Ernst von Glasersfeld

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Ernst von Glasersfeld (born March 8, 1917 in Munich ; † November 12, 2010 in Leverett , Franklin County , Massachusetts ) was a philosopher , communication scientist and, along with Heinz von Foerster, is considered the founder of the epistemological school of radical constructivism .

Vienna, April 8, 2008

Life

Von Glasersfeld was born an Austrian, after the First World War his parents settled in northern Italy . Glasersfeld grew up trilingual (German, English, Italian) and learned a fourth language (French) at the Swiss Lyceum Alpinum Zuoz . He studied mathematics for one semester in Zurich and one semester in Vienna before Hitler put an end to his academic career by annexing Austria.

He says of himself that he has not one but several mother tongues. He attributes the development of radical constructivism largely to this. One is always connected with a mother tongue in such a way that “ the way in which this language divides, organizes and describes the world of experience naturally corresponds to real reality. The more deeply a thinker is anchored in his native language, the more difficult it is for him to consider the possibility that others might see, categorize and thus recognize the world in a different way . “Multilingualism saved him from exactly this and enabled him to see that there are different realities (cf. the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis : the structure of the world is determined / shaped by the mother tongue).

After school he studied mathematics in Zurich, but had to return to Vienna after just one semester because his father could no longer finance his studies in Switzerland. Particularly impressed him Sigmund Freud - especially the interpretation of dreams - and the Tractatus by Wittgenstein . When he reaches sentence 2.223: "In order to recognize whether a picture is true or false, we have to compare it with reality" , it suddenly becomes clear to him that this is not possible at all because one has direct access to the Reality that lies beyond one's own experience. "I understood that there were things that could be said in one language and held to be true, but that still couldn't be translated into another language."

He wanted to avoid the "Nazis in corridors and lecture rooms" and therefore took a winter job as a ski instructor in Australia in 1937 - before the end of the 2nd semester . He was the first Australian downhill champion. As a ski instructor, he quickly realized that you couldn't explain skiing to children. You learn through observation and copy the driving style of the respective ski instructor. Later he thinks about how “unconscious visual impressions are translated into their own motor programs. So there must be patterns in the nervous system that can function both in perception and in the motor network. "

He married his first wife, Isabel, an Australian with a British mother, and lived in Ireland as a stateless foreigner during World War II . He did not get a work permit and therefore worked as a freelance farmer . He took Irish citizenship and read with friends James Joyce ( Finnegans Wake ), Giambattista Vico and GA Berkeley . They moved him in the direction of subjective construction.

After the war he moved to Partschins near Meran in South Tyrol , where Glasersfeld met Silvio Ceccato on Lake Garda . Ceccato dealt with theories of semantics and in 1945 founded an interdisciplinary group (logicians, linguists, psychologists, physicists, engineers, computer specialists), the "Italian Operational School". This group was concerned with tracing semantics back to mental operations. Ceccato founded the international journal Methodos (for language analysis and logic) and Glasersfeld became the translator for the articles in this journal and worked for Methodos as a specialist journalist for the next six years . In 1955, Colin Cherry asked Ceccato to apply his operational analysis to machine translation tasks. Ceccato founded the first "Cybernetics Center" in Milan and worked for the American Air Force. Glasersfeld became his research assistant. On this work his experience is based that "every language means a different conceptual world."

Since 1965 he was head of a US Air Force project on computer-assisted linguistics in Athens (Georgia). In 1969 his wife Isabel died of an embolism. When President Richard Nixon completed a number of research projects - including that of Glasersfeld - the scientists from his group were taken over by the University of Georgia .

He was offered a professorship in cognitive psychology . There was great interest in his computer-linguistic work on the question of whether a chimpanzee could learn a language. Ray Carpenter asked Glasersfeld if he wanted to develop a suitable computer program. Together with his colleague Piero Pisani , he developed an artificial language called Yerkish to research ways of communicating with chimpanzees. They worked with the chimpanzee Lana , but withdrew from the project because the considerable differences of opinion regarding the strong behaviorist research orientation could not be bridged.

Since 1972 he got to know the work of Jean Piaget , to whom he said he owed a lot of thanks. Glasersfeld never met Piaget personally. His “constructivism” forms the “backbone of genetic epistemology”, which deals with both the production and the meaning of knowledge.

A close friendship connected him with Warren McCulloch and Heinz von Foerster .

In 1974 he received American citizenship. In 1976 he was able to take part in Leslie Steffe's research on the development of numerical concepts in children. In the working group, which also included Paul Cobb and Patrick Tompson , they developed a plausible model that explains “what children may do in order to acquire the concept of number and the basic operations of arithmetic.” In teaching experiments , a combination of educational methods with the clinical method of Piaget, they watched the constructive ways of the children. The focus was on the "spontaneous way in which the children approach the individual problems ... the mathematics of the children" .

