Sorry if I was a bit unclear. I was trying to separate two
possibilities.
(1) A "situated" account of learning, which says that the capacity to
accomplish a cognitive task depends on partial structures or processes
at several levels. So, in Hutchins' example of navigating a battleship
the navigation is only possible because of the affordances of various
material objects, patterns in symbolic objects (maps, language) and
tools, representations in individual minds, collective organization of a
team, etc. No one of these levels contains the entire pattern that
makes navigation possible, but all of these partial patterns together
allow the task to be done successfully. Thus "learning" or "cognition"
does not seem to exist at any one timescale or level of explanation.
(2) An account in which we would place "learning" or "cognition" at one
higher or longer timescale, as a matter of something practiced by an
individual over many contexts over time. In Jay's paper he sometimes
refers to identity as something that actually exists at this longer time
scale.
These two are not necessarily mutually exclusive. I am really asking
Jay to clarify for me how to incorporate the multi-level account in (1)
into his new terminology.
Stanton
-- Stanton Wortham Graduate School of Education University of Pennsylvania 3700 Walnut Street Philadelphia, PA 19104-6216 (215) 898-6307