Radical Constructionism as therapy?

The video clip of Ernst Von Glaserfeld on Radical constructionism as therapy, made me a little skeptic. I may not know much about the depth of unconceptualized apples, but I know a lot about therapy, and there are many problems with his statement.
How exactly is thinking this way therapeutic? Is there any evidence that supports its effectiveness? Which types of people should receive this treatment? What types of people should not receive this treatment? How would the therapy sessions be set up? Would this be under the humanistic paradigm? What makes him think that everyone needs this therapy? What makes him think that everyone should think this way? Is it because he wants everyone to stop asking him questions? Is it because he wants to be right?

A Radical Construction of people?

As we all know now, a radical constructivist believes that we obtain knowledge through our experiences. I do not believe in the whole, "A rock does not exist until I have experienced it. You can not show me a rock that I have not experienced because once you show me it, I have experienced it." Yet, I do believe that when it comes to specific things, we can only know from our experiences.

For example, people. (In a hypothetical situation) I hear my friends talking about someone who I do not know. I am uncertain of the existence of the proclaimed person that they are describing. I am not doubting the unknown person's physical existence, but I am uncertain of who this person really is. The characteristics that they give this person are not certain to me because I have not experienced them. They may or may not be funny to me, they may or may not seem intelligent, I do not know. Since we perceive who people are subjectively, the unknown person as other people describe him/her, to me, does not exists because I may not perceive them that way.

How do you truly know someone?
Is this a radical constructivist's view on people?

Re: Brendon Tomasi

Brendon commented to my post "Re: Joel's physiological time vs. Psychological time. " Through out his comment he talked about qualitative hedonism and epicureanism, then asked if I thought it was philosophically equivalent to the happiness archetype. I looked up what a qualitative hedonist was and found that they believe that pleasures differ in quality and quantity and the pleasures that are more pleasureful are the ones that are sought after. I don't deny this theory, but that is not what the happiness archetype suggests. The happiness archetype does not deal with the quality or quantity of pleasures per se.

Epicureanists believe in finding simple pleasures, yet not indulging yourself in what you want. This along with avoiding physical pain will allow you to feel “free from fear” and understand the way the world is. These theories are not the equivalent of the happiness archetype. The happiness archetype involves pain where hedonism and epicureanisim does not. The most equivalent philosophical term is a mix between (regular) hedonism and eudaimonia.

Eudaimonia is a Greek work that is roughly translated to "happiness" or "well being." According to Aristotle, eudaimonia is the highest state of happiness and is achieved over a life of: pleasure, practical activity, and philosophy. (In my own philosophy, this is similar to "ultimate satisfaction," but that's another story.) It's funny, because the keynote speaker at the undergraduate research conference was talking about eudaimonia. She said, "the idea is to make small goals, but have a bigger farther-in-the-future goal at the same time." The smaller goals are like check points.

According to her, eudaimonia means to put yourself through some pain now for your well being, while still enjoying that. You don't want to write that 18 page research paper. It will take a really long time, you'll get annoyed by not being able to find the information you want, and you will certainly pull all-nighters. But when you finish it, you are a better writer, an experienced (for example) philosopher, it's on a topic you like, and you know what? You are smarter and you feel accomplished. This is precisely what the happiness archetype entails. This is precisely why I am a musician. You get a piece and it's tough and when you look at it you think, "I'm never going to be able to play that." Then it gets broken-down, taken in chunks, practiced repeatedly, and there is frustration -- a lot of frustration. Yet, the more frustration the better, because when you finally get it right, the better you feel. Eudaimonia! Right? ...Wrong.

For a few days now, I have been researching eudaimonia. None of the articles I've read indicate that you have to put yourself through pain now that enjoy, for your well being later. According to Aristotle a doing and living well is different for everybody. So eudaimonia is not the best parallel to the happiness archetype, yet it is closer than epicureanism and qualitative hedonism.

So what would the philosophy of: 'putting yourself through pain (while enjoying that pain) in order better your well being and to achieve a long term goal,' be called?

Solipsism, Nihilism, Radical Constructivism, and Metaphysics

I find solipsism very interesting, mostly because it's absolutely ridiculous. Solipsists believe that they are the only thing that they are certain exists. Because if you are thinking about you existence you are existing (or something to that extent). Con ego sum. It's kind of an egotistical statement though, don't you think? It's giving ones self way too much credit. Do you you think you could have imagined all the things in the world? all the intricate details, all the people you meet -- it is all in your dream?

