Søren Brier
The theme of this issue is constructivism: radical, "trivial" or social. In his contribution The view from Somewhere, David Johnson gives a philosophical realist critique of Ernst von Glasersfeld’s radical constructivism. Von Glasersfeld gives a short answer entitled: The View from Here. Beginning with this issue Johnson will edit a discussion group on Thinknet. To subscribe send the message SUBCYBHUMKNOW to listserv@think.net
John Mingers reviews von Glasersfeld new book: Radical Constructivism: a Way of Knowing and Learning and contributes to the evaluation of different kinds of constructivism.
The influential philosopher John Searle has produced an important book on this topic: The Construction of Social Reality. Klaus von Krippendorff critically reviews the text which is further analyzed and discussed by Lars Qvortrup in his paper: How is Society Possible? The Epistemology of Social Constructivism. Qvortrup also describes a soft version of constructivism going beyond Searls´s combination of natural realism and social constructivism.
Guberman and Andrewsky explore the connection between aphasiology and artificial intelligence in their paper: From Language Pathology to Automatic Language Processing... and Return exploring the importance of context and self-organization in the processes of recognition and understanding. Evenlyne Andrewsky is welcomed as a new editor.
Michael Manthey reviews Stuart Kauffman’s book At Home in the Universe which, through the exploration of self-organization principles, shows why our presence here is not as unexpected as Monod thought when he wrote Chance and Necessity.
Finally Ranulph Glanville has written a tribute to Gordon Pask, a founder of second order cybernetics and constructivist communication theory, and to Robin McKinnon-Wood a lifelong collaborator with Pask. Glanville traces the history and products of their work giving new minds the chance to pick up the torch.
Thanks to all that have contributed to the self-organization and development of volume three.
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