Abstract This paper argues that attention is not merely a psychological function of selection or salience, but a world-forming and self-transforming operation. In the paper’s central metaphor, the “garden” names the horizon of an already integrated and stabilized world, the “fence” its current hermeneutic frame, and the “elephant” a large-scale and potentially unsettling body of data that initially does not fit within the existing order of meaning. The paper describes how the first response to such data is often denial, neglect, or the questioning of its status, because the observer mistakes the limits of a framework for the limits of reality itself. The radical constructivist turn does not consist in abandoning order, but in recognizing the revisability of the frame: the fence can be moved outward until the new body of data finds a meaningful place within the world. The analysis relates this metaphor to insights from cognitive science, especially predictive processing, category learning, and schema transformation, while also situating it within a broader epistemological tradition. The paper concludes that the problem of attention ultimately becomes the problem of the knower’s self-knowledge. As a metaphor, the model also offers a concrete and teachable way of presenting this process in educational contexts. Keywords: attention, radical constructivism, hermeneutics, predictive processing, category learning, observer, epistemology
István Bajzák (Mon,) studied this question.