Reflections on the Concept of Experience and the role of consciousness: Unifinished Fragments. Ernst...

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http://www.univie.ac.at/constructivism/journal/6/2/195.ackermann

Radical Constructivism

Reflections on the Concept of Experience and the Role of ConsciousnessUnfinished FragmentsErnst von Glasersfeld†Edith K. Ackermann • MIT/Design Lab • edith/at/media.mit.eduwith Comments by Vincent Kenny and George Forman

> Context • The idea to write this paper sprang up in a casual conversation that led to the question of how the word “experience” would be translated into German. Distinctions between the German “Erleben” and “Erfahren,” and their intricacies with “Erkennen” and “Anerkennen,” soon led to the conviction that this was a thread worth pursuing. > Problem • Much has been written about the nature of experience, but there is little consensus, to this day, regarding the role of consciousness in the process of experiencing. Although RC acknowledges the significance of tacit or senso-rimotor knowledge in the individual’s practical operating, it cannot admit it as a basis to the formation of conceptual structures that, by definition, are conscious. > Method • Drawing from our backgrounds in epistemology and psychology, and a shared interest in Piaget’s psychogenetic approach, we investigate the origins and development of human expe-rience, in this case the mastery of space, time, causation, and object-permanency. We focus on how “noticeable encoun-ters” are gauged, reflected upon, and ultimately worked through, consciously or unconsciously, by the “experiencer.” > Results • A child’s abilities to enact a certain action pattern in a given situation no more demonstrates a re-presentation of the pattern than does recognition in the case of objects. In his studies with children, Piaget has shown that the Kantian categories of space, time object, and “causality” are co-constitutive of the child’s own mo-tion – and its felt impact – as a means to make the world cohere. Of importance here are the concepts of “effective causality,” felicitous encounters, and agency. > Implications • Understanding the circumstances under which some “lived” events, whether self-initiated or striking as if out of nowhere, become noticeable and able affect a person’s life is a daunting task. This joint essay is no more than a conversation-starter and an invitation to further explore the intricacies between agency and causation, sensation and cognition, and, yes, motions and emotions in the making of consciousness itself.> Key words • Psychogenesis, space-time, effective causality, empiricism, Immanuel Kant, William James, Jean Piaget.

Preface by Edith K. AckermannTo be given a place in Ernst’s life has

been a life-changing experience, and to loose Ernst leaves an unspeakable void. It was not the right time to write an obituary. With a little help from Alexander Riegler, however, I was encouraged to opt for a much simpler, and in a sense “truer” expression of gratitude to my mentor, colleague, and friend by presenting a joint essay that we had been working on – and the draft of which we completed a week before his passing.

The work is unfinished and the topic ambitious. An astute reader will immediately notice the piece-meal quality of the text and, if familiar with Ernst’s work, may spot who took a first stab at which sections. While we generally agreed on what to fit in and leave out, made it a rule to build on each other’s insights, and read each other’s prose, we ran out of time to make the text cohere, to in-corporate our two expert readers’ comments, and to come to a close. Even subtitles are still placeholders for unfinished fragments.

In the light of this, one could have done one of two things: polish the text further

without Ernst, or publish the text as is and offer a few annotations in a pre-and post-face. The latter option seemed the way to go to in order to highlight a few issues that need further work, and add fragments of conversation that did not make it into the text. I also chose to incorporate the valu-able comments of our expert readers, Vin-cent Kenny and George Forman, as stand-alone pieces. I hope this somewhat unusual format for circulating half-baked ideas will not discourage the readers from engaging with our musings, in their minds or with others.

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ConsTRuCTIVIsT FoundATIons vol. 6, n°2

Introduction

Both authors of this essay had the good fortune to grow up with more than one lan-guage: Edith Ackermann (EA) with German and French, and Ernst von Glasersfeld (EvG) with German, English, and Italian. An early multilingual background profoundly influ-ences a person’s insights into how words are made to mean: first and foremost in the ac-quisition of language; later in the conception of knowledge and ideas of how we gain it.

Living in more than one language leads sooner or later to the realization that the concept designated by a word of one lan-guage hardly ever matches that designated by the word given as equivalent in a bilingual dictionary. There are few instances where there seems to be inter-lingual synonymy. simple English words such as “screwdriver” or “corkscrew” may look like cases in point. Both are technical terms for commonly used tools, and the uses of the tools are identical, whether you live in Germany or Ireland. Even so, there are subtle differences. Meta-phorically speaking, the English “screw-driver” drives the screw in and out, while the German Schraubenzieher draws it out. Likewise, the English “corkscrew” screws it-self into the cork (and then back out again), whereas the German “Kork- or stöpselzie-her” and the French “tire-bouchon” pull the cork out (with no mention of how the “pull-er” got into the cork in the first place). What seems to matter instead is: get that cork out so the wine can flow! The meanings of these words may be compatible in the sense that they all fit the situations in which they are used (in this case opening a bottle) but their conceptual structure is not the same. Each specifies aspects of the instrumental act, which are omitted by its “equivalent” in an-other language.

An attempt to translate any word into another language inevitably leads you to see details of meaning that the ordinary speaker of the language may be unaware of. “Expe-rience,” the word we are mainly concerned with in this essay, is a prime example.1

1 | At the Centre d’Epistemologie Genetique, where one of the authors worked as a researcher, it was common practice to start the conceptual analysis of a topic, such as consciousness, rep-resentations, or success-and-understanding by

If someone tells you that she was pushed into a freezing swimming pool against her will, you will understand that it was an un-pleasant experience. Experience, in this sense, refers to a noticeable event in the teller’s life, in this case unpleasant, that was actually lived through, and left an impression (meaning a).2 In contrast, if you hear that a physician or a mechanic has a great deal of experience, you will gather that he is con-sidered to have the “know-how” needed for his job, a know-how that usually takes time to acquire. You will gather that he has come to know, or gained familiarity and insight into, his domain because “he has been there before,” and many times! He has both lived through and drawn lessons from a host of noticeable events (meaning b).

