Constructivism II: Maps & Plans

To traverse the world men must have maps of the world.  Their persistent difficulty is to secure maps on which their own need, or someone else’s need, has not sketched in the coast of Bohemia.

This quotation from a letter of Walter Lippmann’s, “The World Outside and the Pictures in Our Heads,” has always tickled me, and over the years I have used it as the text of a final essay exam and the subject of Paideia discussions. 

I precede the Paideia by projecting a map of Bohemia to provide the most obviously needed fact, but the two sentences typically take students 40-45 minutes to decipher, much less to “apply the statement to oneself.” 

The syntax, certainly, is more complex than my students are familiar with.  It’s another example of knowledge—of syntax as well as geography—being the prerequisite to critical thinking.

Lippmann’s warning, of course, is that if our maps don’t correspond to the landscape, our travels will go awry.  Those maps won’t correspond to the terrain if they have been influenced by our desires or someone else’s.  What those desires might be is an open question.  Maybe we are unconsciously ambivalent about going to Bohemia.  Maybe our parents or spouses or children or friends don’t want us traveling there.  Maybe someone we trust has issues we’re not aware of.  Maybe we’re the victim of a nefarious conspiracy.  Lippmann’s warning arises from the possibility that we may not know ourselves or our sources of information well enough to be aware of designs on our plans.

But Lippmann’s statement also implies that we have to know enough about the world in order to make sure our map of Bohemia doesn’t show a coastline.  If we are ignorant of geography, we may bring the wrong clothes.

David Weisman uses a slight variation on the theme as he explains the constructivist error in describing knowledge solely in terms of schema or, for Piaget, developmental structures, not acknowledging “representation” in their epistemology:  “…there are rules for making things, but no ideas of or about them.  This is a grave omission, for no one walks safely across the street in full sunlight or through a dark house at night without maps and plans representing both these terrains and the instrumental relations appropriate to them.  Granting Kant his constructive applications of thought, we insist that hypothesis be given its due:  making designs, music, and proofs, we also make and test representations” (66).

Constructivism has difficulty explaining our instrumental failures.  If the world is only accessible to us through our constructs, and it is impossible for us to represent the world “as it is,” then how are we to understand it when the world we create frustrates our desires, or, in Lipmann’s language, our needs? (Weissman 76).  

One of Weismann’s answers is that we are indeed capable of representing the world.  He writes that a statement is true if it can be “instantiated” (87).  G. E. Moore demonstrated the idea simply in “A Defence of Common Sense”:   

            There exists at present a living human body, which is my body.  This body was born at a certain time in the past, and has existed continuously ever since, though not without undergoing changes; it was, for instance, much smaller when it was born and for some time afterwards, than it is now.  Ever since it was born, it has been either in contact with or not far from the surface of the earth; and, at every moment since it was born, there have also existed many other things, having shape and size in three dimensions (in the same familiar sense in which it has), from which it has been at various distances (in the familiar sense in which it is not at a distance both from that mantelpiece and from that bookcase than it is from the mantelpiece); also there have (very often, at all events) existed some other things of this kind with which it was in contact (in the familiar sense in which it is now in contact with the pen I am holding in my right hand and with some of the clothes I am wearing… (107)

and so on.  Moore is simply reminding constructivists (~ philosophical idealists) that part of the burden of their position that there is no knowable world except through our conceptions of it, is that they must explain the common sense knowledge we all have—even constructivists!—of the world that does not depend on our interest or desire or even whether it works (von Glasersfeld 4). 


References

Glasersfeld, Ernst Von. "Problems of Constructivism." Radical Constructivism in Action: Building on the Pioneering Word of Ernst Von Glasersfeld. Ed. Leslie P. Steffe and Patrick W. Thompson. Vol. 15. New York': Routledge Falmer, 2000. EBSCO. Print. Studies in Mathematics Education. 3-9.

Lippmann, Walter. "The World Outside And The Pictures in Our Heads." American Studies at the University of Virginia. University of Virgina, 1 Sept. 2009. Web. 12 Dec. 2015. .

Moore, G. E. "A Defence of Common Sense." Selected Writings. Ed. Thomas Baldwin. London: Routledge, 1993. 106-33. Print. International Library of Philosophy.

Weissman, David. Truth's Debt to Value. New Haven: Yale UP, 1993. Print.