B29. Constructivist Realities

Knowledge is a human construction. It starts with sensory experience of external stimuli. Even at the beginning of life, these sensations are associated, connected in a way that eventually becomes a meaning. The same is true for new stimulation of the adult.

Even though the stimulation originates in action outside the individual, only the inside interpretation is known. As far as we can tell, nothing about the stimulus is registered in awareness and memory other than our interpretations of it. This registration needs not be conscious or rational.

In our minds new perceptions of stimuli mix with old, and with complexes of perception, some of which we think of as generalizations. Some aspects of knowledge seem generated entirely from internal deliberation, i.e., pondering, without immediate external stimulation. But no aspects of knowledge are purely of the external world, devoid of human construction.

I came to think of three realities. One is a reality capable of stimulating us in simple ways but of which we know nothing else. One is a reality formed of interpretations of simple stimulation, an experiential reality we know so well that we seldom doubt its correspondence to that first reality. The third is a world devised of our most complex interpretations, our rational reality. The second and third, of course, blend into each other.

Though ever revising them, each human being has his or her own version of worlds two and three. Still, a person's world remains largely the same from one day to the next and two people sharing experience devise realities largely the same. Their eyes are stimulated and they speak to each other rendering the stimulation compatible with realities: "Isn't it the moon we see?"

Many stimulations come from other humans. Some are perceived to be indications of generalization held elsewhere. Views which appear to be held by large numbers of people or by those respected are held credible, even factual.

A common human view is that an outside world, reality number one, exists, corresponding nicely to our notion of it, reality number two. This correspondence cannot be tested. Nothing of that outside can register independent of our constructed interpretation. But the view is esteemed, partly because the extreme counterclaim, that the world is entirely illusory, has little popularity.

Many stimulations such as the sight of a familiar face are predictably associated with other stimulations, such as a characteristic greeting. We are comfortable with the view that the moon, people and personalities exist. Denial of an independent reality is unsupportable by evidence, but more important, it is socially disconcerting. In this world the price of believing in reality were there none is small. For self guidance, we might paraphrase Miguel de Unamuno: "If in fact there is no reality, let us so live that it makes no difference." Crossing a busy street, promising eternal love; the consequences are distressing if we stop thinking reality number one exists.

The appetizing belief, mine too, is the non-parsimonious view that all three realities exist and have important effects on experience. Which reality to believe the more important, like the question of nature and nurture, is academic. It is important to remember we can ameliorate or jeopardize our lot by neglecting any of the three.

The aim of empirical research is not to discover reality number one, for that is impossible, but to construct a clearer reality number two and a more sophisticated reality number three, particularly ones which will withstand disciplined skepticism. Science strives to build universal understandings. The understanding reached by each individual will of course be to some degree unique, but much will be held in common. Though the reality we seek is of our own making, it is a collective making. We seek the well-tuned reality, one bearing up under further human constructions: scrutiny and challenge.

Reality is relative, but every person's personal reality is not of equal social importance. Some interpretations are better than others. People have ways of agreeing on which are the best explanations. Of couse they are not always right. There is no reason to think that among people fully committed to a constructed reality all constructions are of equal value. One can believe in relativity, situationality, and constructivism without believing all views are of equal merit. Personal civility or political ideology may call for respecting every view but scientific study does not.

In the early eighties, Egon Guba and Yvonna Lincoln pushed evaluators to pay attention to their own assumptions of reality. They identified several levels of belief in an independent or a constructed reality. Such belief is often linked to belief of how we come to know what we know--but ontology and epistemology are not interdeterminate. Belief in independent reality does not fix one's belief in a simple world, the world of e=mc². Nor does belief in construction fix belief in a heterogeneous, particularlist world. Realists too believe that generalizations are regularly limited by local conditions. "Do teachers always prefer authoritarian milieus or only under certain conditions?" Though idealists, relativists, situationalists, contextualists and other champions of local knowledge regularly resist generalization and are found to support constructivist ontology, their support for a contextualist epistemology is a correlate, not a derivative of that ontology.

Contextualists find value in case studies because the design allows or demands extra attention to physical, temporal, historical, social, political, economic, aesthetic contexts. Contextualist epistemology requires in-depth description, leaving less time for the refinement of theme and construct.

Many realists too are fond of case studies. Physicians specializing in internal medicine, realtors, social workers--many of whom are realists--are professionally committed to case study. However, its is true that naturalistic, phenomenological and hermeneutic case studies are likely to be done by researchers with constructivist persuasions. Why this is is not clear but it probably would be a mistake to conclude that more than does a realist logic, a constructivist logic promotes contextualism and case study methodology.

It is not uncommon to find case study researchers espousing a construcvist view of reality, but the two persuasions are not one and the same.