Internal and External Approaches to Epistemology

UXDiversity Blog

Godfrey-Smith (1996)  talks about three epistemological approaches: An “externalist”  approach, an “internalist” approach, and interactionism.
The epistemic ontology of those of us who hold the externalistic approach is that we come to gain knowledge as external facts become exposed to us. Godfrey-Smith likens this approach to the Associationist Theory, and behaviorism. This brings to mind the dialectic discourse of Lakatos, who believed we could cleave ourselves from our emotional and political attachment to ideas, and that we could collaboratively find scientific truth through honest debate.

The internalistic approach is that we never perceive the external world without our view being adulterated by our internal cognition. He calls this  approach “strong constructivism“, or a “Kantian” approach.  How we perceive the world depends on our experiences, cf, what I presume Aristotle, Mauss, and Bourdieu would call “habitus“. However, I cannot understand the correlation he makes…

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Gestaltist Theory

UXDiversity Blog

“The notion that people learn by forming simple associations, or connections, between events was anathema to the Gestaltists” (Benjafield, 1992).  

 

Gestaltists like Wertheimer, Kohler, Koffka, and Duncker asserted that experiences or meanings cannot be understood by breaking them down to the individual associations made within the development of the meaning-making; that is, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.  Koffka (1935) (who spent the last 14 years of his life teaching at Smith College in Northampton) along with other Gestalt theorists, claimed that people will organize information into the simplest form possible, and will view information holistically rather than its individual parts.  Benjafield (1992) uses this wildlife illustration as an example.  Individually, the parts of the illustration work  together to form an outdoor scene, but from a holistic vantage, the entire scene creates an image of Frankenstein.  (I believe we aesthetically organize and categorize…

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