Radical Constructivism and Narrative

A prevalent model by which contemporary psychiatrists are helped in thinking about knowledge is based on the computer analogy. According to this model, humans are seen as complex devices for processing information contained in their environment. They know by forming internal representations of different aspects of the environment, which they then manipulate in complex and efficient ways.

According to Maturana and Varela (1987), it would be a mistake to define the nervous system as having inputs or outputs in the traditional sense. This would mean that such inputs or outputs are part of the definition of the system, as in the case of a computer or other man-made machine. To make this mistake is understandable when one has designed a machine whose central feature is the manner in which we interact with it. The nervous system, which is part of the organism, has not been designed by anyone; it is the result of a phylogenetic drift of unities centered on its own dynamic state. The nervous system, contrary to popular thought, does not “pick up information” from the environment. Instead it creates a world by specifying what patterns of the environment are perturbations and what changes are triggered in the organism to deal with these perturbations. The popular metaphor of calling the brain an “information-processing device” is not only ambiguous but patently wrong.

Based on his observations of infant behavior, Piaget rejected the premises of the computer analogy and proposed an innovative epistemology. His resulting account of knowledge is constructivist in that the object of knowledge, external reality, is seen as mentally constructed and reconstructed in the course of the infant's interaction with its environment. Constructivism holds that we can never know what is really out there. In other words, there is no such a thing as an observed system reality; rather there