Constructivism is a theory of knowledge with roots in philosophy, psychology, and
cybernetics. It asserts two main principles whose application has far-reaching
consequences for the study of cognitive development and learning as well as for the
practice of teaching, psychotherapy, and interpersonal management in general. The
two principles are:
(1) knowledge is not passively received but actively built up by the cognizing
subject;
(2) the function of cognition is adaptive and serves the organization of the
experiential world, not the discovery of ontological reality.
To accept only the first principle is considered trivial Constructivism by those
who accept both, because that principle has been known since Socrates and, without
the help of the second, runs into all the perennial problems of Western epistemology