Introducing Generative Constructivism
A New a Philosophy for our Times
Generative Constructivism: Foundations for a Philosophy of Our Times
“The whole universe is one bright pearl. What are you going to do with your understanding?”
— Gensa Shibi
Abstract
Generative Constructivism offers a philosophical vantage from which conventional distinctions—between self and behaviour, frame and reality, epistemology and ontology—appear as framings rather than fixed structures. Drawing on pragmatist, phenomenological, and process traditions while departing from them significantly, the position provides a coherent foundation for contemporary practices of change: therapeutic, educational, organisational, and personal. The position dissolves the traditional separation between epistemology and ontology, proposing that how we know and what we are form a single co-dynamic movement. Recognizing this opens choice about where and how to intervene.
I. Introduction
Philosophy has long sought foundations—stable ground for knowledge, ethics, and selfhood. Yet every proposed foundation reveals its own contingency. Rather than failure, this illuminates something about framing itself.
Transformation happens. People change. New capacities emerge. Yet the mechanisms proposed to explain change—insight, willpower, belief modification, identity work—often fail to account for how change actually occurs. Something is obscured by our usual conceptual architecture.
What is obscured: the recursive relationship between self and behaviour, and how frame and reality co-constitute. From this vantage, familiar distinctions remain usable—as choices within a larger space rather than the fixed structure of things.
II. The Recursive Dynamic of Self and Behaviour
Western philosophy has overwhelmingly treated the self as origin of action. From Cartesian substance to Kantian transcendental unity to folk psychology, the assumption persists: first a self exists, then it acts. Behaviour expresses what the self already is.
Such framing grounds moral responsibility, enables narrative identity, supports commitment. It does real work.
A wider vantage reveals something else. Self and behaviour form a recursive system. They co-constitute, each shaping the other in an ongoing loop with no absolute ground. What we call “self” is the system’s ongoing organization of itself; what we call “behaviour” is that organization in its active dimension.
We experience self as primary—as origin of our actions, agent behind the doing. The experience matters. It is how the recursive system shows up from within itself, how it self-organizes coherence. The feeling of being a self is real.
Beyond Behaviourism
A crucial distinction. Behaviourist approaches also emphasise behaviour over self. They bracket interior experience, set aside meaning and identity, work directly with action patterns. This operates before the complexities of self have been engaged—a pre-personal move.
The position here moves differently. It has gone through full engagement with self, interiority, meaning-making, identity. It has taken seriously the felt reality of being a self, the power of belief and narrative, the depths of psychological structure. From within that engagement, it recognizes the recursive system that includes all of this.
Trans-personal, not pre-personal. One bypasses self; the other has moved through self and come out recognizing a larger pattern.
Working With the System
Two kinds of intervention become visible:
Inner work: Engaging self-representations, beliefs, identity structures, meaning-making. Sometimes this is precisely the generative move—shifting the frame from within.
Outer work: Engaging behaviour, action, practice, environment. Sometimes the move is here—beginning before feeling ready, letting action reorganize the system.
A therapist might work with beliefs in one session, suggest behavioural experiments in another. A person stuck in preparation might need to act; someone acting compulsively might need to reflect. Context and timing inform what’s generative. The meta-position enables choice rather than ideological commitment to one pole.
Why Emphasise Behaviour?
When this position points to behaviour, it functions pedagogically. The conventional assumption of self-as-origin is so habitual that the recursive nature of the system disappears from view. Pointing to behaviour loosens this grip—an invitation to notice the system rather than a claim about what is “really” primary.
The reader encounters this as a self who is reading, understanding, evaluating. Philosophy cannot step outside the recursive system to describe it objectively. It points, from within, to what is already operating.
The Participatory Position
Such pointing-from-within warrants emphasis. Every attempt to step outside the system and observe it is itself a movement within the system. Every effort to achieve a view from nowhere occurs from somewhere. The meta-level is always another level rather than transcendence of levels.
Generative Constructivism does not describe the recursive system from outside. It articulates, from within, structures that are already operative. Understanding achieved remains situated within what it understands. Far from limitation, this characterizes the position—distinguishing it from philosophies that claim access to structures transcending all particular framings.
