- Dear Mr. Mcdermot,
-
- Your questions are admirably brief and if I were
younger and had unlimited time I might take them
as triggers for two 20-page essays. But I am not
and cannot re-read much of James, Dewey, and
Peirce, which your first question would require.
So I, too, shall be brief.
-
- The pragmatists, as I understood them, did not cut
loose from the hope that what continues to
- function, i.e., what is "true because it works",
will ultimately reveal something of an ontic
- reality. Radical constructivism relinquished that
hope and focuses interest on HOW the
- knowledge we find functional could be built up.
-
- Piaget's Genetic Epistemology implies radical
constructivism as inevitable conclusion. I am
- convinced that Piaget was well aware of this
(conversations with Bärbel Inhelder and Rolando
- Garcia did not demolish this belief), but he had
occasional qualms about it. There are many
- statements in his works that leave no doubt, but
there are also quite a few where he fudges. I
- was told that someone once asked him what he thought
of reality and he answered: Je m'en fou
- del la réalité! (more politely: I couldn't care less
about reality!). It was, I think, his later
- emphasis on equilibration, rather than on the
development of logic, that confirmed his radical streak.