This distinction between a person’s ex-perience as lived through or witnessed in the here and now and the practical wisdom gained over time has to be marked in the German language by splitting the concept of experience into two words that usually are not interchangeable: Erlebnis for (a) and Er-fahrung for (b).

Erlebnis is about how the undergoing of some noticeable event, as apprehended through the senses or mind, affects us now. Erfahrung refers to the accumulation of knowledge or skill that results from direct participation in events or activities over time.

Experience (a/b) and knowledge (been there, know how, know that)Paying attention to the polysemy of the

word “experience,” as indicated in German, is useful because it sheds light on the phi-losophers’ distinction between experience and knowledge, in this case: “been there” (exp.a), “know-how” (exp.b), and “know-that.” (knowledge).3

looking at its definitions in German, and also English and French. Piaget, himself mono-lin-gual, saw the usefulness of the exercise

2 | The oEd (1971) describes this mean-ing as “being consciously the subject of a state or condition or of being consciously affected by an event.”

3 | “Knowing why,” another important cate-gory of knowledge in the philosophical tradition,

A simple way to illustrate these distinc-tions is offered by animal research in experi-mental psychology, in particular, experi-ments with mice. A mouse that can find the meat pellet in a maze, has no doubt “been there” before, and, through trial and error, has learned to find her way around in that particular maze (navigation in situ). But it is unlikely that the mouse has a mental map of the layout that it could re-present to it-self when it is not in the maze. Research also shows that, with practice, mice eventually become able, over time, to learn new mazes more quickly (across contexts). This begs the question: If our mouse does not have a mental map of the layout, what types of knowledge allow it to find its way ever more swiftly in different mazes?

More to the point for the purpose of this essay, can the animal be said to “have an experience” (Erlebnis) or “be experienced” (Erfahrung) based on its sole ability to suc-cessfully navigate mazes and find hidden meat pellets?4

A conjecture about Aristotle

Aristotle, who can be considered the father of modern science, seems to have been well aware of the distinction between knowledge and experience even if he did not write about it in these terms, at least according to translations.5 There is, in ad-

is a construct on a much higher level of abstrac-tion than we are concerned with in this investiga-tion of the concept of “experience.” The question “why” requires a network of reasons and conse-quences.

4 | Note Edith Ackermann: A closer look into experimental studies of instrumental and “de-tour” conducts, as evidenced in monkeys and hu-man infants, would be useful here. And so would Ernst’s pioneering work with Lana. We spoke about it and decided that it would be another pa-per.

5 | There is a problem with referring to au-thors who wrote in a language that died centu-ries ago. As there is no one alive today who grew up with the language that Aristotle spoke and wrote, no one can be quite sure of how he should be translated. At best we have the conjectures of erudite foreigners who have spent years working at their interpretations. The largest body of stud-

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dition, some indication that Aristotle was primarily concerned with the acquisition of know-how (in the sense of Erfahrung) rather than with personal experience (seen as a singular Erlebnis).

“ …out of sense-perception comes to be what we call memory, and out of frequently repeated memories of the same thing develops experience; for a number of memories constitute a single ex-perience.” (Aristotle 350 BC, Posterior Analyt-ics II, 19, 100A, 4–6)

If, as Aristotle suggests, some form of mnemonic trace or internal reconstruc-tion is required for an event to be “notice-able,” a singular experience cannot, in his view, serve as a source of know-how. only repeated experiences can generate knowl-edge, and only insofar as the experiencing subject practices what Aristotle called the “art of science,” which is the inferential ab-straction of cause/effect rules from a set of experiences. What Aristotle does not allude to, at least in the quoted passage, is that the build-up of “know-how” (Erfahrung) re-quires some form of reflection, that is, the deliberate review of perceptual re-presen-tations and mental operations that Locke established as the basis of knowledge.

the empiricist view of experience Between the end of the seventeenth and

the middle of the eighteenth centuries, the British empiricists worked hard to establish the idea that much of our knowledge was generated by the experiencer, rather than passively obtained from a fully structured independent reality. At the beginning of

ies of this kind is biblical hermeneutics, with its distinct branches: the Christian and the Judaic traditions. This split reveals a general character-istic of hermeneutic interpretation: it is guided by the interpreters’ theological orientation. The same inevitably applies to the interpretation of ancient philosophers. Here, too, the interpreter cannot get away from the beliefs and conceptions that form his or her intellectual basis. Most translators/in-terpreters of classical philosophy have tended to-wards realism.

Book II of his Essay Concerning Human Un-derstanding, Locke asks:

“ Whence has it [the mind] all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, from EXPERIEnCE. In that all our knowledge is founded; and from that it ulti-mately derives itself. our observation employed either, about external sensible objects, or about the internal operations of our minds perceived and reflected on by ourselves, is that which sup-plies our understandings with all the materials of thinking.” (Locke 1959: 121–122)

While Locke believed the secondary qualities were not inherent in things them-selves but were reactions of the receiver’s sensory equipment, he did attribute the primary qualities of solidity, extension, figure, motion or rest, and number, to the perceived items. He therefore must have assumed that the separation of extended things, figures, and countable units was de-termined by these primary qualities rather than by the perceiving mind.

Berkeley put an end to this last shred of realism by showing that the arguments Locke had used to establish the non-rep-resentational character of the secondary qualities applied just as much to the pri-mary qualities (Berkeley 1950). And Hume added the last important insight to classi-cal empiricism by positing that relations are not given in perception but have to be generated by the experiencer (Hume 2005).

