Sympathy

I am a realist. There does not seem to be any reason to doubt that there is an outside world that we have some contact with. Where I sympathize with Idealism and Constructivism is in understanding the mind. At least those who try to address the problem of the minds connection to reality because they recognize how tenuous that connection is.

The mind is not a rational thing, it is in fact a confusing mix of emotion, knowledge, instinct and a goodly number of other things. We do in fact often fail to interact with the world correctly, but this is not because our senses are not reliable. It is in fact our minds ourselves that are the impediment to the rational conscious mind interacting with the outside world.

In my opinion it is far more scary to admit that our minds are not completely under our control, and I sympathize with idealists who may be trying to find the less frightening route in describing our relationship with reality.

Q&A Two Question Two

How Radical can we be without totally denying the existence/relevance of an outside world?

Von Glassersfeld sounds a lot like a metaphysical realist when you get down to it. If we accept his theories on the basis that he is describing a reality where the mind exists in the world but has a very hard time accessing it, then we may be getting somewhere plausible.

At the very least we need to admit that at some time the mind existed in interaction with the world. If not a mind would never have the initial materials to develop the world from. More fundamentally, if the mind didn't exist in the world then where did the mind come from?

We have to admit the existence of something analogous to the subconscious as well, or else the universe would only be the way that we consciously chose it to be, which is rather painfully not the case.

Q&A Two Question One

Is there any use to being a Radical Constructivist? Where can we get working off this theory?


Like a skeptic, the radical constructivist backs themselves into a corner when it comes to knowing anything about the world. If you can't verify an outside reality, then how can we rationally discuss anything?

On this basis alone it seems that RD should be rejected, the same way that skepticism in the end must be rejected. Though the possibility of RD's truth must constantly lurk in the background like the boogeyman, there is no way to approach the veracity of RD's claims, and thus nothing interesting or useful that we can do with it.

RD also fails to tell us why we should be so skeptical about realism. Realism seems intuitively true, and while the nature of realist metaphysics makes it impossible for us to verify from inside and outside our minds weather or not we are actually accessing reality through our senses, there doesn't seem to be any good reason to seriously doubt it.