Epistemology: Constructivism: Radical Constructivism

Radical Constructivism

• Overview:  Radical Constructivism puts forward two main claims: (a) knowledge is not passively received but actively built up by the cognizing subject; (b) the function of cognition is adaptive and serves the organization of the experiential world, not the discovery of ontological reality. Radical Constructivists argue that all knowledge is constructed rather than discovered, and that it is impossible to tell (and quite unnecessary to know) if and to what degree knowledge reflects an 'ontological' reality.
  
  Radical Constructivism holds that the 'fitting' of knowledge to our experiences, or its cognitive viability, is the key to evaluating competing knowledge claims and the mechanism by which we learn. Accordingly, there is no unified world meant to be correctly understood by an observer; the traditional subject-object dualism is thus overcome.
  
  Its founder and most prominent proponent, American psychologist Ernst von Glasersfeld, claimed that the task of a truly 'cognitive' archaeology is not to search for origins of our own (superior, advanced) knowledge of the world, but to come to terms with different forms of knowledge.
  
  From a Radical Constructivist perspective, both ontology and epistemology are redundant: it is irrelevant whether the past existed or not, as this has no effect on our knowledge of it, and how we can know the past is beside the point, as knowledge about the past evidently exists among people.
  
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