Kant’s view of experience

In the first sentence of his introduction to the first edition of Critique of Pure Reason (1781: A 1), Kant states: “Experience is no doubt the first product to which our under-standing gives rise in that it works upon the raw material of sensory impressions.”6

This formulation does not yet exclude the possibility that the raw sensory mate-rial may include structural elements that the understanding mind can import ready-

6 | Note Edith Ackermann: Ernst was utterly suspicious of translations and loved to go to the original whenever possible. Therefore, all Eng-lish translations of the quotes of Kant, Vahinger, Piaget, and Bringuier are his.

made. This possibility, however, is explic-itly eliminated in his section on “Axioms of Intuition”7 in the second edition of 1787:

“ Experience is an empirical knowledge, that is, knowledge which determines an object through perceptions. It is, thus, a synthesis of perceptions, which itself is not contained in perception… In experience, what is more, perceptions come to-gether only accidentally, so that no necessity of concatenation can be determined from percep-tion.” (Kant 1787: B 218)8

William James’s radical empiricism In the twentieth century, empiricism

split into two incompatible schools. The popular one, propagated by the behavior-ists, tended to equate empiricism with naïve realism and disregarded the role of mental operations, which the British em-piricists had isolated as a second indispens-able source of knowledge. It was very easy, therefore, for authors who did not read the original texts of Locke, to get a skewed im-pression of the empiricist orientation.9

The less popular direction was largely cultivated by William James, who in the early 1900s wrote a handful of ground-breaking papers that established his views with regard to the relation between experi-ence and reality. James clearly realized that this relation was a thorny problem and he returned to it in several of these papers, fo-cusing mainly on the question of where, in the flow of experience, the “disjunctions” and “conjunctions” that generate discrete

7 | Translators of Kant have usually translat-ed the German word Anschauung as “intuition.” This is unsatisfactory because in certain contexts the words “view,” “notion” or “idea” should be used; however, for the sake of uniformity we, too, adopt “intuition.”

8 | Cf. comment by George Forman at the end on how our anatomy and sensory apparatus is likely to constrain our navigation in space as well as perception, apprehension, and manipulation of objects.

9 | Jean Piaget is a case in point. The re-marks about the British Empiricists scattered in his works leave no doubt that he was unaware of Locke’s emphasis on mental operations.

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items come from. In the preface to The Meaning of Truth, James states:

“ The statement of fact is that the relations be-tween things, conjunctive as well as disjunctive, are just as much a matter of direct particular experience, neither more so or less so, than the things themselves. The generalized conclusion is that therefore the parts of experience are held together from next to next by relations that are themselves part of experience. The directly ap-prehended universe needs, in short, no extra-neous trans-empirical connective support, but possesses in its own right a concatenated or con-tinuous structure.” (James 1997: xvi–xvii)

The fact that James categorized the two notions as relations creates the difficulty that they are then thought of as deriving from perceptual material as much as being insti-tuted by the perceiver. Following Hume, we are of the view that the experiencer alone can be the relating agent and, what is more, that experiential items can be related to one another in a number of ways, none of which is determined by the items themselves or, for that matter, constrained by the sequen-tial nature of the experiential flow.

But if disjunction and continuity are not relations imposed on the flow of experi-ence, how do they emerge and how do we become aware of them? Much of our uni-verse in which we begin our experience, James said, was chaotic and he referred to it as the “blooming, buzzing confusion” of the infant’s sensorium (James 1962: 29). As a domain, therefore, it must be thought of as initially unstructured and amorphous and thus without continuities or disjunctions.

“What I do feel simply when a later mo-ment of my experience succeeds an earlier one is that though they are two moments, the transition from the one to the other is continuous.” (James 1976: 25)

The puzzle here is how can James, or anyone, feel that the consecutive moments are two when the transition from the one to the other is continuous. We believe that the concept of sameness or continuity can arise only in reflection on a sequence of previously integrated moments of experi-ence. And we suggest that what is needed to resolve the puzzle is a separation of the flow of experience and the experiencer’s at-tention.

simply put, the flow of experience and the focus of attention of the experiencer can be in and out of synch.

This separation was first proposed by silvio Ceccato when he began to expound a theory of attention in talks and lectures at the Center for Cybernetics in the early six-ties.

Ceccato’s theory of cognitive constructionsilvio Ceccato’s ideas of attention open

a possibility for an initial, non-conceptual structuring of experience. unlike the con-ventional notion that attention is a spot-light playing on structures of experience or memory, Ceccato suggested that attention could be seen as a kind of pulse of the mind.

The sequence of pulses generates first of all the basis of what can later be abstracted as the “flow” of experience and the “stream of consciousness.” But it also is the process and the template that provide the funda-mental structure of disjunctions and conti-nuities.10

If one attentional pulse is focused on a sensory signal, the signal can be experi-enced as a sensory particular when it is re-flected upon. If two contiguous moments of attention are focused on sensory signals and no difference is revealed, the two experienc-es merge as indistinguishable. When they are reflected on and seen as two moments of attention, they can be considered “the same” and therefore constitute acontinuity. If the subsequent moment of attention is fo-cused elsewhere or not focused at all, it ter-minates the continuity and thus constitutes a disjunction.11

10 | Helmholtz spoke of moments of atten-tion in his Physiologie der Optik (1867: 741; Cited in James 1905: 241), but the moments were not seen as the regular pulse by the organ of attention.

11 | Ceccato talked about this view of atten-tion at the Centro di Cibernetica in 1960. How-ever, he did not publish an account of it until his article “Modificazioni e Innovazioni” (1964).

A private experiment

There is an experiment that anyone can run. It requires no equipment but a little time and an unencumbered mind. It is a “private” experiment because not only is there no other observer but there cannot be any form of inter-subjective check other than another person doing the experiment with her- or himself. The experiment requires a relaxed state of mind and consists in moving your right-hand index-finger from the wrist to the elbow of your left arm. You have to concen-trate on the sensory signals the movement produces.

The sensation from the tip of the right-hand finger and the sensation from the left-hand arm co-occur in the very specific sense that they are concurrent. That is to say, the one happens while the other happens, and although the attention is not able to focus on them simultaneously, their concurrence can be checked on re-presentations of the event.

The concurrence of sensations in differ-ent neural channels is an instance of what the Irish mathematician William Rowan Hamil-ton described as the projection of one expe-riential sequence upon another (cf. Hankins 1976).

