Constructivist Foundations

(editor-in-chief)
Postal address: Center Leo Apostel for Interdisciplinary Research, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Krijgskundestraat 33, B-1160 Brussels, Belgium
Physical web server:
University of Vienna, A-1010 Vienna, Austria

ISSN 1782-348X

Constructivist Foundations (CF) is an international peer-reviewed academic e-journal dedicated to constructivist issues raised by philosophy a well as the natural, human, and applied sciences. The journal publishes original scholarly work in all areas of constructivist approaches, especially radical constructivism, enactive cognitive science, second order cybernetics, biology of cognition and the theory of autopoietic systems, and non-dualizing philosophy, among others. The readers of the journal will be kept up-to-date with the central issues and problems of contemporary constructivist approaches. Papers are published in an attractive format ready to be printed by the reader. Their physical appearance is permanently fixed (“permanent links”) to allow for reliable citations in terms of volume, number, and page.

Number of subscribers (as of 10 November 2009): 2427.

Constructivist Foundations is indexed in the Arts & Humanities Citation Index and the Current Contents/Arts & Humanities of Thomson Reuters, and in The Philosopher's Index.

Aims and Scope

Constructivist approaches support the idea that mental structures such as cognition and perception are actively built by one’s mind rather than passively acquired. However, constructivist approaches vary in function of how much influence they attribute to constructions.

Many assume a dualistic relationship between reality and constructed elements. They maintain that constructed mental structures gradually adapt to the structures of the real world (e.g., Piaget). In this view perception is the pickup of information controlled by the mental structure that is constructed from earlier perceptions (e.g., Neisser). This leads to the claim that mental structures are about learning sensorimotor contingencies (e.g., O’Regan).

Others seek to avoid the dualistic position. Either they skeptically reject that the structures of the real world can be compared with mental ones, independently of the senses through which the mental structures were constructed in the first place (e.g., von Glasersfeld), or they embrace a phenomenological perspective that considers perception as the grouping of experiential complexes (e.g., Mach).

All these approaches emphasize the primacy of the cognitive system (e.g., Llinás) and its organizational closure (e.g., von Foerster, Maturana). Hence, perceived patterns and regularities may be regarded as invariants of inborn cognitive operators (e.g., Diettrich).

Constructivist approaches can be said to differ also with respect to whether constructs are considered to populate the rational-linguistic (e.g., von Glasersfeld, Schmidt), the biological-bodily (“enactivist/embodied” theories, e.g., Varela), or the social realm (social constructivism, e.g., Latour).

Guidelines for Authors

Author's Guidelines for Full Papers in HTML or PDF
Word template with predefined styles
Author's Guidelines for Commentaries (PDF)
Editorial of the Initial Issue (PDF).

Featured Books

Related books:
Radical Enactivism: Intentionality, Phenomenology and Narrative. Focus on the philosophy of Daniel D. Hutto Edited by Richard Menary (John Benjamins, 2006), 255 pages	Biologie der Realität Humberto R. Maturana (Suhrkamp, 2000)	Key Works in Radical Constructivism Ernst von Glasersfeld, Edited by Marie Larochelle (Sense Publishers, 2007)	Making up the Mind. How the Brain Creates our Mental World Chris Frith (Wiley-Blackwell, 2007), 248 pages	I of the Vortex Rudolfo Llinas (MIT Press, 2002), 314 pages

TABLE OF CONTENTS

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

ADVISORY BOARD

EDITORIAL BOARD

PUBLISHER

Aims and Scope

Guidelines for Authors

Featured Books