11.5 Constructed Reality Assumption

The constructed reality assumption is the epistemological position within second-order cybernetics and radical constructivism that what we experience as reality is not a direct registration of an observer-independent world but is actively constructed by the cognitive processes of the observer. The assumption holds that the structures, patterns, entities, and relationships that constitute our experience of reality are generated by the observer's nervous system, sensory apparatus, conceptual frameworks, and social interactions—they are constructed in the course of knowing rather than found pre-made in the world. This does not mean that there is nothing outside the observer—the position does not deny that perturbations from an external domain affect the observer's sensory systems—but it means that what these perturbations are made into, what experiences and interpretations they generate, is determined by the organization of the cognitive system doing the experiencing.

The constructed reality assumption is grounded in the neurophysiology of perception. Ernst von Glasersfeld developed radical constructivism partly from the observation that the sensory system does not deliver a veridical representation of the external world to the brain but rather constructs internal models from afferent signals, using prior models to interpret ambiguous sensory data and filling in missing information to produce coherent perceptual experiences. The constructive character of perception is demonstrated by perceptual illusions—cases where the visual system constructs a percept that differs from the physical properties of the stimulus—and by the discovery that perception is heavily top-down: what we expect to see shapes what we see, so that the same physical stimulus can produce different percepts depending on the observer's prior expectations and context. These phenomena show that perception is not passive reception but active construction—the perceptual system is continuously building its best model of the world from incomplete, ambiguous, and context-dependent sensory signals.

The Maturana-Varela analysis of the nervous system provides a biological foundation for the constructed reality assumption. Maturana argued that the nervous system is organizationally closed: its internal states are determined by its internal organization rather than being specified by the external world. When the eye is stimulated by light, the particular internal states generated in the visual cortex are determined by the organization of the visual system—the connections between neurons, the sensitivity profiles of different receptor types, the cortical processing algorithms—not by the "objective" properties of the light stimulus. Two animals with different visual system organizations will have different visual experiences from the same light stimulus. The light triggers changes in the nervous system's internal states, but what those states are is determined by the nervous system's own organization:

where E(t) is the organism's experience at time t, N₀ is the organism's initial nervous system organization, and P(t) is the perturbation from the external domain. Experience is a function of both the nervous system organization and the perturbation—neither factor alone determines experience. Changing the perturbation without changing the nervous system changes the experience; changing the nervous system without changing the perturbation also changes the experience. Reality as experienced is co-determined by the observer and the perturbation source.

The social dimension of the constructed reality assumption addresses how individual cognitive constructions become intersubjectively shared as social realities. Individuals who interact frequently come to coordinate their constructions: through language, through shared practices, and through the feedback that each person's behavior provides to others about what constructions are shared and what are not, individuals converge on sufficiently similar constructions to enable coordinated action. Social institutions—language, law, cultural norms, professional practices—are crystallized constructions that have been stabilized through long periods of social interaction and that structure what new members of the social group can and tend to construct. The constructed reality assumption in the social domain holds that these shared social constructions are not objective facts about the world but agreed-upon constructions that have been stabilized through social process—and that they can in principle be reconstructed differently if the social processes that stabilize them change.

The distinction between radical constructivism and naive idealism is important. The constructed reality assumption does not claim that reality does not exist or that it is solely a product of the mind. It claims that there is a domain of perturbations that affects the observer's sensory systems, and that this domain provides constraints on what can be viably constructed—not all constructions are equally viable, and constructions that fail to enable effective interaction with the perturbation domain are eliminated through the negative feedback of failed action. What radical constructivism denies is that we have access to this perturbation domain directly—that our constructions correspond to or represent the structure of this domain as it is independently of observation. We have access to the consequences of our constructions through the feedback they generate; we do not have access to the perturbation domain in itself.

The practical implications of the constructed reality assumption for communication are significant. If each person constructs their own reality from the perturbations they receive, then communication cannot be the transmission of meanings from one mind to another—meanings cannot be transmitted because they are constructions, not things. What communication can do is provide perturbations that trigger constructions in the receiver that are sufficiently coordinated with the sender's constructions to enable joint action. Successful communication is not the accurate transmission of a meaning but the triggering of a sufficiently coordinated construction in the receiver—a fundamentally different goal that requires attention to the receiver's cognitive structure and prior constructions rather than only to the accuracy and completeness of the sender's message.

In therapeutic practice, the constructed reality assumption grounds solution-focused and narrative therapy approaches that treat the client's reality as a construction that can be reconstructed differently. The client does not have a fixed problem with objectively describable properties; the client has a construction of their situation as problematic, and this construction can be examined, elaborated, and modified through the therapeutic conversation. Externalizing conversations in narrative therapy—treating "the problem" as an external entity rather than as an intrinsic property of the person—are constructivist therapeutic techniques: they invite the client to construct a relationship with their problem rather than identifying with it, opening possibilities for different constructions that the total identification had foreclosed. The therapist's role is not to correct the client's distorted perceptions of an objective reality but to join the client in exploring and expanding the constructions available to them.