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Ernst von Glasersfeld (1917–2010)

Von Glasersfeld was the chief architect of radical constructivism (see constructivism) — the thesis that knowledge is not a representation of a mind-independent reality but a construction the knower builds to organise its own experience. Its defining move is to replace the standard of truth (a match between idea and world) with the standard of viability (a fit between idea and the constraints experience imposes): concepts and theories are kept not because they mirror how things are but because they work, the way a key is kept because it opens a lock without thereby copying the lock. He developed the position out of Piaget’s genetic epistemology and the cybernetic tradition, and it became influential well beyond philosophy, especially in mathematics and science education.

Ernst von Glasersfeld (1917–2010). Born in Munich to Austrian parents and raised in Italy and Switzerland, he came to academic life by an unusually late and winding road — he worked as a journalist and ski instructor before turning to cybernetics and language. From the 1960s he worked in the United States on machine translation and computational linguistics, and directed the language-research programme that taught a symbolic communication system (“Yerkish”) to the chimpanzee Lana. He was a research associate at Heinz von Foerster’s Biological Computer Laboratory, and later Professor of Cognitive Psychology at the University of Georgia — where he supervised the young Michael Tomasello — and finished his career at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Key concepts

Radical constructivism. Ordinary constructivism allows that we build our knowledge but still measures it against a reality it is meant to approximate. Von Glasersfeld’s version is radical because it drops that second commitment: the knower has no access to a reality outside experience against which to check the construction, so the question of correspondence cannot even be posed. What we call reality is the relatively stable order the subject builds and maintains within the flow of its experience. This is an epistemological claim, he insisted, not the ontological denial that anything exists.

Viability, not truth. In place of truth as correspondence, von Glasersfeld puts viability. A way of thinking or acting is viable if it serves in the pursuit of a goal without running into the constraints experience sets — if it “fits” as a key fits a lock, one of indefinitely many keys that might open it. Knowledge that fails is eliminated by the friction of experience, much as an organism that fails to fit its environment is eliminated; the ones that survive are not thereby shown to be true, only to have worked so far. The analogy to natural selection — fit, not match — is central to how he framed the whole view.

Debt to Piaget. Von Glasersfeld read Piaget as the great constructivist and made himself Piaget’s most systematic interpreter in English. From Piaget he took assimilation and accommodation — the knower fitting experience into existing schemes and revising the schemes when they fail — and the developmental picture of intelligence as the active building of operative structures. He drew out the epistemological radicalism he saw as latent in the genetic epistemology, sometimes further than Piaget himself had gone.

The forebears: Vico and the cyberneticists. Von Glasersfeld traced the constructivist intuition to Giambattista Vico’s verum ipsum factum — the true is the made, so we can properly know only what we ourselves construct. The modern apparatus came from cybernetics, and above all from second-order cybernetics: von Foerster’s insistence that the observer is inside the observed system, and the surrounding work of Maturana and Varela on the operational closure of the cognizing organism.

Constructivism in education. The position’s largest practical influence has been in the teaching of mathematics and science. If understanding is something each learner must construct, and cannot be transmitted ready-made, then teaching is the arranging of situations in which the learner builds viable concepts — a rationale von Glasersfeld supplied for a wide movement in constructivist pedagogy and mathematics-education research.

Where von Glasersfeld stops

The standing objection is that radical constructivism cannot keep its footing between idealism and solipsism. If there is no access to anything beyond one’s own experience, critics ask what stops the view from collapsing into the claim that each knower is sealed in a private world of its own making — and how, on those terms, the constraints that are supposed to eliminate unviable constructions can do their work, since a constraint seems to require something other than the construction to push back. Von Glasersfeld’s reply is that experience itself supplies the resistance and that other people are among its most important constraints, but whether “viability” can carry that weight without quietly reintroducing the independent reality it disowns is the question his critics press hardest.

A second difficulty concerns the status of the theory itself. If no account can claim to match reality, radical constructivism cannot claim to be true either, only viable — and critics argue this is either self-undermining or an evasion, since the view is plainly offered as a better account of knowing than the representationalism it rejects. Von Glasersfeld accepted the reflexive consequence and embraced it; whether embracing it answers the objection or merely restates it is contested.

Key works

See also: Constructivism · Piaget · Von Foerster · Maturana · Varela