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    By Peter Davson

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    5 views4 pages

    Peter Davson

    Uploaded by

    analiticus
    By Peter Davson

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF or read online from Scribd
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    of 4
    ‘Science de Education 9: 611-614, 200, © 2 Kluwer Academe Publsers, Ped in she Neserlands Contra Garrisonian Social Constructivism PETER DAVSON-GALLE Faculty of Education, University of Tasmania, Locked Bag 1-307, Launceston, Tasmania 7250, Australia (E-mail: P DavsonGalle@ias ed a) ABSTRACT. Ia a recent paper in this jouens, Fim Garrison (1997) opines that @ Deweyan Soci! consizetvism ought to be embraced by seience educators in preference to the stb- jectvist variety espoused by Ernst von Glasersfeld as it. retains all fof the laters] virtues tnd toes not get caught up in its confusions’ (p. $3). In this response, T argue that key lemens of Garrison's complaints ate misguided and that his preferred Deweyan social constructivism is @theoreial framework without appasent superiority and with enough flaws tha itis best eschewed by science educators (end metascicatst general). In a recent paper in this journal, Fim Garrison (1997) opines that a Deweyan social constructivism ought 10 be embraced by science educators in preference to the subjectivist variety espoused by Ernst von Glasersfeld asit*... retains all [of the latter's] virtues and does not get caught up in its confusions’ (p. 543). In what follows, I argue that key elements of Garrison’s complaints are misguided and that his preferred Deweyan social constructivism is a theoretical framework without apparent superiority and with enough flaws that it is best eschewed by science educators (and ‘metascientists generally). As Garrison outlines his views, I take them to be open to the following objections ‘My first concern relates to a discussion beginning in the latter half of p. 546. The target for Garrison is von Glasersfeld’s discussion of the “organism's” achievement of *,..a coherent conceptial network (1989, p. 128). In so far as I follow Garrison, he seems to construe subjectivism as being committed to some sort of non-corporealism about the mind, And that leads Garrison to complain of subjectivism’s ‘.. . un- tenable mind/body, subjectiobsect dualisms....” (p. $45). I fail to see Subjective Constructivism (‘SuC’ for short) as being so committed. As I follow SuC, the core ideas are these. First, that individual agents are the aotive constructors of their semantic and cognitive frameworks, the locus of those frameworks being within the mind. Second, that, given an agent’s perspective from within (or perhaps identity with) his mind, there is both a semantic and an epistemic concern about how he can manage to talk about reality external to his mind — how can he get his symbols to refer. never mind know that they do and know that claims made in their terms succeed in truly describing what such reality is like? In the face of the futility of any hopes that any agent might have of semantic and epistemic transcendence of her subjective realm of existence, SuC focuses inward — ‘one’s conceptual schemes and frameworks of belief are to be viewed as about one’s subjective experience and. even then, an agent's theories are 612 PETER DAVSON-GALLE best viewed instrumentally, as ways of organising one’s experiential lite such that one’s various projcets (excluding understanding objective reality of course) are successfully carried out. If I have these core theses portrayed aright, then no mind/body or subjectlobject dualism is entailed, SuC seems rather to entail a scepticism or agnosticism about such @ non-mental realm of being. Maybe there is some such realm but, if so, it is ineffable and thus cognitively inaccessible. Maybe also, if there is such a realm, we are, as Garrison would urge, ontologically continuous with it (our minds being corporeal brains in some way) but such ontological unity is something upon which SuC is silent and rightly so in this context (I put causaV/histor- ical/reliablist semanticfepistemic theories to one side for this paper). An agent's mere ontological continuity with protons and pulsars and pond slime doesn’t of itself make them knowable or even “effable” by the bit of such reality that is that agent, Such ontological continuity. has no automatic implications for semantics or epistemology. Putative Ockhamist Garrison is in no position of superiority here, for the ontological gargoyles disturbing to his minimalist tendencies are simply not entailments of SuC. Which brings me to my second concern. A trouble with talk of not multiplying entities beyond necessity is that, without further clarification, the exhortation is meaningless. The necessity in question is retational: given some project or goal, one can coherently speak of what is unneces- sary for it but the goal has first to be stipulated. So, what if one has as the relevant goal relatum in the relationship of necessity something like the SuC one of being able organise one's experiential reality in ways. that permit its reliable “navigation”. Now, as the long history of the realismvinstramentalism debate about the semantic construal of scientific theories has taught us, such pragmatic goals are as well served by falschood as by truth and (assuming for the moment the hugely problematic dis tion of observational from theoretical propositions) by i employing only observational propositions and relations among them as by ones semantically realist about theoretical propositions. In the case of SuC. the semantic grounding for the observational