Mike, surely not "better versed" (I'm not familiar with McDowell, or with
Bakhurst's criticisms of your work), but perhaps differently positioned. In
a nutshell, I think that metacognition is an internalized discourse, not an
externalized one. Our basic cognitive processes (the foundation for our
competencies) are recursively adaptive, massively parallel, and
correlational (connectionist talk). Metacognitive self-talk imputes to our
cognition levels of organization and structure that originate in a social
commentary, but aren't really operative in our cognition. Now, this social
commentary can be useful in focussing the cognitive apparatus on elements
of experience that do participate in cognitive processes. But this is
completely different than the veridical silver-bullet many educators take
it to be.
David
Mike Cole
<lchcmike who-is-at gmail.c To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity"
om> <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Sent by: cc: (bcc: David H Kirshner/dkirsh/LSU)
xmca-bounces who-is-at webe Subject: Re: [xmca] ISCAR - Sevilla 2005 -- Theoretical
r.ucsd.edu Concepts in CHAT and their connestion to physical
concepts and knowledge
10/07/2005 05:10
PM
Please respond to
mcole; Please
respond to
"eXtended Mind,
Culture,
Activity"
David-- You appear to be much better versed in this discussion than I am so
perhaps you can provide some help. I first encountered this sort of
argument in the writing of David Bakhurst who was using a philospher named
McDowell. David appeared to believe that my work suffered from failing to
appreciate McDowell's ideas. Jan was using another philosopher whose name I
do not recall, but who, if I am correct, is in the same general area. Both
were severely criticized by a member of the audience but I am not enough of
a Hegel or Spinoza scholar to have a ghost of a chance of evaluating what
was going on. However, I respect both Jan and David, neither of whom, I
strongly suspect, would agree that they were flashlights(!).
So I am left wondering what this is all about.
mike
On 10/7/05, David H Kirshner <dkirsh@lsu.edu> wrote:
>
> Lois,
>
> I share (what I sense is) your frustration with this debate. I see the
> insistence on reason, as a variety of dualist thinking entering even
> (otherwise) sophisticated discourses. Now the caveat that people "act
> ALWAYS from reason [but] not necessarily with awareness of it"
complicates
> the matter by allowing the possibility that one's actions conform to
> reasonableness criteria even if one's personal mentality doesn't actually
> participate in explicit processes of reasoning. But I think this is just
> an
> obfuscation of the basic position that humans are basically rational
> creatures. One sees the influence of this perspective in a wide range of
> pedagogical discourses (e.g., cognitivist and constructivist
> positions--and
> sometimes sociocultural, too?) that construe metacognitive mastery as the
> primary goal of education--the gateway to everything else. My favorite
> quote on the matter (though framed in terms of consciousness) diagnoses
> the
> causes of the position in almost poetic language:
>
> Consciousness is a much smaller part of our mental life than we are
> conscious of, because we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious
> of. How simple that is to say; how difficult to appreciate. It is like
> asking a flashlight in a dark room to search around for something that
> does
> not have any light shining upon it. The flashlight, since there is light
> in
> whatever direction it turns, would have to conclude that there is light
> everywhere. And so consciousness can seem to pervade all mentality when
> actually it does not. (Jaynes, 1976, p. 23)
>
> Jaynes, J. (1976). The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the
> bicameral mind. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
>
> David Kirshner
>
>
>
>
>
> Lois Holzman
> <lholzman who-is-at eastsideins To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
> titute.org <http://titute.org>> mcole@weber.ucsd.edu, " <
> xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
> Sent by: cc: (bcc: David H Kirshner/dkirsh/LSU)
> xmca-bounces who-is-at weber.uc Subject: Re: [xmca] ISCAR - Sevilla 2005 --
> Theoretical
> sd.edu <http://sd.edu> Concepts in CHAT and their connestion to physical
> concepts and knowledge
>
> 10/06/2005 06:51 PM
> Please respond to
> "eXtended Mind,
> Culture, Activity"
>
>
>
>
>
>
> I was also at the session Mike mentions below. While I too would like to
> explore more any relationship between Vygotsky and Spinoza. And that talk
> brought another thing up. I found Jan's talk to raise an
intriguing/thorny
> issue. I can't find my notes right now so my summary will be only enough
> to
> make what I'm thinking (perhaps) clear. Jan was saying that human beings
> act
> ALWAYS from reason‹‹not necessarily with awareness of it but nevertheless
> from reason. I was able to raise the following point with her in the
> session
> and later in a too short conversation: The position she was putting forth
> was a conversational dead end because with her position, anything anybody
> said will be interpreted within her framework and would overdetermine any
> conversation on the matter. If people who did not agree that human beings
> always act out of reason were we to say so, she would ask us/assume we
> were
> acting out of reason, i.e., hear/interpret/place what we said in her
> framework. So how could we go on? How can we talk together?
