You suggested that:
>People like Latour would point to the many mediating instruments that make
>the seeming seamless zoom from the quarks to the galaxies, passing through the
>human skin, possible.
and
>Historical constructivists, one of the first was Gianbatista Vico,
>and realist semioticians, I believe, would argue that it has very
>good practical (and ethical) consequences, if we construe the
>levels as being "objectively real", and look for their "laws" of
>self-organisation (a kind of 'critical ontology' if you wish).
To assume that levels of developmental organization are in the eye of the
researcher has the strange and unintended effect of exempting the
researcher and the research enterprise from being a CHAT
(cultural-historical activity theory) system, something that Latour
explicitly argues against in *Laboratory Life* and elsewhere. Vico
similarly posited that it is because we can study ourselves as
cultural-historical objects that it is possible to have a scientific social
science--the sort of "critical ontology" that you describe--turning the
Cartesian argument upside down. Given that education (and the Politics to
which you refer) involves in some sense a transformation of the "ought" to
"is," we need to understand the processes by which tensions embodying
different levels of organization manifest and resolve over time.
We are doing an extended reading and discussion of K. Gergen's recent
*Realities and Relationships: Soundings in Social Construction* (1994,
Harvard) in which he argues against any sort of foundational
ontology--rather opting for constructed relations of person and society and
seeming to leave the door open for the sort of critical ontology you
suggest.
--King
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King Beach Phone: 517-353-0637
448 Erickson Hall Fax 517-353-6393
Sociocultural Research Group Email: kdbeach who-is-at msu.edu
CEPSE, Educational Psychology Server: SCRG who-is-at msu.edu
Michigan State University Web: http://www.educ.msu.edu/
East Lansing, MI 48824 USA units/Groups/SocCult/SCRG.html
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