International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics

The construction of knowledge is basically the acquisition of perceptive and conceptual invariances, "… with which to explore, order, and predict experience" (E von GLASERSFELD, 1976, p.116).

According to von GLASERSFELD: "If we accept the notion that rational knowledge involves the generation and use of invariances and rules, we cannot help asking how these invariances are generated and what they concern" (p.119). This is the "prime mover" concept of constructivism.

The subject was also broached early by J. PIAGET, who wrote in his "Epistémologie génétique": "Knowledge should not be conceived as pre-determined, neither within the internal structures of the subject, as they result from an effective and continuous construction, nor in the pre-existent characters of the object, since they become known only through the necessary mediation of these structures" (1970, p.5).

He also stated: "Cognitive processes appear then simultaneously as a result of the organic self-regulation of which they reflect the basic mechanisms, and as the most differentiated organs of that regulation within the interactions with the environment" (1967, as quoted by I. PRIGOGINE, 1973 b).

It is somewhat difficult to harmonize these views with the autopoietic view of the observer endowed with perceptual and conceptual organizational closure. This compiler believes that the physiological and nervous capacity to construct knowledge is innate, i.e. organizationally closed, but that it gives the subject the potential for learning and, through learning, create a perceptual and conceptual structure that ends up more and more autopoietic. Such a view is consistent with the progressive stabilization – and eventual sclerosis – of personality and worldview.

From a practical viewpoint M. DODDS and G. JAROS make the following distinctions: "Information is descriptive; it is contained in answers to questions that begin with such words as What, Which, Who, How many, When and Where. Knowledge is instructive; it is conveyed by answers to How-to questions. Understanding is explanatory, it is transmitted by answers to Why questions… (while) understanding presupposes knowledge and information… information presupposes neither knowledge nor understanding" (1994).

This seems quite extreme. Information presupposes at least some frames of references if it is to be more than pure data.