The “private” experiment illuminates what can be projected in its course. In one case, the continuity established by the se-quence of uniform sensory signals (from a succession of sensors in the left arm) is pro-jected onto a sequence of different signals (from one and the same sensor in the right-hand finger): this sequence of apperceptions can be abstracted as the concept of time. In the other case, when the succession of dif-ferent sensory signals is projected onto the sequence of uniform signals, the sequence of apperceptions can be abstracted as the con-cept of space.12

12 | Note Edith Ackermann: In spite of nu-merous trials and much good will, I have not been able to sense the dimensions of space and time as separate without adding variations to the experi-ment, such as: 1. Finger moves (1a) or stays sta-tionary (1b); 2. Arm moves (2a) or stays station-ary (2b); 3: The finger or arm that does the sensing is respectively one’s own (2a) or that of someone else (3b). I asked Vincent Kenny, our second read-er, to offer his insights. Kenny’s comments can be found in the post-face below.

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time-space / flow-pulse: Heuristic fictions or experiential categories?For Kant, the categories of space and

time were an indispensable precondition of any form of perception: a framework without which there simply could be no ex-periential world. While space and time are indispensable in all our representations, just as ruler and compass are indispensable in engineering design, we do not agree, how-ever, with Kant’s belief that these categories are a priori in the sense that they are ready to be used at the beginning of the individual’s experiential career.

Hans Vaihinger, in his Philosophie des Als Ob was a strong advocate of the no-tion that space and time are useful fictions rather than experiential categories, or pre-requisites to experiential constructions: “no one will want to say that these conceptions [space and time] are hypotheses. But they are instead very useful fictions.” (Vaihinger 1913: 270). And again: “Empty space and empty time, in which things are thought of as floating, are fictions for the purpose of measurement” (ibid: 500).

Vaihinger made the astute distinction between conjectures that are expected to be confirmed as constructs in actual ex-perience, as opposed to those that are not expected to be found prior to experiential construction.

This is somewhat similar to what Piaget suggests in entirely different terms in his theory of cognitive development. There, space and time – as well as causality and object permanency – are gradually built-up categories that survive in development be-cause they are eminently useful tools for the organization of experience.

To Piaget, what is more, the genesis of these categories is co-constitutive of the subject’s growing recognition that “it” itself is playing a part in the monitoring of its activities. In other words, agency, as much as causation, are to be taken into account if one is to understand the origins and devel-opment of human experience. Piaget’s psy-chogenetic approach sheds new light on the child’s practical understanding and progres-sive mastery of her surrounds.

on the origins and development of human experience – Jean PiagetIn his revolutionary volume La con-

struction du réel chez l’enfant (1937), Piaget established his view that there is no initial separation between self and world during the first weeks of an infant’s life. nor are there a-priori categories, such as time, space, object or causation, ready to be used, or dis-tinguished, by the infant.

“ The external world begins in confusion with the sensations of a self that is ignorant of itself, before the two terms separate from one another in order to organize themselves reciprocally.” (Piaget 1937: 308)

This view is akin to James’s, and was presented in a seminal paper read before the British Psychological society in 1927. In it, the young Piaget went as far as to suggest that human babies are best described as So-lipsists that ignore themselves.

“ There is a total continuity between internal and external experience. Every phenomenon is perceived as charged with both physical qualities (taste, resistance, sound, color, shape, and so on) and psychic qualities (pleasure or pain, desire, sentiment, effort, efficacy, resistance, waiting, anxiety, and so on).” (Quoted in Gruber & Vo-nèche 1977: 205)13

The entire world appears to human in-fants as the prolongation of immediate feel-ings and kinesthetic sensations, thus giving rise to a “worldview” in which objects (peo-ple and things) have no permanence: far from the eyes (or touch), far from the mind! And, as we know, if objects have no perma-nence they cannot be perceived as distinct from each other, changing over time, or impacting one another. In such a fluid uni-verse, Piaget continues, space is reduced to immediate and dislocated contact zones, as-sociated with fleeting sensations (tableaux mouvants) that dissipate as soon as the baby’s attention shifts, and time is mostly marked by inner pulses and impulses.

13 | The word “experience” as used here reads more like a projection of the psychologist than a “felt occurrence” by the infant.

“ At its point of origin, time is solely intermin-gled with the impressions of psychological dura-tion inherent in attitudes of expectation, effort, and satisfaction, in short with the activity of the child herself.” (Piaget 1952: 363)

Piaget used the term “efficacious causality”14 to characterize these early liai-sons between (an infant’s) physical sensa-tions, or rudimentary feelings, and outside occurrences, without there being any obvi-ous distinction between the two. such liai-sons, what is more, often find their source in chance encounters, and are then repeated and refined through circular reaction when-ever “experienced” as pleasurable – and avoided or discontinued when gauged un-pleasant or discomforting. The word “expe-rienced” is right on the mark here, since the infant is granted the abilities to recognize, if not understand, that “it” somehow plays a part in the come-back or disappearance of respectively felicitous or unpleasant occur-rences:

“ Psychologically speaking it is likely that these early liaisons go together with feelings of efficacy. […] The facial expressions of babies leave almost no room for doubt that they feel responsible for certain events and very happy about it indeed. Let us turn to the facts themselves. The first causal experience a baby has is what Baldwin has called ‘circular reaction’: The child does something by chance, takes pleasure in the result, and does it over and over again as if he wants to reproduce the same result (it matters little if the urge to repeat is the cause or result of the act reproduced). For ex-ample, near the end of the second month and dur-ing the third a baby begins to slip her thumb into her mouth no longer by chance but deliberately and sucks it for long periods of time.”(Quoted in Gruber & Vonèche 1977: 206)15

14 | Gruber and Vonèche translated “cau-salité par efficace” as “efficacious causality,” which is different from “efficient causality.” Piaget later used “magico-phenomenist” instead of effica-cious: magical because there is no apparent link between the child’s action and their supposed effects, phenomenist because any event (phenom-enon) can be linked with any other (cf. Piaget 1937: 229).

