Knowledge construction: individual or social?

For many years, battles raged between those who saw knowledge as perception of a given reality and those who saw it as being constructed through rational activity. More recently, epistemological debates have focused on that activity being essentially individual or social. Initially, the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education (PME) was heavily influenced by the idea that mathematical knowledge is constructed by individuals, and particularly by von Glasersfeld’s “radical” constructivism. The social constructivist thesis that mathematics is a social construction challenged this dominant notion, but Steve Lerman critiqued the “shared consciousness” interpretation of social constructivism and articulated the sociocultural idea of the centrality of social interactions. His influence led a strong turn to the social, with a focus on intersubjectivity in mathematical knowledge and mathematics learning. Steve not only challenged individual people’s ideas but also drew PME into a position where sociocultural and other poststructural theories are in regular use.