III. Frame-Reality Unity
A person in crisis sees threat everywhere. The same streets, same faces—but danger saturates the field. Another day, relaxed and open, the world appears welcoming. What changed? Not the streets.
Constructivism traditionally places reality on one side, our interpretive frames on the other. World given; meaning constructed. But look closer at how perception actually works. There is no moment of pure reception followed by interpretation. Perception arrives already meaningful, already organised. Searching for raw data beneath the framing finds only more framing.
Frame and reality are aspects of a single process. To perceive is already to frame; to frame is already to constitute what appears. What shows up shows up always already within a frame, and the frame exists only in what it discloses.
Practical implications follow. Changing frames changes what shows up. This is why therapeutic reframing works, why paradigm shifts reorganize entire fields, why a shift in context can transform what seemed fixed. Different frames disclose different possibilities—some more than others, some more coherently than others. Evaluation becomes pragmatic, aesthetic, ethical: what does the framing enable?
We might understand our models as mapping an independent reality. We might understand them as generating what they describe. The first grounds scientific practice; the second foregrounds creative possibility. Each serves in different contexts.
The Problem of Recognition
Frame-reality unity raises an immediate problem. If framing is invisible to itself—if one perceives through frames rather than perceiving them—how does recognition occur? How can what is looked-through ever be looked-at?
Standard answers tend toward pessimism. Frames are transcendental conditions of experience. That they exist can be known. What they are cannot be. The eye cannot see itself seeing.
Such pessimism is excessive. Recognition does occur. An authority experienced as external is suddenly seen as constructed, projected, granted power. The frame becomes visible. The question is how.
The answer: One does not see the frame. One catches oneself framing.
Frame as structure remains invisible. What becomes visible is the activity of frame-construction. The looking rather than the lens. Meaning-making as ongoing process rather than fixed architecture.
The distinction matters. Catching the activity differs from transcending the frame. One remains within framing while becoming aware of framing-as-activity. Awareness does not escape the system. It is itself a moment within the system—but a moment in which the system’s operation becomes part of what appears.
Recursion follows. Awareness of framing is itself framed. Awareness of that awareness is framed. No final unframed awareness terminates the sequence.
Yet the recursion is not vicious. Each level contextualises the previous rather than canceling it. What develops is not frame-free perception but increased capacity to hold the framing process as available within experience. More of the system’s operation becomes visible to itself, without the visibility ever achieving a position outside the system.
The Intersubjective Dimension
Frame-reality unity as described thus far might appear to operate only at the individual level. Correction is needed.
Multiple recursive systems do not operate in isolation. Frame-reality processes interact, overlap, mutually constitute. What we call “shared reality” or “objective world” is the stabilized intersection of multiple framing processes that have achieved sufficient coherence to appear independent.
Solipsism is not escaped by adding other minds. Rather, the recursive systems are always already interacting. Language, culture, institutions—these are not overlays on individual frame-reality processes but dimensions of how those processes operate from the beginning.
A child does not first construct a private reality and then learn to align it with others. Construction occurs through interaction. Frames are inherited, negotiated, contested, stabilized collectively before they appear as “individual perspective.”
The position is neither individualist (frames in heads) nor collectivist (social construction determining individual experience). Frame-reality processes operate at multiple scales simultaneously—individual, dyadic, cultural, historical—with no level having ontological priority. The recursive co-constitution that characterizes self and behaviour also characterizes self and other, individual and collective.
Implications follow. When frames shift collectively—paradigm changes, cultural transformations, historical ruptures—the shared reality inhabited shifts. Not merely interpretation of events, but what events can occur, what problems can be solved, what becomes thinkable. The scientific revolution was not new beliefs about old reality but new reality-appearing through new framing.
Therapeutic work provides a microcosm. The frame-reality field includes therapist and client as co-constituting system. Shifts happen not through one person changing another’s frames but through the interaction producing new framing possibilities that neither could generate alone.
The intersubjective dimension requires its own development beyond this initial articulation. What is established here: the position is not confined to individual consciousness but extends to collective frame-reality processes, maintaining the same recursive co-constitutive structure at every scale.
