Dave, what do you think then of Popper's three worlds idea? I haven't heard you talk about Popper before but have heard you speak fondly of Polanyi, who I believe was a fierce rival of Popper in his day.

You may be setting me up for a mass attack by the critical rationalists who intrude on the ACT-KM forum from time to time. However to attempt to respond to your question without writing an essay.
Firstly I think Popper is clearly a product of his time - influenced by his evacuation to New Zealand to escape the Nazi’s and then developing a political approach in opposition to a form of doctrinal marxism that was prevalent on the 40’s and 50’s. He was rightly hugely influential in the Philosophy of Science and made the significant advance of falsification as the distinction of scientific proof. When that is moved into language it becomes more difficult as it makes assumptions about the nature of language which I think are dubious. I can understand why Wittgenstein once threatened him with a poker. I have had similar impulses when subject to the desiccation of language that normally accompanies an attack from our modern day critical rationalists.
Popper’s challenge to Hume did (I think) Philosophy a great favour, but I am not sure he fully takes on board the question of context which is critical to any complexity informed philosophy. The three worlds are an interesting perspective, but not necessary a prescriptive one. My view is that we have the world as it is, the world as we perceive it and the world as we know it. Popper’s world one and two confuse these and his world three attempts a synthesis. I think this is a mistake and we are better to see phenomenology, epistemology and ontology as interacting discs that impact on each other, align and “dis-align” over time. I think that Popper does not really escape from, and in fact embraces the dualism of what can be known and that which belongs to God that started with Kant and is unhelpful to say the least. More of that in the book chapter draft that should go up next week with a bit of luck and a following wind.
Khun (much loved by fluffy bunnies) and Quine from different perspectives challenge Popper and my own thinking comes from the “naturalising” tradition of which Quine is one of the key thinkers. In summary Popper does not (I think) escape the paradigms of scientific understanding that were prevalent during his early years.
As to Popper and Polanyi - there are obvious differences, but also compatibilities. As I remember it some of the religious approaches with which Polanyi was linked drew on Popper’s work, but I could be wrong there. You may be confusing Polanyi with Wittgenstein and the poker?
Finally a piece of trivia - but it amused me! If you look up Popper on the Wikipedia (I shameless used it to check some of my facts for this post, in my absence from my library) you will also see another definition - namely a US military weapon. To quote “A "Popper" emits very low frequency (VLF) energy to induce physiologic and/or psychologic impairments”. Thats what I feel like when the critical rationalists arrive. Bring on the poker …..

Perhaps these ideas are a critique of the lexically baseed view of psychometrics?

please expand Bruce, it sounds interesting

Hi Dave,

First - thanks for the time chatting last week. Unfortunately, the recording failed (the cause of many impure thoughts).

Second - are you able to provide a full text RSS feed? I imagine most of your readers will access your site via an RSS feed reader (like bloglines) - which makes full text feeds very convenient.

Finally - I see social constructivism as based largely in the relative/objective camp. If everything is perceived to be relative, then social constructivism is one flavor. (based on your recent comments in act-km (i.e. not wanting to read a thesis to get the framework of a conversation), I regrettably provide a short post on the objective/subjective debate: http://www.connectivism.ca/blog/67

If some entities are objective (as I believe), then it becomes critical that we consider the possibility that we align ourselves with an entity (not the entity with our frameworks). The danger here is always about monochromatic views - i.e. we are always subjective or always objective. I think it largely boils done to a context-game - first we define the nature of the knowledge object/process, and then we can determine obj/subj (and we must be sure that subjectivity about our interpretation is not erroneously extended to subjectivity about an entity itself).

Question - how do you demarcate what is socially constructed in our understandings and what exists as the "what is" aspect of a knowledge element? (The process of learning is often seen as strongly social (blame Vygotsky...Bandura, and to a degree Piaget)...the social act of acquiring/encountering knowledge does play an important role in our learning.)

As an aside/alternative to constructivism: I've taken to detailing the learning process as primarily about connection-forming, not construction: http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/connectivism.htm .

My attack was on social constructivism as an epistemological position. Its not necessarily the same as constructivism as a learning theory. So I can agree in part with Piaget that learning requires social construction in the learner (or as importantly in the learning community) for certain types of knowledge without needed to a social constructivist or relativist in respect to the nature of that knowledge.

That said I do not think it is the only valid form of learning - or the valid theory of learning. The brain learns in a different way in its early years up to a period of plasticity at around 2-4 when things change - we learn how to learn. I don't think one needs to be bound, even if one adopts a constructivist view of education by some of the practices of educational researchers.

For example I found learning by doing an insufferable bore in science at school then I could learn the basics from a text book and move on. Look and Say as a method of teaching grammar made a whole generation of partial dyslectics such as myself worse rather than better.

Neither if I attack social constructivism as an epistemology, do I have to say that all entities are objective (to use your language) some things are socially constructed but it does not follow that all things are so.

The demarcation of types is more interesting and one of the key aspects of sense-making. We did some work on this with the basic Cynefin framework and there is more work to do. I will be writing about that in the book as things progress over the next view weeks. Context is I think key.

I am not getting into the subjective/objective debate - its late at night here in Singapore and I am going to bed!

you could be interesred in Ian Hacking´s "Social construction of what?"

I'm not sure that Hacking really escapes from social constructivism but thanks for the reminder

Keep it going, thanks. Great web site.