15 | The term “feel responsible” could be translated here by “feel a sense of agency.”

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And Piaget continues,

“ if we could make babies talk, as William James does with his crab, we would make it say: ‘This thing here I see moving and the irresistible feel-ing that just filled the entire universe are one and the same thing!’” (ibid: 207)

Expanding the experiential field: Here-and-now to then-and-therePiaget’s clinical interviews with de-

veloping children convinced him that the concepts of time and space arise gradually from how the child senses and makes sense of her own motion relative to the motion of objects in her surrounds.

Important in this context is Piaget’s concept of “objective groups,” a theoretical construct that accounts for how, around the age of 2, the pre-representational child treats the consistency of “responses” of sev-eral perceptual items that have been con-nected through motion, either of their own or caused by the subject. Piaget cites Leon Brunschvicg’s lucid expression, “To con-ceive space, requires first of all that one fur-nishes it with things” (Brunschwicg 1912), which he formulates in his own terms:

“ The fifth stage marks an essential progress in the construction of the spatial field: it is the ac-quisition of the notion of objects’ displacement relative to the others; in other words, the elabora-tion of “objective” groups of displacement within a homogeneous environment.” (Piaget 1937: 160)

These constellations of perceptual ob-jects are seen as “objective” only in so far as they can move relative to one another in somewhat consistent fashion.

“ space therefore is not at all the perception of a container, a container of bodies as such. And if, in some sense, space does become a container, it is to the extent that the relations that constitute the objectification of the bodies themselves suc-ceed in coordinating one another until they form a coherent entity.” (Piaget 1937: 87)

At its endpoint, the sensorimotor con-struction of time presupposes a practical

universe that is spatially organized (where events are located (placed), just as the con-struction of space presupposes a practi-cal universe where events can be ordered (displaced). Both in turn presuppose the permanence of moving objects and the con-servation of their trajectories (order of dis-placements, grouping displacements).

In other words, without a sense of space and time there is no conception of change or stable states, and without efficacious cau-sality and object permanence there is no way to locate and order objects and move-ments within a spatio-temporal framework. These dimensions co-evolve as a result of more or less felicitous encounters (Erleb-nisse) as perceived, handled, and integrated by the experiencer.

genesis of the notion of time: lived time, felt time, “real” time While the genesis of time – and changes

over time – is not our main topic, its origin and development constitutes a rich domain for the study of human experience, in part because its mastery poses great difficulties even to intelligent adults.

one of the reasons for this difficulty is that time, the “irreversible,” is not treated as such by the human mind. And for good reasons: we would not get very far without projecting ourselves in space-time. The very construction of reversible operations (i.e., internalized action with possibilities of re-turn) would be impossible if time were not “made to be” reversible in our minds. An-other reason is the noticeable discrepancies, in adults, between “time as felt” (people’s sense of time), “time as represented” (con-cepts of time); and “time as measured” (the invention of devices to keep track of time in the form of calendars, clocks, chronom-eters). of the adult concept of time, Piaget said:

“ What is usually called the course of time is nothing but the succession of events, but if the notion of time constitutes the group of co-dis-placements that join these events, the temporal relation, qua relation, becomes reversible because a new order can be read in two directions…” (Piaget 1946: 63)

And:

“ Time in itself [is] the simple feeling of unroll-ing and of successive pointers inherent in the states of consciousness.” (Piaget 1937: 285).

Human infants’ initial sense of time, we have seen, emerges from their abilities to maintain or release tensions associated with expectations, effort, and satisfaction of basic needs, such as hunger, comfort etc. (Piaget 1952). It is only with the apparition of the first evocative memories and the first an-ticipations of things to come that diachronic thinking (or thinking in time) sets in. As they reach their second birthday, most chil-dren have acquired a fairly solid knowledge-in-action about time, space, object perma-nence, agency, and causality.

We cannot emphasize strongly enough that all these categories are intricately relat-ed, and co-constitutive of a child’s expand-ing experiential field, of which time is an intrinsic part (Ackermann 2004).

Piaget’s “object groups” and practical “groups of displacements” (both of which appear at the end of the sensorimotor stage) seem to be at once enablers of, and arising from infants’ practical mastery of relations such as affirmation, negation, and practical reversibility: a clear indication that their in-tegration cannot be attributed to the reading of experience alone.

In other words, the child’s progressive and co-constitutive genesis of space, time, causation, agency, and object permanency (all of which are key to the organism’s sur-vival) itself requires some form of a-priori mechanism by which the growing child can compensate for surface perturbation. The difference, as we see it, is that Piaget’s a-priori are functional, evolutionary, and rooted in biology (the science of the living) whereas Kant’s are categorical, a-temporal, and rooted in philosophy (the philosophy of science).

the problem of consciousness The most vexing question in this theo-

retical development is whether – and to what extent – attentional pulses, as defined by Ceccato, or practical intelligence, as seen

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by Piaget, involve the experiencer’s aware-ness. The fact that under hypnosis people can remember things of which they were to-tally unaware before leaves little doubt that there are forms of unconscious conceptual structuring. As it is unconscious, we cannot examine it ourselves except via its results in retrospect.

In his conversations with Jean-Claude Bringuier, Piaget recounts an experience that throws some light on the workings of consciousness.

“ Bringuier: Where does consciousness begin in the animal kingdom? Piaget: Ah, that cannot be resolved. There is no criterion… I imagine that there are degrees of consciousness on every level … but degrees. one can be conscious of an act and not integrate it; I would call this elementary consciousness. I am not at all a visual person. For example, on a walk, I pull my watch out of my pocket and may actu-ally say to myself what time it is. If I have actually said it, I remember what the time was. If I did not speak and it was entirely visual …Bringuier: … you forget it!Piaget: one minute later I again pull out the watch and recognize that it is still the same time. Hence I was conscious the first time but totally forgot it, because it had not been integrated. I had to be conscious at the moment when I visually con-sulted my watch but because there was no integra-tion, the consciousness disappeared the moment I no longer saw it; had I pronounced something like ‘five after two’ I would have remembered it.”(Bringuier 1977: 19)

one could suggest that what is remem-bered in the unconscious is a piece of un-structured experience plus the experiential context in which it occurred. under hypno-sis, the context is sufficient to guide at least a partial structuration. We propose this as tentative explanation.