Since his retirement in 1987, he worked for several years at Jack Lochhead Scientific Reasoning Research Institute , Physics Department, University of Massachusetts . He died of pancreatic cancer.

The Ernst von Glasersfeld Archive, part of the Brenner Archive Research Institute at the University of Innsbruck, looks after the academic legacy and also organizes the Ernst von Glasersfeld Lectures. The estate administrators are Theo Hug and Josef Mitterer .

Awards

Works

  • Institute for Empirical Literature and Media Research [LUMIS] (Ed.): Constructivist Discourses . Wins 1984.
  • Knowledge, language and reality. Working on radical constructivism . In: Philosophy of Science, Science and Philosophy . tape 24 . Vieweg, Braunschweig / Wiesbaden 1987, ISBN 3-528-08598-3 ( books.google.de - authorized German version by Wolfram K. Köck).
  • Beyond the limits of understanding . Benteli, Bern 1996, ISBN 3-7165-1004-1 .
  • Ernst von Glasersfeld: Paths of Knowledge. Constructivist explorations through our thinking . 1st edition. Carl Auer Systems, Heidelberg 1997, ISBN 3-89670-004-9 (edited and with a foreword by Hans Rudi Fischer ).
  • Radical constructivism. Ideas, results, problems . In: Suhrkamp-Taschenbuch Wissenschaft . tape 1326 . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1997, ISBN 3-518-28926-8 (English, original title: Radical Constructivism . Translated by Wolfram K. Köck).
  • Willibald Dörfler , Josef Mitterer (ed.): Ernst von Glasersfeld. Constructivism instead of epistemology . Drava-Verlag, Klagenfurt 1998, ISBN 3-85435-302-2 .
  • with Heinz von Foerster: How we invent ourselves. An autobiography of radical constructivism . Ed .: Hans Rudi Fischer . Carl-Auer-Verlag, Heidelberg 2007, ISBN 978-3-89670-580-8 (first edition: 1999).
  • Non-binding reminders. Sketches from a distant life . Folio-Verlag, Vienna / Bozen 2008, ISBN 978-3-85256-401-2 .

Audio CD

  • Between languages. A Personal History of Radical Constructivism . Concept and direction: Klaus Sander. supposé, Cologne 2005, ISBN 978-3-932513-63-3 .

Secondary literature

  • Hugh Gash, Alexander Riegler (eds.): Commemorative Issue for Ernst von Glasersfeld. Special edition from Constructivist Foundations. 6 (2), 2011, pp. 135-253. ( online at: univie.ac.at )

Quotes

A brief list of the meanings ascribed to the word "truth":

  • Realists want to call something “true” when it matches reality
  • Pragmatists when it works
  • Coherence theorists if it is compatible with the comprehensive theory
  • and constructivists should avoid the word except in everyday contexts where it means nothing more and nothing less than that something said yesterday is repeated today without substantial change

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ An obituary for Ernst von Glasersfeld (1917–2010) University of Innsbruck iPoint - the information portal of the University of Innsbruck
  2. ↑ Ernst von Glasersfeld: Knowledge, language and reality, work on radical constructivism. Braunschweig / Wiesbaden 1987, p. XII.
  3. ↑ Glasersfeld, 1998, p. 26f.
  4. ^ A b Eva Fessler: Ernst von Glasersfeld is an honorary doctor of the University of Innsbruck. University of Innsbruck , April 18, 2008, accessed April 22, 2011.
  5. ↑ Glasersfeld, Foerster, p. 120.
  6. ↑ Glasersfeld, 1987, p. XII
  7. ↑ Ernst von Glasersfeld: Non-binding memories: Sketches from a distant life , Bozen, 2008
  8. ^ Ernst von Glasersfeld: An Introduction to Radical Constructivism. In: Paul Watzlawick (Ed.): The Invented Reality . Norton, New York 1984, pp. 17-40 ( cesipc.it ).
  9. ↑ Glasersfeld, 1998, p. 45.
  10. ↑ Glasersfeld, 1998, p. 47.
  11. ↑ diepresse.com
  12. ↑ Event website
  13. ↑ EvG: Review of: SJ Schmidt: The uneasy view of the knowledge. In: Sociological Review. 22 (3), 1999, pp. 287-292.
personal data
SURNAME Glasersfeld, Ernst von
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian-American philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH March 8, 1917
PLACE OF BIRTH Munich
DATE OF DEATH November 12, 2010
Place of death Leverett , Massachusetts