Which are the relationships between Kantian epistemology and radical constructivism ?

Sounds like you are wondering if both are a form of solipsism. Schopenhauer continued this track in his tome, ';The World As Will and Representation.'; Pretty dense stuff, but worth the read.Which are the relationships between Kantian epistemology and radical constructivism ?
Great question.





Kant proposed that to the extent that knowledge depends on the structure of the mind and not on the world, knowledge would have no connection to the world and is not even true representation, just a solipsistic or intersubjective fantasy. Kantianism seems threatened with ';psychologism,'; the doctrine that what we know is our own psychology, not external things. Kant did say, consistent with psychologism, that basically we don't know about ';things-in-themselves,'; objects as they exist apart from perception. But at the same time Kant thought he was vindicating both a scientific realism, where science really knows the world, and a moral realism, where there is objective moral obligation, for both of which a connection to external or objective existence is essential. And there were also terribly important features of things-in-themselves that we do have some notion about and that are of fundamental importance to human life, not just morality but what he called the three ';Ideas'; of reason: God, freedom, and immortality. Kant always believed that the rational structure of the mind reflected the rational structure of the world, even of things-in-themselves -- that the ';operating system'; of the processor, by modern analogy, matched the operating system of reality. But Kant had no real argument for this -- the ';Ideas'; of reason just become ';postulates'; of morality -- and his system leaves it as something unprovable. The paradoxes of Kant's efforts to reconcile his conflicting approaches and requirements made it very difficult for most later philosophers to take the overall system seriously.





'Radical Constructivism' (see Fischer 1995) is part of a larger 'constructivist' movement in the philosophy and sociology of science (Schwandt 1994). Its founder and most prominent proponent is the American psychologist Ernst von Glasersfeld (e.g. 1987a; 1991; 1992a; 1995). Among his followers and critical supporters are Gebhard Rusch (1987; 1990), Siegfried Schmidt (1987) and Niklas Luhmann (1992; 1993). Glasersfeld's thinking is highly interdisciplinary, but it is mainly built on the work of the French psychologist Jean Piaget, as well as on insights from cybernetics, i.e. the study of self-contained systems (Glasersfeld 1994; Portele 1994). Piaget's studies on the cognitive development of children led to the often cited conclusion: ';Intelligence organizes the world by organizing itself'; (Piaget 1937: 311). This means that knowledge is a self-organised cognitive process of the human brain; it is not aimed at a 'true' image of the 'real' world but at a viable organisation of the world as it is experienced. Similarly, cybernetics deals with continuously recursive, i.e. circular, processes of observing and learning, but from an entirely technical point of view. Self-regulating devices only know what they have sensed by feedback. A 'second order cybernetics' (Heinz von Foerster) in turn observes how such systems observe, and in this reflexive manner it includes the current observer in the field of study. Radical Constructivism is, if you will, 'second order knowledge', taking into account its own procedures too.





Radical Constructivism puts forward two main claims (Glasersfeld 1989: 162):





';(a) knowledge is not passively received but actively built up by the cognizing subject;


(b) the function of cognition is adaptive and serves the organization of the experiential world, not the discovery of ontological reality.';





Both Kantian epistemology and radical constructivism are concerned with how we experience the World.Which are the relationships between Kantian epistemology and radical constructivism ?
The relationship between Kantian Epistemology and Social(radical) constructivism is first, that knowledge is constructed by individuals' brain. Kant held that we could only know the appearance of thing(noumena) not the thing itself(phenomena) Thus knowledge is based on what the mind sees as the appearance. So in both cases the individual's brain construct the knowledge. Social Constructivism, view of is a construct of the mind, not compilation knowledge similar to Kant in a distant way. Second, there is no solid foundation for knowledge to rest on, since in Kant's Transcendentalism we don't really know the object, as in Social Constructivism, knowledge doesn't necessarily reflect ';ontological reality.'; Third, in both cases the individual forms the knowledge based on his personal view. Though Social Consrtuctivism is more akin to consensual knowledge(group based knowledge) Knowledge is not truly objective in the sense of traditional epistemology. Because of that there is a tendency to a relativistic view of knowledge.

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