Problems with the explanation of con-sciousness arise in many other corners of the cognitive domain and we tend to agree with what Piaget said. His account of the ex-perience with the watch shows that seeing, to him, could not yet be considered expe-rience. It required what he called “integra-tion”: a conscious refocusing, in this case, through verbalizing.

We have made a parallel observation with regard to dreams. dreams are made of

apparently random conflations of percep-tual or imaginary mental constructs. This is different from experience. In experience your attention can focus anywhere in the sensorium, the totality of available sensory signals, and it searches for concepts (recog-nition matrices) that can be filled with sig-nals (data) that are available.

The difference is that the material for the construction of experience is taken from the sensory signals that are available at the moment; whereas the material for dreams, imaginary constructs and all the heuristic fictions in scientific explanations are taken from the store of recorded re-presentations. This is the reason why we may dream of en-tering a room without “seeing” windows, curtains, pictures, or furniture beyond the items that are necessary for the development of the dream’s story. none of the dream’s contents can be called an experience until it has been “integrated” by the attentional process of remembering at the time of wak-ing up.

Consciousness, it seems, is not an all or nothing phenomenon. developmentally, it is a gradual acquisition and hand in hand with it goes the construction of “object per-manence.” The first thing is the constitution of patterns that make possible the recogni-tion of coordinations of sensory data as the repetition of earlier coordinations. These patterns could be called “recognition ma-trices,” and they come into operation only when the specific sensory signals are actual-ly available. After repeated use, they acquire sufficient independence to be called up as re-presentations irrespective of the avail-ability of the involved sensory material. At that point they form the necessary condition of the conception of object permanence.

This is the step that was disregarded in the hundreds of experiments with infants and animals, made to show that Piaget was wrong and that object permanence was a much earlier acquisition than he believed. What the experiments demonstrated was that the subjects were able to recognize cer-tain items, but they in no way showed the presence of relevant re-presentations.

once there are several permanent ob-jects in a child’s mind, they can be related to one another in the network of space and time and thus form the beginning of what we later consider our experiential reality.

tacit knowledge

There are two further questions that, we believe, may shed some light on the role of consciousness in experience: (1) In what ways, if any, can a baby’s or chimpanzee’s practical intelligence be said to be the result of experience if it is neither conscious nor reflected upon (no re-presentations before and no after-the-fact reconstructions); (2) Alternatively, just because a baby or animal exhibits consistent, dynamic, reversible, and flexible action-patterns in-situ, should it be credited with some form of abstract-ed pattern or map? In which case one may wonder: who is doing the “abstracting,” the researcher or her subjects?

Consistent flexible action patterns are the power of champions in nearly all kinds of sport. High skill in athletics, skiing, driv-ing racing cars, and soccer, derives from a process in which slowly learned intricate action patters are gradually removed from conscious control. This is necessary because these patterns have to be enacted much faster than conscious attention could man-age. This kind of unconscious know-how has been referred to as “tacit knowledge,” which Michael Polanyi characterized by the phrase we can know more than we can tell (Polanyi 1967: 4). These action patterns can be called up, as it were, globally, and the ac-tor is aware of enacting them, but not of the individual steps they contain.

We close this stroll through the jungle that surrounds the concept of experience with a quotation from George Kelly that provides a lucid and eminently helpful per-spective on our subject, and in a brilliant way merges the two meanings from which we started our enquiry. For Kelly, the prin-cipal objective of psychological processes is the anticipation of events and from this

“ It follows that the successive revelation of events invites the person to place new construc-tions upon them whenever something unexpect-ed happens. otherwise one’s anticipations would become less and less realistic. The succession of events in the course of time continually sub-jects a person’s construction system to a valida-tion process. The constructions one places upon events are working hypotheses, which are about to be put to the test of experience. As one’s an-ticipations or hypotheses are successively revised

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in the light of the unfolding sequence of events, the construction system undergoes a progressive evolution. The person reconstrues. This is experi-ence.” (Kelly 1963: 72)

summary

The idea to write this paper sprang up in a casual conversation that led to the ques-tion of how the word “experience” would be translated into German. The fact that it cor-responds to two non-interchangeable Ger-man words led to the conviction that “ex-perience” indeed designated two different concepts. It soon became clear that this was an intricate problem worth pursuing. Much has been written about the nature of experi-ence, but there seems to be no general con-sensus concerning the role of conscious-ness in the process of experiencing. This question is important for the constructivist

model, because although this model does not exclude the notion of tacit or sensorim-otor knowledge in the individual’s practical operating, it cannot admit it as an element in the experiencer’s conceptual structures, which, by definition, are conscious. At this point the observer of the child faces the same problem as in the case of the concept of object permanence. The fact that the child enacts a certain action pattern in a given situation no more demonstrates a re-presentation of the pattern than does recog-nition in the case of objects. The availability of such re-presentations cannot be demon-strated before the onset of language.

The meaning of the word “experience” that we have labeled (b), which roughly refers to expertise gained in the execution of practical activities, is not particularly interesting with regard to consciousness, because “know-how” floats like an iceberg in that area, and only a small part of it is

conscious in the form of rules of thumb that have been abstracted from the “automatic” actions.

Meaning (a), “something that has been lived through” implies a memory that be-came and remained conscious at least for a certain length of time.

The British empiricists, though differ-ing on several points, agreed that what the human subject experienced was not a rep-resentation of an objective world, but the conglomerate of what the senses produced and the active subject’s mental operations. Hume provided the insight that relations, obviously because they required the move-ment of attention from one element to another, were the due to operations of the perceiver rather than features of perceptual material.