IV. Constructive Modelling
Models as maps of territory—representations succeeding by correspondence. Models as lenses—constructions shaping what they seem to describe. What shifts when we move between these?
The lens view foregrounds something important: models answer to what they enable. Prediction, intervention, coherence, elegance—these measure generative adequacy. When a model stops enabling what’s needed, revision follows. We might describe this as approaching reality more closely. We might describe it as constructing a more useful frame. The descriptions do different work.
Scientific models, psychological frameworks, philosophical positions—all can be engaged either way. The constructive view highlights practical possibility: what does this allow us to do? What becomes thinkable?
Reflexive application follows. The position offered here is one frame among others—potentially adequate for certain challenges. Its value lies in what it enables. Evaluation proceeds accordingly.
V. Ontopoiesis
Ontology has a performative dimension. Being unfolds through enactment.
Ontopoiesis—from Greek ontos (being) and poiesis (making, creating). What is, is always also becoming. What appears, is always also appearing. Being has a verbal quality.
We speak of entities, properties, fixed natures—this serves many purposes. We speak of processes, enactments, ongoing constitution—this serves others. Treating existence as process rather than substance makes certain things newly conceivable: flexibility, change, creative engagement with one’s own becoming.
Doing and being are aspects of the same movement. Acting is being in its active moment. Being is acting in its stabilised aspect. Conceptually distinguishable; actually co-arising.
For self: we are ongoing enactments that stabilise as apparent beings. Identity performed continuously, in each act. Such performance precedes any choosing self that could direct it. We find ourselves always already in process, always already enacted.
The Gap Between Frames
Recognition of ongoing enactment requires something specific: capacity to rest in the space between configurations.
Between frames—after one releases, before another consolidates—there is a gap. Neither empty nor full. Formless. The space between configurations.
Such gaps make frame-shifts possible. Without tolerance for not-knowing, one clutches the current frame despite its limitations. One requires the next frame to be visible before releasing the current one. But the sequence does not work this way. Release comes first. Then gap. Then consolidation.
Capacity for not-knowing is capacity for transformation. One who can rest in “I do not know” has more degrees of freedom than one who must always know.
Anti-intellectualism does not follow. Knowledge is not devalued. What is valued equally is capacity to suspend knowing—to let structures dissolve without immediately replacing them. Such suspension allows new structures to form.
VI. Self as Process
A person says: “I need to become more confident before I can do that.” The structure of this sentence assumes a self that must first change, then act. What if the structure misleads?
The conventional view: a self exists and then acts. It might grow, develop, change—but remains a thing undergoing change, substance beneath modification. Such framing supports identity over time, grounds commitment, enables responsibility.
Another view foregrounds something different. Self is patterning—a pattern of organisation within the flow, stable enough to be named, persistent enough to be recognised, continuously reconstituting. Identity becomes iterative: each moment re-constitutes what will be recognised as self, drawing on previous iterations, never merely repeating.
Consider stuckness. We might see it as “the self being blocked”—an obstacle to be removed. We might see it as a pattern of organisation producing its own persistence. The second view offers different leverage points.
Consider growth. We might see it as “adding to a fixed self.” We might see it as the pattern reorganizing into new configuration. The second dissolves the sense of needing to “become someone else” before changing.
In therapeutic work, sometimes honouring continuity and building on strengths serves. Sometimes loosening fixation and enabling reorganisation serves. Different moments call for different moves.
The recursive nature matters. Self-construction is not something happening to a passive recipient. The self being constructed participates in its own construction—not the action of a prior self, but the self-organising nature of the process itself. The system constructs itself, including the constructing.
Layers of Meaning
Recursive self-construction has a particular structure in lived experience. Experience presents itself in layers. A thought arises. Then a feeling about that thought. Then a reaction to that feeling. Then a judgment about that reaction.
Each layer appears to be response to the previous. Yet on examination, each layer is simply the next content arising. Nothing is genuinely “meta” to anything else. Layer two comes after layer one rather than above it. Another moment of experience rather than transcendent position on experience.
Compounding occurs here. The original arising might be uncomfortable. Feeling about it adds distress. Reaction to the feeling adds frustration. Judgment about the reaction adds shame. By the time the process becomes conscious of itself, multiple layers have accumulated.
