Radical Constructivism: A Way of Learning (Studies in Mathematics Education)

Rating:
Summary: Understanding the difficulty with meaning
Review: An excellent book. Von Glasersfeld very carefully builds up a conceptual notion of how humans acquire and modify their internal concepts of the world. After a careful summary of some leading historical thought in the area of meaning and constructivism, Prof. von Glasersfeld clearly shows the internal workings of how meaning is built up from experience and how we understand our meanings through continual negotation with the external world.

This is one of the few books that I have seen that actually discusses the idea of "re-presentation", or how one's memories are stored and re-presented when triggered by a stimulus, such as a word. It is definitely enlightening to think about the transfer of meaning in this way and how it informs about the inherent limitations of computer intelligence.