Politics concepts and applications

Politics

Since, according to constructivism, human knowledge does not reflect reality, it therefore challenges the fundamental beliefs of rationalism.

Constructivism is a philosophy that holds that all knowledge, or how humans view their world, is constructed instead of being based on any actual realities. According to constructivism, knowledge does not necessarily reflect any external realities but instead is contingent on conventions, human perceptions and the overall social experience of an individual. In other word, according to constructivist theory, knowledge is nothing more than artificial reality. If constructivism was to be summarized, it can be said that constructivism defines both knowledge and truth based on a paradigm that uses inter-subjectivity instead of the rationalist objectivity. This being said, constructivism is fundamentally opposed to the premises of rationalism, which holds that the opposite is true, or that knowledge is based on rational reasoning, or on reality.

For example, according to constructivism, including such leading constructivist leaders as Hegel, Garns and Marx, the concept of such things as race, sexuality and gender are concepts created not from rational or reason but through social experiences and human perception. However, on the other hand, a rationalist would argue, using the approach of reason, that such things as race, sexuality and gender are concepts based on reason, or, stated another way, that the knowledge humans have about race, sexuality and gender is based on the information gained from the fact these things actually exists and thus humans interact with- as opposed to create.

Constructivist theory finds its roots in the ancient Greek philosophers, including Aristotle, who argued "man is the measure of all things." In other words, Aristotle believed that man, or the knowledge of man, is the accumulated result of the human experience, which is the cumulated result of the how humans have perceived their world as opposed to how their world actually is. Thus, human reality become reality not because its based in reason and rational thinking, but because it is what we have constructed it to be. As Kant stated in 1708: "The norm of the truth is to have made it" or simply the truth is what one makes true instead of what is actually true.

One of the most famous constructivist statements as to the formation of knowledge comes from physicist Gaston Bachelard, who stated in 1934:

And, irrespective of what one might assume, in the life of a science, problems do not arise by themselves. It is precisely this that marks out a problem as being of the true scientific spirit all knowledge is in response to a question. If there were no question, there would be no scientific knowledge. Nothing proceeds from itself. Nothing is given. All is constructed."

Thus, according to Bachelard, the truth of human knowledge is ignorance. Being ignorant, we form questions. Since questions beg for answers, we create an answer to our questions and thus simultaneously create reality, or knowledge. The truth of the matter, however, is that there is no way of knowing whether the answer is correct yet, at the same time, that begs the question since it becomes correct based on the constructed reality shaped in answering the original question.

Another way of saying this is, as Paul Valery states, that human knowledge, or reality, is invented. According to Valery, "My hand feels touches as well as it touches; reality says this and nothing more." Stated less poetically is that when a human has a question, such as "how does this feel," the only reality is that the hand feels something. Everything else taken away from this experience is constructed from this little-understood reality in order to create an answer and thus establish what is eventually held out as being true.

Constructivism is characterized by several fundamental principles and beliefs. The most fundamental of these beliefs is that constructivism does not focus on an ontological reality but instead only on a constructed or, as previously described, an artificial or quasi-false reality. According to constructivist, ontological reality, or the actual truth, is a fallacy as, since there is absolutely no way to verify what the actual reality is, it cannot be known and thus does not actually exist. According to the constructivist theory, rationalism, which searches for ontological reality in order to build knowledge, is viewed as nothing more than intuition. The constructivist, in other words, view that the realist hope of the rationalist is "simply an arbitrary freezing of the infinite regress of circularity that plagues human reasoning which vainly hopes to validate itself with a secure foundation."

As has already been alluded to, rationalism takes what is essentially a polar opposite view of reality as constructivist do, believing that knowledge comes from an appeal to reason. Rationalism can best be defined by looking towards Edmund Burke, who defined rationalism as the method or theory in which the criterion of truth is not sensory but intellectual and deductive.

Like constructivism, rationalism too finds its roots in ancient Greek philosophy, starting with Plato, the constructivist Aristotle's mentor. According to Plato, the key to finding knowledge was through leading a rational and reasonable life. Chronicling the teachings of Socrates, Plato argues that in order to understand the world, one most first understand themselves. In other words, the truth lies within oneself and not, as constructivists argue, within society. According to Socrates, the only way to accomplish this was through the use of rational thought.

Rational thought, according to Socrates, is a process of gaining knowledge through discourse. It begins with the asking of a seemingly rhetorical question in which the other person will give an answer. Once the answer is given, Socrates would continue to ask questions until all conflicts were resolved or until the only answer left was that there was no known answer. The result was a mythological breaking down of the constructed knowledge in hopes of finding the truth: which all too often was that the truth is unknown.

Because rationalism focuses on discovering the actual truth, many rationalist use a mathematical and scientific approach in order to deductively derive the rest of all possible knowledge. According to such rationalist as Baruch Spinoza and Gottfired Leibniz, in principle, all knowledge can be gained through the use of reason alone. However, both also conceded that this would not be feasible in practice in any areas of knowledge except such specific areas as math.

In other words, even the most devout rationalist concede to the constructivist argument that it is impossible to discover actual truth because it is also impossible to avoid the truths that humans have constructed and, more fundamentally, that all truths are constructed by humans as there is no possible way (except in math) to know for sure whether an answer is true or whether it is true only because we think it is true.