Most suffering turns out, on examination, to be secondary and tertiary meaning. Reaction to the reaction. Meaning made about the meaning.
Seeing this structure changes relationship to it—not because seeing transcends the structure (one remains within it) but because the layering becomes part of what appears rather than the invisible medium of appearing.
VII. Self-Organisation Without Subject
If we take the processual view, what organises action? How does coherent behaviour emerge?
Self-organisation. Complex systems produce ordered behaviour without central control. Patterns emerge from interactions, coherence from process, direction from dynamics. No conductor is needed for the orchestra to play.
Behaviour is organised by the very process of behaving. Each act constrains and enables subsequent acts. Patterns stabilise through repetition. Coherence emerges through consistency. Organisation is self-producing.
Self is what self-organisation feels like from the inside—the system’s sense of its own coherence, its recognition of its own patterns, its anticipation of its own continuity. The feeling of being a self is real. The question is how to understand what it indicates.
No absolute beginning, no ultimate foundation. Always already in process, always already organised, always already constructing the next iteration.
Self crystallises around patterns of engagement, stabilises through recurrence, persists through self-reference. What crystallises is never final. What stabilises can reorganise. What persists is persistence itself—pattern maintaining itself through time.
VIII. How Change Occurs
Self-organisation as described raises an immediate question. If frames shape what appears, and one is always within a frame, how does any shift occur?
The recognition mechanism developed in Section III—catching oneself framing rather than seeing frames as structures—creates a precondition for what follows. One must catch the limiting frame while remaining within framing before a different frame can emerge. Such recognition does not by itself produce transformation, but it enables the process described below.
Frame generating “I cannot change” produces a reality in which change is unavailable. The belief confirms itself. Evidence against it does not appear because the frame determines what can count as evidence. Closed loop.
Standard responses invoke breakthrough, grace, rupture. Something from outside the system intervenes to break the cycle.
Generative Constructivism proposes a different mechanism: the end state is posited first.
Circularity characterizes the mechanism. Indeed, circularity is the mechanism.
Operating from “I cannot change,” evidence of change is not sought, not recognised, not accumulated. The belief confirms itself through what it makes (in)visible.
If one posits—as a leap, without prior evidence—”I am one who changes,” a different dynamic begins. (The language of “positing” necessarily sounds agentive, though what occurs is the recursive system reconfiguring its own parameters rather than a subject executing a decision. We cannot speak of this process without employing the grammar of agency, yet that grammar must be understood within the framework already established: there is framing, not a framer.) Transitions start to register. “There was anxiety, now there is calm. There was confusion, now there is clarity.” Each registered transition becomes evidence. Evidence builds into generalisation. Generalisation creates the lens through which further transitions become visible.
The circularity is generative rather than vicious. One is not waiting for proof before leaping. One is allowing the leap to generate its own confirmation.
Bootstrapping. Physically impossible—one cannot lift oneself by one’s own bootstraps. But self-organising systems do something analogous constantly. They create the conditions for their own transformation. The system modifies the parameters that govern its own operation.
Consciousness, treated as self-organising system, bootstraps. Frame that says “I change” generates the evidence that supports it—not through distortion or wishful thinking, but through determining what becomes visible, what gets registered, what accumulates into pattern.
IX. Knowledge and Pragmatic Self-Creation
What is knowledge? Accurate mental representation of an independent world—this grounds objectivity, supports science, enables error-correction. Capability to engage effectively with what appears—this foregrounds practice, skill, embodied competence.
Seeing knowledge as capability highlights something: to know is to be able. This is pragmatism, but with ontological teeth. The claim is not merely that we should evaluate knowledge by its practical consequences. Rather, knowledge is constitutively practical—it exists as practice rather than mental content that might or might not be applied.
Instrumentalism must be distinguished here. Instrumentalism holds that knowledge is valuable because it produces useful consequences—mental content judged by external effects. The claim here differs: knowledge is not mental content that produces consequences; knowledge IS the capability itself. There is no separable “knowing” that might or might not lead to “doing.” To know is to be organized in a way that enables certain engagements. Learning is not acquiring content but becoming reorganized. The distinction between theory and practice collapses not because theory serves practice (instrumentalism) but because they are aspects of a single process—knowing-doing-being as unified movement. The distinction is ontological rather than evaluative.
