From the author: Constructivism, what is its essence and what does it look like? The concept of constructivism was first used in the works of J. Piaget and J. Kelly in the 50s of the previous century. It came into use and acquired the status of a concept after Watzlowik’s article in the 1981 collection “Invented Reality.” Let us immediately make a reservation that constructivism in science and constructivism in art have nothing in common, except perhaps opposition to realism and some common ancestors from philosophy, the harm of G. Vico, who convincingly showed that we can know the ultimate truth only in relation to what we ourselves have created .Constructivism in science is a phenomenon of the twentieth century, appealing in its foundations to psychological, sociological, neurobiological, linguistic and anthropological research. Constructivism is a group of theories in various fields of science that emphasize the idea of ​​the constructive nature of knowledge, the linguistic and cultural-historical conditionality of interpretations of the world and the pluralism of truth. The roots of constructivism lie: the genetic epistemology of J. Piaget, the categorization of J. Brunner, the personal constructivism of J. Kelly, the phenomenological sociology of P. Berger and T. Luckman. The basis of constructivism is: phenomenological sociology of A. Schutz, symbolic interactionism of Mead, and cultural-historical psychology of L.S. Vygotsky. The key concept of constructivism is construct. In a general sense, a construct is a “template of interpretation”; among related terms we can distinguish: “frame”, “gestalt”, “image”, “image”, “filter of perception”. My preferred metaphor for describing my understanding of a construct is a prism. Let’s imagine our consciousness, taken here and now, as a tunnel of attention, into which, naturally, the entire multitude of objects never falls at the same time. Let's imagine this tunnel as a kaleidoscope tube. We point this tube at a light source (i.e., at the “real world”) and see a vibrant play of shapes and colors, which are physically “waves” of light, sifted and distorted by prisms with different transmission capacities and distorting effects. Do I see a light source at the moment when I look into a kaleidoscope aimed at it? The question is philosophical. There are different answers to this question within and outside of constructivism. There are three main ones: radical, social and, standing apart, domestic. Let's look at them briefly. Radical constructivism Radical constructivists prefer to consider the world as perceived by a living system with the ability to autopoiesis, i.e. the generation of new, including self-constructive elements and orders. Scientists who are usually considered to be part of this direction largely appeal to the analysis of the functioning of biological systems and higher nervous activity, cybernetic and linguistic metaphors. For a radical constructivist, any knowledge is a form of organization of experience, including the experience of communication. Thus, consciousness, thinking and intelligence here are phenomena of linguistic recursion, constructs in the general system of self-organization of knowledge, in many ways similar to biological organs. Each person, like any other object, is a kind of vortex of information in the ocean of communication. In line with radical constructivism, theories have developed: the communicative constructivism of P. Watzlawick, the radical constructivism of E. von Glasersfeld, the epistemological isolation of H. von Foerster, the autopoietic structures of U. Maturana and F. Varela, the neurobiological constructivism of G. Roth, as well as the theory of communication and self-organization : N. Wiener, R. Ashby, G. Bateson. The works of radical constructivists are striking in their “decipherable precision”; scientists belonging to this movement traditionally begin by unpacking their own point of view and only then move on to its application, thanks to which their texts become like a crystal clear, consistent mathematical calculation with a detailed explanation of each step. These textstemper the mind and inspire research. Social constructionism This direction focuses attention on the role of discourse and the system of human relations in which the world and individual selves are constructed, on norms and standards of behavior, mental processes that determine the influence of culture on the individual picture of the world, on the complementarity of all existing points of view and the contractual nature any knowledge. Researchers in this area often remind themselves and their colleagues about the need to renounce the pretense of knowing absolute truth, and to recognize the bias of any researcher. According to this direction, what is worth paying attention to, first of all, is that we construct the world not individually, in our minds, but jointly - in conversations and agreements with others, as well as the practices that condition and consolidate these agreements. The individual “I” for representatives of this movement, as G. Hermans puts it, is a complex polyphonic structure that has a narrative nature, formed in relationships with other people and formed by the interweaving of many voices. Social constructivism, in my opinion, is the first door found from the cynical pluralism of postmodernism into something new. The work of the social constructivists infects a kind of new ethic, an ethic of “celebration of difference,” respect for different points of view, an ethic of genuine interest in reality and human interaction, instead of the arrogant expert position of a judge, as in modernity, or the position of a caricaturist, as in “pure » postmodern. Supporters of social constructivism (constructionism) rely on linguistic, literary and semiotic studies, narratology, philosophy of dialogue, theory of speech acts, philosophical ideas of such minds as: F. Nietzsche, L. Wittgenstein, E. Giddens, M. Foucault, J. Deleuze , J. Lacan, J.F. Lyotard, J. Baudrillard, J. Derrida, M.M. Bakhtin, A.N. Chomsky and others. The founders of social constructivism are considered to be: K. Gergen, R. Harré, J. Shotter. Among their like-minded people one can also name: J. Potter and M. Wetherell with their discursive psychology, T. Sarbin and J. Brunner with their narrative psychology and G. Hermans with his theory of the dialogic “I”. From the point of view of social constructivism, everything that we consider beautiful, good, kind, correct, valuable is constructed through language in relationships with other people, determines us and our actions. The key concepts for social constructivism are: community, relationships between people, social contract, language, discourse, privilege and privileged position, narrative, dialogue, social practice. Domestic “near-constructivism” Despite the fact that domestic human science has long positioned itself as “cognizing reality,” many of the ideas of our scientists breathed life into constructivism. And first of all, it is impossible not to mention here such a revolutionary as L.S. Vygotsky, who is usually considered as one of the founders of constructivism, along with J. Piaget. A number of his ideas are currently actively used in a variety of constructivist research and practice-oriented areas of psychology, linguistics, pedagogy, sociology and cultural studies. This is the idea that the intrapsychic is derived from the interpsychic, and that all higher mental functions of a person are internalized social relationships, and that perception, memorization, thinking and other information processes are inseparable from sign-symbolic mediation. We can also mention Lev Semenovich’s well-known understanding of the psyche as an organ of selection, a sieve that “strains the world” and changes it so that one can act, subjectively distorting reality in favor of the organism. You can also point out some ideas of A.N. Leontiev’s activity approach: the idea of ​​the subject’s partiality, the idea of ​​a “way of reflecting the world”, which is influenced by»