Many people, including myself, will have become familiar with the term "constructivism" through the work of second-order cyberneticians such as Heinz von Foerster and, particularly, Humberto Maturana. In broad terms it connotes an epistemological position which claims that, as biological observers, we have no immediate access to the external world but that we construct ourselves the world that we each experience. There are, of course, many flavours of constructivism from a mild form that points out the inevitable fact that we can only experience the would through our own bodies and that, therefore, our experience is always our experience and is never unmediated, through to Maturana's radical version that contends that no thing exists except as we construct it - we can say nothing whatever about any form of external world.
Having come across von Glasersfeld's work in connection with Maturana, and knowing that there were broad similarities although also important disagreements, I expected this book to be centrally concerned with the current debates about and within constructivism and particularly Maturana's position, and was eager to read such a book. In this I was mistaken for Maturana is barely mentioned (briefly, on a number of occasions), and much of the discussion is historical rather than current. So, although not what I expected, the book turned out to be interesting in its own right and worth reading for anyone interested in a wider view of constructivism.
The book is best described as an extended reflection upon von Glasersfeld's own personal view of constructivism and how it developed. As such, much of the book is quite personal, some of it autobiographical, and although I found this rather self-indulgent in places it did not negate the overall value of the book. In the rest of this review I shall outline the various chapters, commenting when appropriate, and then give some general criticisms and my overall evaluation.
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