To understand what I mean by guessing, let us look at what constructivism postulates about knowledge and learning. Jean Piaget suggested that through a process of assimilation and accommodation, learners construct new knowledge based on their experiences. Assimilation is when a learner’s experience is aligned with their internal representation of the world. Accommodation, on the other hand, is the reframing of one’s representation of the world when the experience does not fit one’s original representation. In another words, accommodation happens when one learns through mistake. I prefer to think of this in terms of the process of coherence and consensus. Coherence is the process by which we interact with the senses that I have mentioned before, and actively construct viable theories and explanations of what is observed. This is represented in the diagram below.

Essentially, we experience life through our senses (including the sense of the mind, what we can imagine). From this we actively construct representations of the world (including self). An example is when we see a new material we have never seen before, and reach out to touch it – that moment of touch creates a new construct within our internal representation of the world. We observe and think “this material is smooth, it is pleasing to the touch”. Coherence is reached through negotiation with the “outside” world through our senses, as well as through negotiation with our internal representation (through the mind). For example, when we first observe a material, it is likely that we already can predict what it “feels” like. This is because we have observed the relationship between sight and touch before. Hence when we actually touch the material, we achieve coherence, either by confirming what our internal representation predicts (assimilation, that it is smooth as predicted), or a reframing of the internal representation (accommodation, it is not smooth as predicted based on past experience!).

While one can argue that this process in itself is a social process, since we think by way of language and language itself is a social construct, nevertheless a more obvious social process is inherent in the theory by way of consensus. Consensus is an agreement with self and others. So while coherence is achieved through logical thoughts and experiential interaction, consensus is achieved through a back and forth process with self and others. A good way to represent this is via the diagram below:

Each mini-mes achieves its own sense of coherence, and across these mini-mes knowledge is constructed through consensus. Note that consensus does not mean everyone agrees on one theory – rather, it simply means that within a group of people there is a shared sphere of influence and forms a significant culture within that group. Clearly, a group of eskimos would share a significant degree of consensus within themselves, but not with a group of Singaporeans.

Thus learning is a process of actively guessing the experience at hand, and creating some form of internal representation (meaning) through a process of coherence and consensus. Meaning is both a mental as well as social construct that corresponds to an internal representation of what is “understood” of an experience. In phenomenology, this corresponds to the idea of the Verstehen, subjective understanding that stands in contrast to the Cartesian “explanation” of an objective “truth”. Taken as a whole, our “meaning” or Verstehen come together to form our lifeworld or Lebenswelt, our experience of the world. It is interesting to see that what we "see" is not only a result of objective information (in the form of light) entering our conscious mind - more than that, it is a result of our Verstehen and Lebenswelt. Someone who has never seen the Mona Lisa before will never be able to picture the Mona Lisa from the pixelated image in the last article.

Therefore to question what a spiral means to me is something that I cannot fully answer. The Verstehen of “spiral” is, to me, a rich web of interconnected meanings, a substantial part of my Lebenswelt built over the many years of my life. Even through my flash presentation, I’m sure that whatever you have understood of what a spiral means to me is something that is creatively different from my Verstehen, and a part of your own Lebenswelt.