Basic Claims of Radical Constructivism

The Radical Constructivist Postulate says that the cognitive system (mind) is operationally closed. It interacts necessarily only with its own states. The nervous system is " a closed network of interacting neurons such that any change in the state of relative activity of a collection of neurons leads to a change in the state of relative activity of other or the same collection of neurons " (Winograd and Flores, 1986, p. 42). This is a consequence of the neurophysiological principle of undifferen-tiated encoding, as already formulated by Johannes Müller in the 19th century. " The response of a nerve cell does not encode the physical nature of the agents that caused its response " (Foerster, 1973/1981, p. 293). Maturana (1978) suggests that we can compare the situation of the mind with a pilot using instruments to fly the plane. All he does is " manipulate certain internal relations of the plane in order to obtain a particular sequence of reading in a set of instruments " (p. 42). In other words, the pilot doesn't even need to look 'outside'. Since the mind is operationally closed, i.e., semantically impenetrable, we cannot know any 'external semantics'; thus we arrive at the Epistemological Corollary: Reality is neither rejected nor confirmed, it must be considered irrelevant. 3 Any explanation within the RC framework for-goes recourses to a mind-independent reality. As mentioned above, it is this postulate which draws a sharp distinction between RC and solipsism which explicitly objects to reality on grounds which are as obscure as any grounds to assert reality. As an immediate result, any correspondence theory of representation is rendered impossible (Peschl and Riegler, 1999). In neurophysiology, it is useless to search for neuron clusters whose activations correlate with external events in a stable referential manner. Understanding representation from the perspective of constructivism gives us a clue as to what we have to look for in the representational substratum; namely, mechanisms which allow the generation of adequate behavior. Traditionally these mechanisms have been thought of in terms of manipulations of referential representations. However, there is neither neuroscientific nor epistemological evidence in favor of such a view. As the representational structure is the result of a system-relative construction process , it is no wonder that we are experiencing difficulties identifying (traditional referential) representations in natural and artificial neural systems. It seems that it is simply the wrong thing to search for. Likewise, …