Kant had no doubt that experience was the source of knowledge, but he believed that space and time were not elements of

ERnst von glAsERsFEldwas born in Munich, 1917, of Austrian parents, and grew up in Northern Italy and Switzerland. Briefly studied mathematics in Zürich and Vienna. Returned to Italy in 1946, worked as a journalist, and collaborated until 1961 in Ceccato’s Scuola Operativa Italiana (language analysis and machine translation). From 1962 director of US-sponsored research project in computational linguistics. From 1970, he taught cognitive psychology at the University of Georgia, USA. Professor Emeritus in 1987. He held several honorary doctorates. Ernst von Glasersfeld passed away on 12 November 2010. Web site: http://www.vonglasersfeld.com

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EdItH K. ACKERMAnnis an Honorary Professor of Developmental Psychology at the University of Aix-Marseille, France, and currently Visiting Scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Architecture, Design Laboratory. She teaches graduate students, conducts research, and consults for organizations and institutions interested in human learning, imagination, and creativity. She likes to work with designers, educators, scholars, and policy-makers committed to rethinking what it means to be knowledgeable, literate, or skilled in today’s digitally saturated world – and what it takes to become so. Recent collaborations include with the LEGO Learning Institute, OLPC, INVIVIA, the PIAZZA and PUENTE EU Projects, and the Exploratorium Science Museum, San Francisco, where she was granted an Osher Fellowship and an “Outstanding Educator” Award in 2010.

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the experiential material but were a priori conditions of the subject’s ability to ex-perienceJames, the founder of “radical empiricism,” has written copiously about experience and the question of conscious-ness (James 1976, 1997). But his position is not clear to us. We suspect that it is not unlike the view that Piaget expressed in dif-ferent parts of his works, suggesting that consciousness was not an “all or nothing” concept, but developed gradually in the child’s cognitive world. our research with children (Ackermann 2004, 1991; Glasers-feld 1981, 1991), has confirmed this view. Hence we believe that feelings, impressions, and other psychological events that have no definite location in the experiencer’s space-time scaffolding and are not accessible to re-presentation, cannot be revisited, and therefore cannot reasonably be considered parts of conscious experience. Retrievable re-presentations cannot be formed without a location in the network of space and time from where they can be called up. This net-work, as a rule, is not developed by children before the age of about eighteen months.

The theory of operational semantics, developed by silvio Ceccato on the ba-sis of Bridgman’s method of operational definitions, introduced the idea of an at-tentional pulse as the origin of conceptual structures. This opened a way to imagine a non-perceptual construction of space and time grounded on nothing but the sequen-tial succession of moments of attention (cf. “private experiment” above).

We agree with Kant that there cannot be an experiential reality without the scaffold-ing of space and time, but this scaffolding need not be an a priori endowment. opera-tionalism shows a way it can be constructed by operations of the functioning mind as what Vaihinger called a “heuristic fiction.”

In contrast, Piaget (1937) was able to detail in his revolutionary study of the child’s construction of reality how the no-tions of “space” and “time” are developed together with those of “object” and “causal-ity” from the child’s experience of its own motion and that of percepts. We ended this investigation with a quotation from George Kelly, who simply and elegantly overcomes the difficulty of the two interpretations of “experience” that triggered our research.

Post-face by Edith K. Ackermann

“An experience is something that personally affects your life”

(John Dewey 1934: 336)

To dewey, as to Kant and Piaget, scien-tific theories are not true descriptions of an objective reality but instruments that prove useful in apprehending and ordering the world. This satisfies the minimum RC re-quirement that, indeed, the world is neither perceived nor represented as it is. Instead, it is apprehended and made intelligible through our actions and the evaluation of resulting consequences, relative to some internally set values. The problem remains: under what circumstances can an organ-ism’s self-correcting abilities and evaluation criteria – set values, logical necessities, or anatomical constraints – be said to be expe-riential and not just triggered as a result of some internal mechanism operating in the background, on the organism’s behalf, with-out its noticing.

I asked Ernst: What to make of Freud’s notion of the unconscious?

“ EvG: Freud studied an individual’s associa-tions to uncover what she or he had repressed. And Hume said that associations arise from tem-poral or spatial proximity in experience. That’s plausible, but many things that are contiguous in experience are not associated. If we assume that associations are triggered by unconscious emo-tional states, we could say that emotional stress may lead to random associations. This may help Freud, but I don’t think it helps us.”

I do not think Ernst wanted to go there, so let me quote James once more. Two note-worthy chapters in The Principles of Psy-chology are on “Emotions” and “Will.” The first sets out the theory, also enunciated by danish physiologist Carl Lange and corrob-orated by dewey, that emotion can follow, rather than cause, its bodily expression:

“ Common-sense says, we lose our fortune, are sorry and weep; we meet a bear, are frightened and run; we are insulted by a rival, are angry and strike. The hypothesis here to be defended says that this order of sequence is [often] in-correct… that we [can] feel sorry because we

cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble...”(James 1981: 1065f)

The significance of this view, accord-ing to James, is that our emotions are tied in with their bodily expressions. What, he asks, would grief be without its tears, its sobs, its suffocation of the heart, its pang in the breastbone? not an emotion, he an-swers, for a purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity (James 1981: 1068). Much in alignment with James, dewey states:

“ We jump immediately when we are scared, as we blush on an instant as we are ashamed. But fright and shamed modesty are not in this case emotional states. of themselves they are but au-tomatic reflexes […] The jump of fright becomes emotional fear when there is found or thought to exist a threatening object that must be dealt with or escaped from. The blush becomes the emotion of shame when a person connects, in thought, an action he has performed with an unfavour-able reaction to himself of some other person.” (dewey 1934: 42)

To dewey, the art of living (through experience) restores a balance between the poles of aimlessness and mechanical effi-ciency. “It mobilizes those courses of action in which through successive deeds there runs a sense of growing meaning conserved and accumulating toward an end that is felt as accomplishment of a process.” (ibid: 39)

It is out of scope here to further dwell, except to say that there is still plenty of room within RC to pursue our unfinished musings on the intricacies between lived and felt, conceived and perceived, imagined and reasoned and, yes, embodied and rep-resented.

