Ernst von Glasersfeld’s Philosophy of Language: Roots, Concepts, Perspectives

From its very beginning, Glasersfeld’s interest in language and communication has been motivated by an epistemological position which he himself named radical constructivism, which he saw embedded in the skeptical and instrumentalist traditions of European philosophy (since Democritus and Sextus Empiricus), in the psychology of Jean Piaget or George Kelly, and in Silvio Ceccato’s and Heinz von Foerster’s second order cybernetics. Radical constructivism,1 in Glasersfeld’s view, is essentially a theory of knowing which has helped to draw up a coherent and homogeneous approach to language, communication, and epistemology.2 In what follows I shall concentrate on the essentials of this approach.