[Xmca-l] Re: Request: Chandler article

[Annalisa Aguilar]

I'd like to thank Francoise and Martin for requesting and providing this article, by Chandler. It's a really good one! Something about it reminded me of LSV's Ch 6 of Thought and Speech.


Also seems appropriate to the threads of late.


I'm interested in this notion that abstract thought is somehow culture free, though. Where does this come from?


And who was Turner? Is there a way to get my hands upon the Turner article cited in this paper?

[Turner, T. (1973), Piaget's Structuralism. Am. Anthrop. 75:351-373.]


Apparently he passed away last November:

http://www.chronicle.cornell.edu/stories/2015/11/anthropologist-terence-turner-dies-79



Kind regards,


Annalisa


>
> Chandler, M. J. (1975). Relativism and the problem of epistemological loneliness. Human Development, 18(3), 171-180.
>
> A commentary on the sense of isolation and estrangement which commonly accompanies the relativism ushered in by the emergence of formal operational thought, and a detailing of several regressive strategies frequently employed by adolescents in their efforts to accommodate to this plurality of solitudes. It is suggested that the stereotypy, cliquishness and press toward conformity common among adolescents, as well as the penchant for abstraction and the susceptability to secular and nonsecular conversions often characteristic of this age group, can be understood as attempts to cope with the estrangement of social relativism through the imposition of a kind of artificial consensus. Such essentially regressive solutions are viewed as a by-product of a standard of cognitive development which regards maturity as a kind of exclusive trafficking in abstract relativistic thought. This view is contrasted with an alternative construction of cognitive development which rejects the notion that concretism is an intellectual handicap of middle childhood, that centered or figurative thinking is a conceptual stage to be overcome, and that thoughts freed of all contradiction are the mark of conceptual maturity. This second and dialectical view of development is proposed as a perspective which permits a brand of cognitive growth that does not sacrifice the particular to the general nor condemn the adolescent to the vertigo of relativism.