skeptical about and which are the ones they know to be experiencer-independent existents?"

<7>
The grounds for skepticism with respect to particular knowledge claims cannot be specified in any detail in advance of actual empirical inquiry, since that is a contextual issue entirely dependent on the manifest resources of, and evidence available to, the knower at some specific time. What any generalized (social) theory of knowledge can and does assume, however, is that some objects (including others) do exist independently of any particular knower, since that is both a condition of intelligibility of any social (hence realist) epistemology, and, as hypothetical realism asserts, the best abductive explanation of our experience (notice the deliberate and perfectly natural plurality of that last phrase – no heuristic fictions need apply). Is there no non-contradictory version of global agnosticism? I suppose a solipsistically inclined phenomenalist with no explanatory or generalized ambitions at all, may resist all talk of extra-experiential objects or relations on verificationist or skeptical grounds (paving the way for a bizarre and contradictory metaphysics of unsensed sense data), but EvG has never consistently adopted such a perspective; in fact, though his words often reflect a kind of popularized Carnapian phenomenalism, he explicitly rejects this approach in his dismissal of solipsism ("Solipsism is refuted daily by the experience that the world is hardly ever what we would like it to be." EvG, Radical Constructivism, 1995) and insistence, with Maturana (who has fatal pronoun problems of his own) and apparently Muller, that we always make the world in concert with others. For those who doubt the veracity of this latter point or see it as just another "semantrick," I offer this passage from EvG:

<8>
EvG continues (C30, 2): "[DKJ writes]: "Yet (ii) is a cognate, if not simple expression of, solipsism." I submit that the rejection of all claims to KNOW experiencer-independent objects or relations has nothing to do with solipsism, because solipsism designates a belief about BEING whereas the agnostic’s rejection concerns KNOWING."

<9>
This is an interesting claim. I need to reflect further on the relations between global ontological agnosticism and the question of solipsism. But the solution to that puzzle is unrelated to our present concerns, since EvG does not consistently maintain his global ontological agnosticism. (If there were, as the previous paragraph suggests, no inferential relations between his purely epistemological stance and the question of solipsism, then EvG could not claim, as he does above, that "solipsism is refuted daily by our experience.") Why is EvG forever defending opposing positions? Because RC rests on a set of contradictory assumptions (the central message of TA 75). He wants both to resist all references to a world beyond the lone knower and to embrace commonsensical, nonsolipsistic reflections grounded in sociality and (at least the possibility of) a constraining, extra-conceptual world. Perhaps if he were, in the fashion of the eccentric phenomenalist above, successfully to restrict his every claim to claims about his own subjective states, then he might be able to remain consistently agnostic about any and all questions (including the question of solipsism) about external-to-EvG being. However, if, only once, he claims to know of, or more simply make reference to, any experiencer- (that is, EvG-) independent object or relation, then he loses his status as a global ontological agnostic and, in particular, as an agnostic with respect to the question of solipsism. (That is, in the parlance of this debate, he will be affirming, or at least partially resting his case on references to MIR or, as I prefer, HIR.) But it takes little effort to see that EvG invokes the specter of independent constraints at nearly every turn, either in the guise of "independent, ontological obstacles," appeals to the "necessity" of social consensus (above), "fitness" (a fallibilistic cognate of correspondence), or myriad other references to the way the "real world steps on our toes." (These are rough, if in some instances exact, quotations from the literature. I apologize for not supplying complete references, but anyone familiar with EvG’s writings will recognize them.) In fact, RC -- in the fashion of Berkelean or Kantian or Cartesian idealism -- temporarily avoids quick refutation by exceeding its own restrictions on the scope of sensible utterances (another instance of the contradiction ingredient in the "pronoun problem"). Luckily for RC, solipsism is averted by the very mention of a POSSIBLE external constraint, in the fashion of "X appears to fit Y, and perhaps, though I can’t say for sure, Y is external to me." Unluckily for RC, such claims run directly counter to – that is, logically contradict – EvG’s (misbegotten) radicalism.

<10>
EvG writes: "In C25<4>, DKJ quotes my excerpt from the Encyclopedia Britannica and comments: ‘A self-reflexively inconsistent and pronoun-plagued claim par excellence! The basic idea, of course, is that humans - in all their glorious plurality – ought never to claim to know of the existence of anything ‘outside of their experience.’" [And EvG responds]: Once again he confuses knowing of the existence of an item with knowing an item. I don’t think this has anything to do with pronouns but rather with verb-object relations (in this case, the semantics of transitivity). "I Know Sebastian" indicates a relationship of personal acquaintance, "I know of Sebastian" does not. In DKJ’s case, confounding the two is, I think, not an equivocation but a permanent blind spot" (C30, 3).

<11>
None are so blind as those who won’t see. Here’s the distinction in question, available without contradiction to the metaphysical realist: I know, I am acquainted with, the apple that I see before me. Hungry and hoping to accommodate to a world that often confounds my desires, I infer abductively to its externality as I attempt to explain its persistence (eyes opened or closed, the apple still appears to my senses) and resistance to my knowing (it stays an apple however much I want two apples or one banana). In this speculative but entirely ordinary way, I know of the apple (or my wife, ski slope, etc.; see EvG’s next paragraph below), and, in an effort to fulfill a plan formed in my mind to satisfy some need or desire in the world as I have learned to map and organize it, I reach out and take that sustaining bite.

<12>
EvG writes: "As far as I can see, DKJ’s pronoun fixation springs from his frequent assertion that RC generates a contradiction by invoking the existence of "others". This imputation, too, is based on his notion of ontic existence, which he has sneaked in. In RC, knowledge of "others" is no less an experiential construction than knowledge of the slope I ski on or knowledge of the woman I live with. And because the viability of my models is never one hundred percent, both can surprise me. I fully agree with Herbert Müller that it is useful and sometimes necessary to act AS THOUGH one’s models were experiencer-independent; but this "as if" reality is, just like Kant’s "thing in itself", a heuristic fiction" (C30, 4).

<13>
It is but a truism that our "knowledge of others," like our knowledge of the world generally, is an experiential construction. Yet truisms alone do not an exciting or novel theory make. What if we supplement this truism about our ideas of "others" with the further claim that nothing about these "others" refers to anything beyond our ideas? That would be exciting indeed: We might then boast an "epistemology without metaphysics" (EvG’s phrase). Alas, it would also be false, as the two quotes above show. The simple truth is that the viability of RC as an explanation of OUR experience rests on decoupling our collective and worldly constructions from EvG’s (distracting) radicalism. The ubiquitous references to independent others and the real world are not mine alone, not something I’ve "sneaked in," but an integral part of EvG’s nonsolipsistic, hence nonradical, epistemological project (they are also presupposed, of course, by any normal understanding of this conversation). Hearing again the echoes of that radical constructivist refrain, "But these are not references to real, independent others, but simply my construction of them," we can turn, ironically enough, to EvG for an answer: You construct what you please, but remember, "No individual can afford not to establish a relative fit with the consensual domain of the consensual environment." That’s just the way it is. Constructivism de-radicalized. And the reason for this is plain: No heuristic fiction, not even a "necessary" or seemingly "consensual" one, ever saved a theory from solipsistic absurdity, any more than I might sustain myself from a bite of a fictional apple.

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David Kenneth Johnson