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GLOSSARY INQUIRY: RADICAL CONSTRUCTIVISM
A theory of individual knowing, radical constructivism argues that a person actively interprets her/his present experiences based on her/his past experiences and in such a way as to maintain their overall coherence. In doing so, the individual learner creates her/his “reality”.
Radical Constructivism is radical in the sense that it rejects the possibility of knowing an external, universal reality in the metaphysical sense, since knowledge is always personally construed. Significantly, radical constructivism does not suggest that there is no external reality; rather, it asserts that the knower has access only to their experiences. As such, personal knowledge does not need to “match” an external reality; it only needs to—and only can—fit the experiences in the experiential world of the experiencer.
Radical constructivism’s view of learning is compatible with that of complexity science—at least so long as one’s focus is solely on the level of the individual as he or she tries to make sense of his or her experiences. For complexivists, however, this is only one part of the story: every individual is in fact co-evolving with and nested within many other complex learning systems. The individual and these other systems are mutually constituting and so any complete theory of knowledge must take a more ecological approach.
See related terms: Nestedness, Knowledge, Evolution, Ecological.
