Quantifying the Moral Dimension. New steps in the implementation of Kohlberg’s method and theory. Fedor Kozyrev
fruitful constructivist movements. Structural theories of personal development built on this base put forward one more principle common for constructivism, namely the quantum character of self-development. In fact, this principle is a derivative of a basic constructivist premise about the existence of active internal structures responsible for the organisation of experience. Any sort of discontinuity of a transition presupposes non-uniformity of an object or a milieu in which it takes place, that is, it presupposes structure. This is because the very steadiness of structures is due to their ability to resist external influences up to a certain critical point and to change abruptly beyond this point. When Max Planck discovered the quantum effect, it became clear that atoms have structure. Observations made by Piaget and his followers convinced them that something similar takes place in the realm of the psyche. Personal constructs do not change through our life gradually and smoothly. They have a tendency to stay unchanged (resistibility), so each occurrence of a new construct is preceded by a break-up of an old one. The inner world of a human being resembles a kaleidoscope, in which one complex and coherent pattern replaces another without intermediate stages. The mission of education is to prevent recycling and to evolve the process into a progressing line coordinated by a pedagogical ideal. This is what Piaget recognised as the main perspective of personal development and defined in terms of progressive changes of schemas.
Another heuristic point in Piaget’s doctrine was a statement about the inseparability of two processes, one of which was the assimilation of external matter by the mind and another was the transformation of the mind by this matter. «The mind organizes the world by organizing itself». This famous aphorism of Piaget let radical proponents of constructivism consider cognition and education as modes of activity whose primary aim is rather the arrangement of a human’s inner world than comprehending the world around. The interaction of constructs with the outer world results not only in the adjustment of the latter to the demands of the former. Constructs themselves are adjusted to reality. Piaget conceptualised these two sides of the same process in physiological terms of assimilation and accommodation, the latter being responsible for the change of constructs and allowing in particular the consideration of the cognitive development of a human being as a form of evolutionary variability and as a sort of biological (and social) adaptation to the environment via self-organisation. In this biological discourse constructivism grants affinity with synergetics and borrows its conceptual framework and its theoretical potency.
It is worth restating that constructs dwell mainly beyond the conscious. They are not merely complexes of notions, as it was in the example with parents given above. They consist of psychological states and acts preceding rational activity. Included in this category may be acts of intentionality, apperception, intuition, motivation, semantic conjugation, that is, involvement in a certain language game (Wittgenstein) and in a hermeneutic circle of a culture, subjection to the pressure of metanarratives (Lyotard) and social prejudices (Gadamer) etc. From this point of view any investigation of the conscious on the constructivist premises is always a deep inquiry – an attempt to get a glimpse into the dimension of the psychological life of a person that is hidden from his/her own eyes. Many schools of psychology attempt it, but in different ways. The peculiar features of the constructivist approach are better seen in its contraposition with Freudianism.
Many celebrated scholars, disciples of Freud himself included, criticised psychoanalysis for its dangerous insularity, not allowing researchers to get beyond legitimate interpretations. H. Olport, for instance, claimed that the desire to seek hidden motives and complexes in all psychological phenomena results in a sort of methodological presbyopia in which a psychoanalyst cannot see and take into account obvious and open motivations. Monolithic and strictly focused in its method, this school comes close to the point where the hermeneutic circle turns into a vicious one. The researcher armed with an omnipotent theory is quite unlikely to be interested in facts that do not fit that theory. Much more interesting for him are facts that support the theory, so the theory starts serving itself, a process that was brilliantly described by T. Kuhn regarding science in general. We deal here with the basic problem of scientific investigation, namely that of theoretically encumbered fact, the one that neo-positivists and phenomenologists struggled with a hundred years ago. Freudianism is a bright but far from unique example of the dialectics of advantages and disadvantages of the empiric-analytical method. The firmer the theory, the more logically coherent it is, the more sophisticated and exact its methodical equipment, the narrower is the set of phenomena that can be lassoed by it without distorting truth. As a consequence of its brave (and in many ways successful) reduction of the human psyche to basic human instincts Freudianism distorted beyond recognition the image of the healthy psyche and finally lost the taste for its study and concentrated on abnormalities. The return of the complete and healthy personality into psychology as a result of overcoming a reductionist temptation was the achievement of scientists belonging to humanist and phenomenological schools – A. Maslow, C. Rogers and others.
The mention of Carl Rogers is especially appropriate here because his Self Concept with its methods of study is a paradigmatic example of the constructivist approach to personality. His Self Concept is in fact a mega-construct by means of which people evaluate themselves. The differences from Freudianism in this approach are not only the much lower level of reduction (Self Concept consists of seventy or more respondents’ judgments regarding most aspects of his/her private and social life) but also the more cautious and modest position of a psychologist in making diagnoses. The new wave of psychology explicated by Rogers advances together with a phenomenological culture of research, prescribing avoidance of hasty evaluations and awareness of prejudices absorbed unnoticed alongside methodological standards.
Rudimentary to this movement was W. Dilthey’s project of descriptive or structural psychology. The opposition of explanative and descriptive psychology correlates with the distinction he proposesbetween natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften) and human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften). Freudianism and constructivism occur in this scheme on different sides, as long as the former hastens to give explanations for tacit dimensions of psychological life while the latter seeks to uncover these dimensions for observation and reflection. J.-P. Ricoeur called psychoanalysis an archaeology of the soul meaning not only its concern with the past as the cause of the present condition of the patient but also its habit to reproduce the whole from its fragments. Anamnesis comes in this case as a result of the particular combination of pieces fished out of the stream of information by means of an instrument tuned in advance to catch highly specific psychological structures. Other things are filtered out. Constructivism, on the contrary, motivates the researcher to collect and to include in analysis as many descriptions as possible in the mode of C. Gyrtz’s doctrine or that of literary criticism and to elaborate (or adjust) criteria for diagnostics afterwards on the basis of the collected data. The reproduction of a hidden pattern is achieved in this mode not through the application of a universal scheme to the particular case and the excogitation of missing pieces but through resorting and reshuffling numerous data until reaching the maximal likelihood.
So the aspiration to minimize the damage of reduction (that is the deliberate impoverishment and simplification of the rich whole, associating it with an abstract model, projecting onto it a chosen plan, neglecting details etc.) determines the main difference between constructivism and former empiric-analytical methods of studying hidden psychological processes. This feature brings constructivism close to the humanities. At the same time a characteristic for the former is the wider application of analytical procedures, quantitative methods and statistics than is usual for the latter. It even has sights on not just the disclosure but also the quantification or measurement of the dark side of psychic reality.
In this respect constructivism implies the principle of complementarity (N. Bohr). On the one hand the aspiration to observe intact the structure of its object means abstaining from its complete disassembly and employing instead the technique of drawing or sketching a portrait. At this holistic level of description constructivism operates as a rule with integral moulds or patterns of individual