An Introduction to Radical Constructivism

TLDR

Consciousness constructs reality from experience, making it appear as an independently existing world. Knowledge is built by organisms to order experience through repeatable experiences and reliable relations, constrained by prior construction steps. Reconceptualizing knowing as searching for fitting behaviors eliminates epistemology, revealing that reality appears only where constructions fail, which can only be explained using the concepts that built those failures.

Abstract

The experiencing consciousness creates structure in the flow of its experience, and that structure is what conscious cognitive organisms experience as “reality.” Since that reality is created almost entirely without the experiencer’s awareness of his or her creative activity, it comes to appear as given by an independently “existing” world. Once knowing is no longer understood as the search for an iconic representation of ontological reality but, instead, as a search for fitting ways of behaving and thinking, the traditional problem of epistemology disappears. Knowledge can now be seen as something which the organism builds up in the attempt to order the as such amorphous flow of experience by establishing repeatable experiences and relatively reliable relations between them. The possibilities of constructing such an order are determined and perpetually constrained by the preceding steps in the construction. That means that the “real” world manifests itself exclusively where our constructions break down. Moreover, we can describe and explain these breakdowns only in the very concepts that we have used to build the failing structures.