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Module 1

The theory of Organic Constructivism

Organic Constructivism is a coherent theoretical system linking epistemology, individual knowledge, socially shared knowledge and educational consequences.

Architecture

The levels of Organic Constructivism

The central level B addresses individual and scientific knowledge; general epistemological positions sit above it and educational implications below.

Level A

Epistemological positions

Knowledge and reality, the origins and nature of knowledge, and its construction through subject-environment interaction.

Level B

Theories of knowledge construction

Individual knowledge and its social sharing (S-C), with dichotomous systems concerning learners (VdA) and science (VdC).

Level C

Achievements and values

Educational implications: studying learners, science teaching, learning types and questionnaires testing epistemological beliefs.
Diagram: the levels of Organic Constructivism
Diagram: the levels of Organic ConstructivismThe author’s diagram connects epistemological positions, theories of knowledge construction and educational outcomes.Translated version of Nicolás Marín Martínez’s original diagram. View the Spanish original
Read the diagram text
  • Priority to the object / Empiricism
  • Mechanistic constructivism
  • Subject (OC) / Object (OR)
  • Organicist constructivism
  • Priority to the subject / Rationalism
  • Level A: Epistemological positions
  • Individual priority
  • Organic Constructivism
  • Social priority
  • Level B: Theories of knowledge construction
  • Methodology
  • Gather information about the learner relevant to teaching
  • Assess DCE
  • Critically review the field’s theoretical framework
  • Epistemology
  • Structuring an SPD epistemological theoretical core
  • Teaching
  • of science, methods, procedures, competencies, etc.
  • Learning
  • Cognitive organisation and types of learning. Critical review
  • Achievements and values
  • Level C: Achievements and values of Organic Constructivism

The underlying problem

Known object and real object

A central question concerns the relationship between the known object as constructed by the subject (OC) and the corresponding real object (OR). Two broad positions emerge.

One view allows comparison and treats greater similarity as greater truth. Everyday understanding, technology and sporting accuracy seem to support it; behaviourism and inductivism followed this approach.

The other denies direct comparison: constructed knowledge is internal, external reality outside. Different interpretations, limited perception and continuing learning suggest replacing truth-as-copy with usefulness, effectiveness, adequacy, prediction and coherence.

Organic Constructivism adopts this second position. It accepts reality while denying that we can place a mental construction beside its external object to check a match.

OC

Known object

Reality constructed by subjects through experience, reflection, language and social regulation, shaping further interactions.

OR

Real object

External reality encountered but not directly accessible, limiting, disturbing and guiding adaptation.
Diagram: positions on known and real objects
Diagram: positions on known and real objectsThe author’s activity comparing positions and evidence concerning known and real objects.Translated version of Nicolás Marín Martínez’s original diagram. View the Spanish original
Read the diagram text
  • Rearrange the rectangles into an organised diagram
  • Position F
  • The known object (OC) can be compared with its referent (OR). Any distance between them can be reduced and serves as a criterion of truth
  • H. OC and OR can be compared, but the subject filters and biases rather than copies. A good method can reduce the distance
  • G. OC and OR cannot be compared, nor can increasing adaptation be asserted, because what OC represents cannot be known
  • Evidence B
  • Multiple interpretations / Limited perception / Learning never ends
  • Evidence C
  • Interpersonal agreement / Technological progress / Precision in actions
  • Move the rectangles and connect them with arrows according to their content to form a coherent diagram
  • D. OC and OR cannot be compared, but OC can approach OR in an adaptive sense
  • E. We can compare and copy OR’s properties one by one to construct an OC identical to OR
  • Position A
  • The known object cannot be compared with its referent: a membrane separates subject and environment. Rethink truth in terms of usefulness and adequacy

The philosophical “isms”

Organic Constructivism among philosophical positions

Constructivism offers an intermediate account of knowledge’s origins. Comparing alternative positions clarifies Organic Constructivism’s commitments.

Empiricism

Experience dominates: the environment supposedly supplies information directly.

Rejected as a sufficient explanation.

Rationalism

Reason dominates construction, overlooking concrete environmental interaction.

Acceptable only within a developmental account.

Realism

Knowledge is assumed truer when it resembles external reality more closely.

Replaced by an adaptive criterion.

Idealism

Reality is treated as inaccessible, denying knowledge’s representation of or progress towards it.

Rejected: adaptive progress is possible.

Apriorism

Assumes cognitive structures are innate and preformed at birth.

Rejected: every structure has a genesis.

Mechanism

Reduces complexity to separable parts, additive wholes and linear causes.

Organic Constructivism’s methodological opposite.

Table 1

Dichotomous statement system (SaD-CO)

More and less adequate statements are organised along empiricism–constructivism and mechanism–organicism axes.
Table 1 · SaD-CO
Epistemology

Less adequate · Empiricism

Approaches prioritising experience, reason or innate structures, assuming knowledge-reality correspondence or denying any adaptive progress towards reality.

More adequate · Constructivism

Knowledge develops through subject-object interaction, balancing experience and rational activity. Constructed and external realities remain distinct; progress is adaptive rather than a truth-by-copy criterion.

Model

Less adequate · Mechanism

Machine models assume separable parts, an additive whole and simple linear causal relationships.

More adequate · Organicism

Knowledge is organic: the whole exceeds the sum of parts. Growing understanding changes both their relationships and how the parts themselves are defined.

Individual knowledge

Four pairs to understand learners

For Organic Constructivism, the signifier is anything arriving from outside: words, symbols, images, perceptions and formulas. The meaning does not travel with it: subjects construct it through experience, emotion and prior knowledge. Information circulates; it becomes knowledge within the mind.