Philosophical nihilism is the idea that nothing really exists, values have no value, and nothing can be truly known.

Like I mentioned in my last post, in psychiatry nihilism is a delusion. ( A delusion is a distorted belief, not to be confused with a hallucination which is sensory experience not caused by external stimuli.) This delusion is found in certain types of schizophrenia; the patient may think that they are a ghost and only here in spirit form.

Radical constructivists believe that knowledge adjusts itself to fit certain situations. We cannot know what we have not experienced. Yet, it is not through our direct experiences that we construct our world, but our interpretations, it's what we take from our experiences that shapes our world and knowledge. "one need not to enter far into constructivists thought to realize that it inevitably leads to the contention that man --and man alone -- is responsible for his thinking, his knowledge and, therefore, also for what he does" (Glasersfeld).

Kant stated that, metaphysics suggests that things are only true if they correspond to an independent and objective reality.

So the difference between solipsism and nihilism is that solipsists state that they are real and everything else isn't, where (metaphysical) nihilists suggest that nothing is real including themselves. The idea's of Radical constructivists and solipsists overlap, but solipsist deal with the metaphysical -- a realm radical constructivists want nothing to do with.

According to Glasersfeld, our interpretations of reality constructs our knowledge. In class it was stated that RC, unlike solipsists, believe that you can't construct the world any way you want. Yet, since RC don't believe in metaphysics, wouldn't that suggest that you can construct the world anyway you want? Do any of the four philosophical positions/beliefs cross over in any other way?

Re: Joel's Physical time vs. Psychological time

Joel mentioned three different dimensions of psychological time. Each person either is past oriented, present oriented or future oriented. What he may not know is that these are actually archetypes of happiness.

Those who dawn on the past are known as nihilists. There is a blurry line between psychological nihilism and philosophical nihilism. This is mostly due to the fact that there are many different definitions of nihilism. In philosophy, it could be the thought of nothingness; nothing is of value or matters and there is no comprehensible truth. In psychiatry, it can be a delusion in which the person feels like their own existence isn't real. Nihilists in this sense, can't get over their past and feel that no matter what they do, their life is never going to get any better. Behaviorists refer to this as "learned helplessness."


Those who are present oriented are called hedonists. In philosophy as well as psychology, a hedonist is someone who focuses on the here-and-now, they are pleasure seekers and don't care about the future consequences. A psychological hedonist flees from what causes them pain (Thomas Hobbes' "Leviathan"). These people are damned because they will end up in debt, jobless, or other significant societal problems.

Those who are future oriented are known as rat racers. I'm not sure if philosophy has an equivalent term. The rat racer is always focusing on the future, and puts them self through pain now so that they will be happy in the future. When they achieve a goal there is only a little happiness, and then they are on to the next. In this process, they have little fun.

There is also a fourth archetype called the happiness archetype. Although you may think that this archetype is just in between a hedonist and a rat racer, it isn't. This doesn't make you happier because given a situation, you have to choose whether to be happy now or in the future. This archetype focuses on having pleasure now and in the future. For example say someone decided to go on a diet. The hedonist would give up right away; the rat racer would eat food that they hated, but was healthy; and the"happier" would eat the fattening food they liked in moderation. An other, probably better example, is that of musicians. Yes, scales and repeating a passage over and over again can be tedious, but they are still having fun and getting quick gratification by getting that passage right after a few minute while also making themselves better musicians.

At the end of his post Joel asked, "what would reality look like without the institution of time?"

Psychologically, time effects us in so many ways, even in ways that you would not think of like happiness mentioned above. Yet, If we had no sense of the past or present our minds might would kind of work like the way they do when we are under certain aesthetics. There is a certain type of aesthetic (I'm not sure which one) which works in a way that you are conscious, but you can't feel pain because the moment the signal gets to your brain, your focus is on the present. So your thought process is literally, "wait, what just happened?" If you got smacked in the face and fell to the ground you wouldn't feel the pain, you would just wonder why you were on the ground.

Time is an evolutionary development that is required for our survival. Even animals have a sense of psychological time. If we had no conception of the past, we would not be able to progress in anything. With no capacity to remember what we learned previous to any given moment we wouldn't have memories. And if it wasn't for memories we wouldn't be able to read, talk, or even walk. If we couldn't walk, we wouldn't be here. Therefore, memories, and a sense of time is necessary for our existence.

How do radial constructivists' view time?