language is the agent's first-person experiential life and, if the goal is viable navigation of that life, then postulation of entities and processes in realms beyond the fist- person experiential is prazmatically unnecessary — it is Garrisonian social constructivism (henceforth labelled ‘SoC’), not SuC, which transgresses Ockhamist strictures relative to the goal outlined above. It is SoC which postulates a world of extra-mental entities and happenings superfluous for the satisfaction of the goal of organising one’s experiences. Of course, such a first person focus by SuC has its oddities, As Gatrison delights in pointing out, sueh a determined instrumentalism about anything but one’s own private stream of mental events poses problems when it comes to others, problems of some salience in the context of discussions about education. Names like ‘Horace’ anc identifying definite descriptions like ‘the warty nosed kid in the corner’ would usually be given a realistic semantic construal (we take ourselves to be teaching real kids, CONTRA GARRISONIAN SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIVISM 613 presumably) yet will be construed instrumentally if one consistently carries through the agent-centric semantic themes of SuC. ‘Horace’ and its under- standing is constructed but this is not, despite Garrison’s derisory carica- ture on p. 548, for the SuC agent to be literally constructing other humans like Horace (noting this should be a matter for rejoicing in our Ockhamist as it will allow him to avoid three unnecessary “Scare” exclamation marks, on p. 548). If some Kantian Horace-in-himself exists, then he exists, not as some mental construction of mine, but in some other manner. My difficulty as semantic agent is forming any conception of hhim that can manage realistic referential attachment to such an ontologically “other” entity. Of course, as noted, best not to bother for some purposes, for such attempted positing of other minds is superfluous to the pragmatic task of organising and navigating one’s experiences, Nonetheless if one did, in idle speculative mode, wish to entertain the thought that Horace existed then one’s experience of self provides a conceptual repertoire with which to conceptualise the nature of another ~ indeed a curious twist to such experientially anchored semantics as embraced by SuC is that it seems that just about the only sort of extra-agential entity that neatly avoids in-principle ineffability is other mental events of the same type as one’s own, Of course even if the SuC agent bothers to attempt effing Horace and even if she succeeds, there is still the epistemic problem of Knowing that she has succeeded. But then Garrison is hardly better off in terms of knowledge of other minds than SuC is. Garrisonian SoC hopes to break free from the semantic and epistemic isolationism of SuC by extermalising mind and language such that they are functions of social practice (pp. 549-551). The ditficulty with Garrison's hopes for this are that he seems to fail to take on board the full import of Quine’s indeterminacy thesis (which I take him to accept). If a person is, apart from the mere mush of her brain, crucially to be identified with her place as a “node” in her community's web of social practices, then indeterminacy strikes harder at the chances of individual identity and common understanding than Garrison manifests awareness of. To make ‘my point requires a small excursion, Consider the radical translation/interpretation literature (e.g. Davidson 1984) which derives from Quine’s indeterminacy thesis. Briefly, say that one is observing some set of practices (including verbal) of some foreign tribe and trying to ascertain what is meant by their linguistic episodes. A variety of translation hypotheses could be crafted. each as congruent with those episodes as the others even after quite extended, even unlimited, observation, Nor would one’s own participation in their social “game” help: for the question remains as to what itis that one is participating in. So far, this is just @ familiar story of epistemic under-determination of, in this case, linguistic theory by the tribe’s observed practice, But add the indeterminacy semantic thesis that there is no more be be had as to what the tribe's utterances mean or refer to than what is constituted by their practices and then, in effect, there is no answer to be had as to which 614 PETER DAVSON-GALLE translation hypothesis is right ~ ‘neither/both’ is the indeterminacy thesis’s anywer because to ask for meaning beyond publically observed practice is to make an illegitimate query yet that practice does not distinguish the two hypotheses. (Desoite all of which our working anthropologist would, J surmise, hold that there are two hypotheses and not deem the two translation candidates as semantically conflated). On the face of it, such trenchantly public semanticism makes the tribe’s language knowable only by impoverishing what there is to be known, To return to our main path, the neophyte language leamer is in much the position of the anthropologist. His task is to learn his own tribe's language. He can by all means participate in various social practices and if there 1s more “© meaning than those practices (like a mentalistic component) yet such public practices are his sole evidence for what is mean’t by various Tinguistic episodes he observes in his linguistic com- munity, then he has an epistemic under-determination problem, And a corollory of this is @ mutual understanding problem: does he mean the same by various utterances as others? Is the “game” he takes himself to be playing, the same

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