>From: "scerir@libero.it" <scerir@libero.it>
>Subject: Re: ART: What Art Is
>Date: Sun, 28 May 2000 20:10:59 +0100
>
>Ayn Rand wrote that the visual arts "teach man to see more precisely and to
>find DEEPER MEANING in his field of vision" and that the art is "a
>SELECTIVE
>RE-CREATION of REALITY according to an artist's metaphysical
>value-judgments."
>
>(Since I did not read Rand's books Iım not sure but) I suggest,
>inconsiderately, that Randıs aesthetics may have ³something² in common with
>the s.c. constructivist aesthetics.
>
>Silvio Ceccato (1964) developed Bridgman's idea of operational definitions
>into a comprehensive system of mental operations. He emphasized the
>³constitutive² capability of the mind and the role of a pulsating ATTENTION
>that governs the generation of concepts (like artistic CREATION, artistic
>RE-CREATION, beauty, but also semantics) by separating and relating the raw
>material of sensory differences. On these premises he worked out a detailed
>model of a thinking organism that was able to construct an experiential
>world (even without ³representational² input from an external reality).
>Ceccato developed also concepts (relevant in the artistic domain) like
>communication & "enrichment", etc.
>
>Modern (rectius: radical) constructivism is based on the following basic
>principles: knowledge is not passively received either through the senses
>or
>by way of communication, but is actively built up by the cognising subject;
>the function of cognition is adaptive and serves the subject's organization
>of the experiential world, not the discovery of an objective ontological
>reality.
>
>The importance of constructivism is best understood by comparing it with
>the
>traditional approach in epistemology or cognitive science, which sees
>knowledge as a passive reflection of the external, objective reality.
......
>scerir (Rome)
>
Actually, the constructivist view of epistemology, as you describe it -
except for the non-essential conclusion that it has nothing to do with "the
discovery of an objective ontological reality" - really has nothing in
conflict with objectivism as I understand it. Objectivism does not deny
that there is a process of internal mental operations that evolves to build
a representation of the experiental world, or that this process is very much
individuated, but rather says that this process is capable of producing
valid knowledge of that world, that it is not arbitrary, that we can
communicate and validate our models through interaction with that real
objective world. That was, after all, the major defining goal of logic and
epistemology - specifying the methods of validating and acquiring knowledge.
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