I asked one of our readers, George For-man, to elaborate on a comment he made in the section on Kant about the anatomi-cal and environmental constraints on hu-man knowledge and experience – which I reformulated in my own terms. I asked: Can you comment on Lakoff and Johnson’s idea that “we think the ways we think because we have the bodies we have, and live in the world in which we live”? I am not sure if Ernst would agree with the comments of-fered, but here they go.

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Comment by george Forman: Anatomical and environmental constraintsPiaget would ask Kant to include action

with objects as a source of constraints. These constraints result from universal invariants such as visual occlusion, gravity, and ana-tomical structures that yield repetitive, re-versible and reciprocal movements.

While Piaget acknowledges a neurologi-cally based sensitivity to “closure” (the inte-gration of movements into a system of recip-rocal implications), the generalization of this sensitivity to form concepts requires what one could call a “structured environment,” as opposed to a completely synthetic a priori.16

For example, Forman (1982) traced the changing strategies infants use to create sym-metry with blocks and discovered that chil-dren were 80% more likely to bang identical blocks at the midline than same-sized but differently-shaped blocks. The children later began to release identical blocks side by side, gradually producing more complex forms of symmetry by age three. one could argue that the search for identity and later construction of equivalence was constrained by the bilat-eral symmetry of the human body. Anatomi-cal symmetry in action serves to organize objects into increasingly complex forms of equivalence.

In a similar vein, other researchers argue that certain language structures are shaped by the fact that we live in a “marked” gravi-tational field (Clark 1973). If humans were aquatic, floating in a medium of zero grav-ity, up and down would not have a ubiqui-tous kinesthetic differentiation. The fact that humans are terrestrial primes us to treat the high of height as functionally different from the low of height. Indeed, we treat “high” as a near language surrogate for the entire inter-val, as when we say, “The wall is six feet high,” a connotative reference to effort. These ubiq-uitous kinesthetic markers of effort do not exist for right-to-left spatial continua and Clark found that the appropriate language

16 | Note Edith Ackermann: Ernst would rather speak of a viable fit between the organism and its milieu, and not refer to the qualities, or “af-fordances”, of the environment as-is (in this case, structured).

for horizontal markers is more difficult to learn than for vertical markers.

one might not accept ubiquitous forces or specie determined anatomical structures as a counter argument to Kant’s synthetic a priori. There is always some organization of the constrained actions that must come from a receptive brain. But at this point we may be in a type of word game that makes it impos-sible to use research at all. But let us offer an almost irresistible homunculus: the brain’s “recognition” that a system has “closed” into a group of implications, the origins of our understanding of logical necessity.

This was Piaget’s thesis and research pro-gram. If there is still an element of the syn-thetic a priori in his theory, so be it. But he has pushed into “experience” some of what Kant would relegate to the a priori.

Comment by vincent Kenny: Experience and the private experiment This whole area of “experience” really

needs a lot of work done in order to attain some coherence. Many years ago I set out to do something similar with the work of George Kelly – who has much in common with Ernst’s work – where Kelly used the term “experience” in at least a dozen differ-ent ways. I can’t even begin to look for those notes!

In any case I think the main point intro-duced here of Ceccato’s alternative construal of “attention” – and the illustrative “experi-ment” – needs further unpacking. It is not clear, for example, how the metaphor of a “pulse of the mind” gives us a very different result to the standard image of attention as a “spotlight.” I don’t know enough about Cec-cato’s work to know if he meant this pulse to be like that sent out by a radar or submarine’s system of “pinging” the void to anticipate obstacles. This submarine metaphor is of course much closer to the radical construc-tivist’s notions of closure, and the medium as an impenetrable black box.

Applying this to the experiment, I don’t know if one has to be practiced at using the “pulsing/sonar” metaphor to put one’s attention on to one’s finger/arm in a differ-ent manner to that of the usual “spotlight” mode? Perhaps the difficulty in doing this

experiment in an alternative mode derives exactly from our not having practiced the “sonar mode” enough? It is quite possible that Ernst, having been familiar with this and other Ceccatian experiential experiments, was able to produce different experiential finger/arm materials to those of people not trained in these alternative modes? This is similar to the problem of trying to expound a constructivist epistemology in a realist lan-guage frame.

I think that to arrive at the space/Time observations one would have to have done other “sonar” experiments.

In any case, the way the experiment is presented here is less clear to me than earlier versions of this same idea, where the focus was on producing the notion of “motion” and “time” – but not “space.” Further, it must be explained more fully that the perceived relationship of contrasts (through our use of attention) between our tactual signals read as “sameness” and tactual signals read as “shift-ing” or “changing” allows the generation of the notion of “time.” In other words, our attending to the differences in sensations-which-are-continuous relative to sensations-which-speak-of-sequencing (a series of tac-tual differences along the arm) allow us to produce other phenomena such as “time.”

so what I think needs to be clarified is how our choice of construals of these tactile sensations – as different or as equivalent – leads to the implication of either “motion” or to “time.” The same issues of perceiving “change” or invariance” in a system leads to our notion of a “self ” that is experientially “continuous.” There are a lot of tricky sub-ar-guments that one would need to work out in-cluding that of the need to distinguish “atten-tional impetus” from “intentional impetus.”

These of course are all big themes that still need to be fully worked out.

Acknowledgements

I know Ernst was eager to send this es-say to Alexander Riegler for publication, but only after receiving our reader’s comments. I thank Alexander for helping me “push” the paper into this special issue, and for support-ing the idea of adding to the unfinished draft rather than altering it without Ernst’s input. I thank Vincent Kenny and George Forman

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for their comments. Ernst would have found a way to integrate them. His passing forces us to imagine how, without him. My deepest gratitude goes to Ernst for having let me in on this joint adventure. It has been a joyful and inspiring experience.

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Received: 7 February 2011 Accepted: 18 February 2011

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