Charles Sanders Pierce invented pragmatism and William James was his first disciple from Harvard lol. Pierce had a trielectical development of ideas- in opposition to dialecticism so popular at the time, What works is as good of a description for inquiry and meaning of concept- that is, of evaluating the worth of them, as can be made. Rather than a rigid test of a scientific hypothesis as if it were a syllogism, practical means testing would be used. He said; “Consider the practical effects of the objects of your conception. Then, your conception of those effects is the whole of your conception of the object.” Constructivism is more of a petite epistemology theory about how people learn and interpret data.
Glasersfeld had a theory of radical constructivism wherein he believed knowledge of the external world was interpreted by a mind subjectively. He did not deny the existence of external reality-simply that one cannot know it. He developed his paradigm in 1974, and obviously it resembles Kant’s noumenon/ phenomenon distinction, and Wittgenstein’s ideas about information in The Tractatus Logico Philosophicus- and I need say that I believe Wittgenstein practical language games analysis in The Blue and Brown Books was more valuable than Piaget’s paradigm, philosophically speaking, of constructivism. Wittgenstein of course later denied the value of the Tractatus himself believing it was more or less high flying gas from an engineer that wanted to deliver reality in neat little packets of data that could be pieced together by the knower. Quantum mechanics does resemble that paradigm in some respects ironically- yet who could know back in the day?
