Freshman year.
I am a Dualist. I have my ideas about what is right and wrong, true and false, and they are based on an appeal to Authority (maybe that’s Jesus and maybe that’s Schopenhauer, but they’ve got the truth and now I do too).
Sophomoria
Multiplicity. Huh. There sure are a whole lot of opinions;
god damn, now I’m … not so sure.
I’m a Junior
Relativism. It’s all just opinions. Nobody is right. Not even me. I’m listening to Morrissey. You shut your mouth. How can you say? I go about things the wrong way? Fuck off, all ya’ll, widdat shit.
Ramping toward Graduation
Commitment Within Relativism.
Breathe, Grasshopper.
Yes that’s right. Everything is relative and ultimately, no one knows nothin’
But
I’m choosing to commit to a path Anyway and maybe that’s Jesus and maybe that’s Schopenhauer or my own Morning Blend, but that’s okay because the truth is not what Authority says or the rebel alliance says; we don’t know, and
I chose THIS anyway.
Now let real life begin, or put it off for a while and go to grad school.
***
This is my gloss on William G. Perry, Forms of Intellectual and Ethical Development.
This morning I was asked to dig out and dust off this thing, and, In the process, I found out a whole lot of things about Constructivism.
For our immediate purposes here, and now, let’s just say:
Constructivism is a view in the philosophy of science that maintains that scientific knowledge is constructed by the scientific community, which seeks to measure and construct models of the natural world. Constructivists have a relativist ontology and a socially co-constructed epistemology.
Categories of knowledge and reality are actively created by social relationships and interactions. These interactions also alter the way in which scientific episteme is organized.
Constructivism as an epistemology urges that researchers reflect upon the paradigms that may be underpinning their research, and in the light of this that they become more open to considering other ways of interpreting any results of the research.
Constructivism refers to many schools of thought that, though extraordinarily different in their techniques (applied in fields such as education and psychotherapy), are all connected by a common critique of previous standard objectivist approaches.
Or:
Knowledge is socially constructed: World and information co-construct one another
Consciousness is a social construction
Political struggles: Power plays an exaggerated role in the production of knowledge and consciousness
The necessity of understanding consciousness—even though it does not lend itself to traditional reductionistic modes of measurability
The importance of uniting logic and emotion in the process of knowledge and producing knowledge
The inseparability of the knower and the known
The centrality of the perspectives of oppressed peoples—the value of the insights of those who have suffered as the result of existing social arrangements
The existence of multiple realities: Making sense of a world far more complex than we originally imagined
Becoming humble knowledge workers: Understanding our location in the tangled web of reality
Standpoint epistemology: Locating ourselves in the web of reality, we are better equipped to produce our own knowledge
Constructing practical knowledge for critical social action
Complexity: Overcoming reductionism
Knowledge is always entrenched in a larger process
The centrality of interpretation: Critical hermeneutics
The new frontier of classroom knowledge: Personal experiences intersecting with pluriversal information
Constructing new ways of being human: Critical ontology
Didja catch that? Let me say it again.
The necessity of understanding consciousness—even though it does not lend itself to traditional reductionistic modes of measurability.
Bam.
Cut.
Print it.