Language gone wild

A little confused at first, I realized (okay, I was told) that we changed the topic to language and it's correlation to ideas on Wednesday.

The first thing that came to mind was the case study of Genie. Genie was a girl who was strapped to a toilet by her Father from when she was 14months old until she was 13. She never learned to speak, whenever her father fed her he only growled and barked at her. Genie's partially blind mother did nothing to stop the abuse. When officials found her, Psycholinguists and language accusitionists went wild for this "wild child." (at first anyways) No one had ever seen a case of a human so isolated from social interaction or a teenage that never heard a word in their life. "This child could be the answer to so many questions" researchers thought. Questions that are unethical for the researchers to find themselves.

Genie moved into the house of her new teacher, Marilyn Rigler a graduate student in human development. At first, whenever Genie would get angry she would engage in self-mutilating behaviors. Marilyn taught her how to turn that frustration outwards by stomping or slamming doors. And eventually genie was able to use language to an extent and exhibit her frustrations in words.

If this isn't an answer, or supporting evidence that ideas, thoughts and emotions are possible without words then I don't know what is. Genie obviously had ideas, thoughts, and emotions, but she didn't know language so she was unable to communicate and share them. The same is with animals, they have thoughts they just can't say them. They prove that they do through their actions.

Yet, on the other hand when brain activity was recorded they saw almost no activity. Her brain waves were extremely undeveloped and her brain was lopsided! She could easily do tasks that involved primarily the right side of the brain and it took a little while for her to learn things that involved both, but when it came to the left side it was impossible. There is something called a critical period, it's like a window of opportunity and different tasks have a different time frame at which they are best learned. If a human has not heard language by the age of four, that window is almost completely shut.

After a few years Genie had lost her funding, and she was swapped from foster home, to her mother, to foster home again. To learn more about Genie check out

http://www.feralchildren.com/en/showchild.php?ch=genie

Feral children never learn enough language to give the answers that scientists need! 200 years ago they found a boy they named "victor" in the woods, he had no ability to speak language. A psychologist took him in and tried to teach him language and raise him but he was so wild and wouldn't comply that the psychologist put him in a mental institution. He was there for the rest of his life.

Is it better to take these feral children in and try to teach them human culture, or just let them be?

Re: Whiping the World Clean

In Joel's latest post he questioned time's existence and if it exists without humans. He ended by asking if time flows or do we flow through it?


In the article by Bradley Dowden talks about the flow of time and how there are two main theories. The first theory is known as the, "Myth-of-passage theory." This theory basically states that the flow of time is all in our heads. There is not an objective flow of time, but there is a possibility that our minds tell us there is. The second theory is known as the, "dynamic theory." This theory states that "the flow of time is objective, a feature of our mind-independence."


I'm not sure I see the difference in the two theories but, I believe that the flow of time is perceived by the events that you are doing and your feelings towards them. If you are doing something you love for 3 hours oppose to something that you hate for an hour, that hour is going to flow a lot slower than the 3 hours, possibly to the point where the 3 hours seemed like it was less time than the one.

So to answer Joel's question I think that time flows atomically, but it doesn't affect how fast or slow it feels. Depending on what we are doing determines how fast or slow time is passing. So in reality time flows automically, but it seems as though we flowing through time and our actions determine the speed of that flow.

What is the difference between the "myth-of-passage theory" and the "dynamic theory"?

Re: Emily's: Human's Imperfect Construction of Time

Emily talked about free-running (when there are no light cues and our circadian rhythm operates on a 25hour cycle) and the fact that a year is actually 325.25 days. She ended by asking, "Does anyone have any insight to why our interpretation of time is skewed? Is there a way to make it more accurate?"

Is our interpretation skewed of time because of the clock? If it is skewed because of the clock then what should our interpretation be? Whose to say that it is skewed when we don't know what the real answer is?

As for time being more accurate let's see, if there is 60 seconds in a minute and 60 minutes in an hour then that's 3,600 seconds in one hour. There is 24 hours in one day, 6 hours is 1/4. 6 x 3,600 = 21,600. 21,600/365 = approx. 59.18. So the most accurate way to make time would be adding 59.18 seconds to everyday(... I think, I'm not the best at math.) But are we going to change this leap year system that's been going on since 50-45 B.C. just to make time more accurate? No. We have time for our convinence, so we can plan and schedule events in a "timely manner." Why does it matter if it takes us four years to catch up on 43,200 seconds?

So my question is: Whose to say that our time is skewed when we don't even know what time is or if it even exsists?