Hence the gap between teaching and learning. Teaching presents content; learning assimilates it internally. Even excellent strategies may or may not produce learning.

The third pair contrasts concept and schema. Concepts suit exchange in semiotic communities such as science. Individual knowledge is also implicit, procedural, embodied and emotional; schemas describe it better.

The fourth pair distinguishes logic from psychology. Academic categories can make learners appear inconsistent. Their own knowledge is often coherent, useful and adapted to their environment through organic self-regulation.

Across all four pairs runs an embodied view of knowledge that overcomes body/mind, subject/object, reason/emotion and procedural/conceptual divisions.

Diagram: meanings and signifiers
Diagram: meanings and signifiersThe author explains why meanings do not travel with signifiers and are assigned internally.Translated version of Nicolás Marín Martínez’s original diagram. View the Spanish original
Read the diagram text
  • Meanings and signifiers: together or separate?
  • context
  • message
  • language
  • sender
  • receiver
  • Of everything arriving from outside (words, images, perceptions, information, etc.), what already arrives with its meaning?
  • List:
  • Does a word contain its meaning?
  • Can we learn from other cultures?
  • Information or knowledge?
  • In Spain: “eat heartily”; in Peru: “pull, take, sniff, drive, fail…”
  • Originally, “quedamos al tiro” referred to meeting at the shots; today “al tiro” means “immediately”
  • Writing found from an extinct culture about which we have no information
  • An object found by astronauts on a planet beyond the solar system: what is it?
  • With 100 words and grammar rules, a computer has created one million sentences
  • Is what is written in a book just signifiers, or is it meanings?
  • Reflect on the relationship between meaning and signifier: are they joined?
  • Words are linked to meanings by social convention and work within their cultural context
  • Writing and objects from other cultures may seem meaningless in ours
  • Does meaning exist only within the human mind and never outside it?
  • If a word carried its meaning…
  • If cultural context supplies meaning…
  • If meanings exist only in the mind, then…

Table 2

Dichotomous statements about learners (SaD-VdA)

The first two pairs concern empiricism–constructivism; the next two, mechanism–organicism.
Table 2 · SaD-VdA
Meaning–signifier

Less adequate · Empiricism

Assuming external signs, symbols and sensations arrive with meaning, or that learners can acquire everything taught through sufficient teaching effort.

More adequate · Constructivism

Subjects assign meaning with their whole biological, emotional and cognitive being. Meanings vary by degree and differ between teachers and learners.

Teaching–learning

Less adequate · Empiricism

Assuming direct causal links between teaching conditions and learning outcomes, with learners able to acquire everything taught easily.

More adequate · Constructivism

Teaching and learning differ in nature. However favourable the conditions, construction occurs internally and remains demanding.

Concept–schema

Less adequate · Mechanism

Treating learners’ knowledge as a hierarchy of precisely defined concepts connected through logical class relations.

More adequate · Organicism

Cognition includes stable experiential, procedural and implicit structures strongly linked to emotion, needed to assign meaning.

Logical–psychological

Less adequate · Mechanism

Academic logic introduces bias, making subjects appear fragmented or confused when they are not.

More adequate · Organicism

Psychologically informed frameworks reduce bias and reveal more coherent, pragmatic problem-solving within the subject’s environment.

The social extension

Semiotic-community symbiosis

How can knowledge be socially shared if construction remains internal? Organic Constructivism proposes the S-C: socially generated signs and rules in symbiosis with a community that assigns shared meanings.

System of signifiers

Language, symbols, writing, books and formulas with their rules. Without an interpreting community, they remain inert information.
⇄ symbiosis

Community of meanings

People assigning, negotiating and stabilising meaning. Without semiotic records, continuity and cultural memory are lost.

Communication encourages personal meanings to align with communal meanings, while individual contributions transform the community. Developed in module 5.

Diagram: semiotic-community symbiosis
Diagram: semiotic-community symbiosisSigns require a community to become knowledge; communities require signs for continuity. Learning depends on meaning.Translated version of Nicolás Marín Martínez’s original diagram. View the Spanish original
Read the diagram text
  • Symbiosis of a semiotic system and meaning-makers
  • Shared semiotic system
  • Community able to assign shared meanings
  • Without a community, the system of signifiers loses its ability to become knowledge
  • Without a semiotic system, the community loses continuity as intergenerational transmission and the social regulation of meanings and signifiers become less effective
  • We learn from meaning, not from the signifier

Scientific knowledge

The distinctive nature of scientific knowledge

Scientific knowledge’s identity depends on a community that agrees, manages and uses its conceptual resources. The self-regulating entity is science’s S-C system.

Success depends especially on managing the semiotic system through two factors: strong social regulation, reinforcing symbiosis, stability, continuity and the training of new members, and strong empirical regulation, continually confronting a stable core of semiotic materials with evidence.

Table 3

Dichotomous statements about science (SaD-VdC)

Synthesises nature-of-science consensus from five international research groups (Marín, Benarroch and Niaz, 2013): its nature and its progress.
Table 3 · SaD-VdC
Epistemology

Less adequate · Empiricism

Science treated as direct generalisation from observation, a theory-free reflection of natural laws, complete, exact and produced in neutral contexts.

More adequate · Constructivism

Science develops through dialogue between theory and theory-laden evidence. Its value is usefulness; its development responds to contemporary problems.

Progress

Less adequate · Mechanism

Science treated as linear accumulation through one universal, infallible method and the contributions of isolated geniuses.

More adequate · Organicism

Progress is collective, complex, usually evolutionary and sometimes revolutionary. Scientific methods vary across discovery, communication, regulation and justification.

Tables 2 and 3 differ in their knowledge contexts but show structural parallels despite originating in different literatures: psychology and philosophy of science.