Ability incorporates into the pattern of self-organisation, becomes part of what constitutes the self. Learning transforms the learner through incorporation.
Knowledge incorporates through use. Using and being-transformed are aspects of the same movement: the recursive system engaging with new forms of practice and thereby reconstituting itself. We become what we practice—a single process of practicing-becoming.
Theory is a form of practice—articulating and organising understanding. Practice embodies understanding, enacts frameworks, constitutes meaning. At one level they divide; at another they unify in knowing-doing-being.
Change happens through engagement. New capacities emerge through practice. The self that could engage differently is constructed in and through engaging. Working with representations and beliefs—this too is a form of practice, a mode of engagement. The meta-position sees these as moves within the space, fitted to context.
X. Conclusion
Generative Constructivism offers a philosophical vantage for an era aware of the constructed nature of categories, the processual nature of existence, the entanglement of knower and known.
The position:
Self and behaviour form a recursive system. We experience self as origin—this is how the system appears from within. Inner work and outer work are moves within this system, chosen as context demands.
Frame and reality co-arise. Changing frames changes what appears. The map-territory distinction is itself a map.
Being unfolds through enactment. Reality has a performative dimension, continuously constituted through engagement.
Self is patterning. Identity is iterative constitution—stable enough to persist, fluid enough to reorganize.
Knowledge is capability. Knowing and doing form a single movement. Learning transforms the learner.
This articulation happens from within. Philosophy points from inside the recursive system. A vantage, not a verdict.
For therapy: the choice between working with self-representations or working with behaviour is tactical rather than ideological. For education: learning transforms the learner through engagement rather than information transfer. For organisations: culture is enacted in each interaction. For personal development: becoming happens through the full range of moves—inner and outer, representational and embodied.
The position is trans-personal: having moved through full engagement with self, interiority, meaning, it recognizes the recursive system from within that engagement. Pre-personal bypass is refused.
The claims here cannot be demonstrated by argument alone. They invite verification through practice—through noticing, in one’s own experience, the recursive construction they describe. Far from limitation, this characterizes a philosophy of transformation: it must itself be transformative, or it refutes itself.
What is offered is a meta-recognition. Conventional distinctions remain usable within their contexts. What shifts is the vantage from which they are seen—as framings, deployed as situations call for rather than the fixed structure of things.
Its truth is not correspondence but enablement. Its proof is not argument but practice.
What remains is engagement—and in engagement, becoming. The recursive movement of living construction, always already begun, within which all our moves are made.
The position emerges from engagement with pragmatism (James, Dewey, Rorty), phenomenology (Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty), process philosophy (Whitehead), enactivism (Varela, Thompson), second-order cybernetics (von Foerster, Maturana), developmental psychology (Kegan, Cook-Greuter), and contemplative traditions. It departs from each significantly. What is offered here is distinct—a philosophical position adequate to the particular challenges of recognizing and engaging the recursive construction of self, frame, and reality as a unified process.
References
The intellectual sources include pragmatism (James, Dewey, Rorty), phenomenology (Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty), process philosophy (Whitehead), enactivism (Varela, Thompson), second-order cybernetics (von Foerster, Maturana), social constructionism (Gergen), developmental psychology (Kegan, Cook-Greuter), and contemplative traditions recognising the constructed nature of self. The position departs from each significantly and should be understood as distinct, emerging from engagement with all of them.
So grateful to be a student of yours. I’ve been craving deep intellectual conversation and explorations like this for what feels ages. Every article, audio, session feels like unwrapping a gift of precious wisdom.
This piece was challenging and mind-expanding, and refreshingly clear in connecting dots between so many diverse lineages of inquiry. I loved it on so many levels.
As someone who works with voice, I was struck by how much this point applies:
"Inner work and outer work are moves within this system, chosen as context demands."
Voice work is usually approached either outwardly--through the physical mechanisms (technique)--or inwardly, as a vibratory portal to other states of consciousness. Both can be effective approaches, depending on the circumstances, but neither on its own engages the voice is a complex system that both reflects who we are and changes who we are.