About radicalism of construction in “radical constructivism”

The article deals with the conceptual content of the theory of “radical constructivism” - one of the most vivid schools in modern epistemology which was established as a reaction to problems and contradictions of classical theory of knowledge. The theory is analyzed in order to discover philosophical originality of the matter. Members of radical constructivism trying to depart from classical ideas as far as possible, suppose that knowledge itself cannot describe objective reality, because an individual who learns the reality does not know anything about it. The “real world” is nothing more than a system of mental images, created by a person oneself on the basis of information received from one’s sense organs. The authors have subjected to critical analysis two theses of Ernst von Glasersfeld, one of the founders of this approach in the theory of knowledge, in which he had laid down the paradigm of radical constructivism. The authors of the article have shown that the principal content of constructive paradigm had already been described in the research works of classics of German philosophy of the 18th - 19th centuries - Immanuel Kant and Georg Hegel, who had made a fundamental contribution to classical epistemology. Kant discovered active nature of consciousness, Hegel was the first in the history of philosophy who made an attempt to renounce the point of view considering mechanistic structure of the nature and set reductional opinions against idea of development. The principal findings received by the authors are: radical constructivism positioning itself as an approach totally opposite to the classical theory of knowledge and it is not radical enough with respect to the latter because the approach develops the ideas implicitly contained in classical philosophical theses.