Re: Bourdieu on Chomsky and Vygotsky

Angel M.Y. Lin (mylin who-is-at oise.on.ca)
Thu, 12 Oct 1995 12:35:55 -0400 (EDT)

Very lovely quote, Phil! Thanks for posting it!
Angel

On Thu, 12 Oct 1995, AGRE Phil 44.27.71.39 Professeur invite d'A Collinot wrote:

> I found this quote interesting. Phil
>
> "I believe that there is a sort of incompatibility between our scholarly mode
> of thinking and this strange thing that practice is. To apply to practice a
> mode of thinking which presupposes the bracketing of practical necessity and
> the use of instruments of thought constructed against practice, such as game
> theory, the theory of probability, etc., is to forbid ourselves to understand
> practice as such. Scientists or scholars who have not analyzed what it is
> to be a scientist or a scholar, who have not analyzed what it means to have a
> scholastic view and to find it natural, put into the minds of agents *their*
> scholastic view. This epistemocentric fallacy can be found, for instance,
> in Chomsky, who operates as if ordinary speakers were grammarians. Grammar
> is a typical product of the scholastic point of view and one could, building
> on the work of Vygotsky, show that skhole [roughly, leisurely scholarship] is
> what allows us to move from primary mastery to secondary mastery of language,
> to accede to the meta: meta-discourse, meta-practice. *The fundamental
> anthropological fallacy consists in injecting meta- into practices.* This is
> what Chomsky does; ... ."
>
> -- Pierre Bourdieu, The scholastic point of view, Cultural Anthropology 5(4),
> 1990, pages 382-383.
>
>