Dear Mr Glasersfeld,
I am a student of Nanjing
Normal Unversity in China. Several days
ago, i read some your
papers--Radical Constructivism and Education. I got a lot
from you. and i have got a
lot papers of yours, i find it is new and
wonderful for
an educator.
However, i still have some
questions to ask you if you are so kind
to tell me:
1. Is Piaget a
constructivist or structruralist? (Maybe he wanted
to combine them together.)
2. What about you? do you
think you are a radical construtivist or
a radical
structuralist?
I also read some essays of
yours in Chinese version, and i find
they were translated not as yours
origional attention. The translator considers
you as a structuralist.
I am looking forward to
your reply!!!
Thanks!
sincerely
Liu Shufeng (Chinese
name:xxx)
Dear Liu Shufeng,
Thank you for your
questions and your interest in constructivism.
There is a website where I
have been answering questions about
constructivism for several years
http://www.oikos.org/vonen.htm . I
am transferring your
questions and my answer to that website and would ask
you to send any further
questions you might have to:
kenny@oikos.org
Piaget considered himself a
structuralist of a special kind and wrote a
monograph - Le structuralisme, Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1970) - to
clarify his own position. It is a very interesting little
book. Among other instructive things it contains
the statement that the cognitive
organism would construct a stable world for
itself, even if the 'real' world
were in continuos flux.
Some of the anthropological
structuralists would not have agreed with
this view because they were hoping to discover
structures that could be said to exist
independently of individual people. What Piaget took from
conventional structuralism
was the focus on relational patterns rather than on
individual fixed entities.
He was, indeed, more structuralist than the originators
of the movement, becaused he thought that the
items interconnected in a
structure could themselves be characterized as
structural patterns.
So the answer to your two
questions is essentially the same. Piaget saw
no contradiction between structuralism and
constructivism - and neither do
I.
If you read some of the
conceptual analyses I have published (e.g. Notes on
the concept of change,
Cahiers de la Fondation Archives Jean Piaget, No.13,
91-96. Geneva: Fondation Archives Jean Piaget.
1993; or, A model for the construction
o elementary concepts, in D.M.Dubois (Ed.) Computing
anticipatory systems, 45-52. Woodbury, NY:
American Institute of Physics.
1999), you will find the patterns i suggest for some
elementary structures.
What you say about the
translations of my papers does not surprise me. I
am sure it never strikes
current translators that my ideas may be much
closer to
the oldest Chinese philosphers than to the narrow
realist views of today's science
writers.
Best wishes,
Ernst von Glasersfeld