> Not all differences of opinion get deadlocked in this way but I think
this
> one does.
> Any thoughts?
> Lois
>
>
>
> > From: Mike Cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>
> > Reply-To: mcole@weber.ucsd.edu, "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity"
> > <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
> > Date: Tue, 4 Oct 2005 18:08:57 +0200
> > To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
> > Subject: Re: [xmca] ISCAR - Sevilla 2005 -- Theoretical Concepts in
CHAT
> and
> > their connestion to physical concepts and knowledge
> >
> > Thanks Ana, for your overview. I am checking with folks at LCHC about
> how
> we
> > could
> > most easily make all the abstracts of xmca members, or that xmca
members
> > want to
> > discuss, gathered together in one place.
> > I have a few clear minutes to write and have been reading with interest
> > what others have
> > been posting. My own feeling is that concrete issues from concrete
> sessions
> > might be
> > of interest as possible markers for further discussion.
> > For example, at a symposium chaird by Jan Derry, Vladislav Lektorsky
> talked
> > about the
> > centrality of formative experiments as central to cultural-historical
> > methodology. this interests
> > me a lot (I, too, identified this as an issue in need of discussion). I
> do
> > not have the text and
> > Slava read in English which made it difficult to follow, but that topic
> and
> > his ideas are of
> > interest to me for followup.
> > David Bakhurst talked about questions of mediation. I got a few minutes
> to
> > talk to David about
> > his paper which is on what is another of my core interests. I found it
> very
> > odd that he could
> > raise as a possible difficulty the idea that from a chat perspective,
> the
> > world could be seen
> > as accessible ONLY through a mediator. This is clearly not the position
> > taken by LSV or any
> > of his immediate colleagues, or by anyone I know of working in this
> > tradition. Much more could
> > and should be discussed vis a mediation (e,g. our earlier discussion of
> > whethe operations
> > are mediated, or if, once they become ¨transparent¨they no longer are.
> Jan
> > did not get enough
> > time to talk, but she raised some (apparently disputable) suggestions
> about
> > the relevance of
> > Hegel and Spinoza. Since the lsv-Spinoza connection is little discussed
> and
> > the issue of
> > cognition/emotion is much discussed, this was something I thought worth
> > following up on.
> > My computer connection is outta money.
> > Other comments to come
> > mike
> >
> > On 10/3/05, Ana Marjanovic-Shane <ana@zmajcenter.org> wrote:
> >>
> >> ISCAR in Sevilla, September 2005:
> >>
> >> In a conference of this scope, where one cannot hope to have attended
> >> even one 10th of all the presentations, it is hard to give any overall
> >> evaluations or even impressions. But, XMCA members who did not come to
> >> Sevilla, ought to have some notion of what went on there for 5 days in
> >> September 2005. So those of us who were there really need to put our
> >> thoughts together and give some descriptions of what went on. That is
> >> not easy. There are different aspects one can write about, different
> >> themes that ran through presentations, different aspects of
> >> organization. I will be working from my notes -- taken in haste during
> >> the workshops, from the abstracts we received and from some other
> >> sources people gave us (handouts, web pages). It would be very useful
> if
> >> someone at the XMCA headquarters could put the abstracts in pdf format
> >> on the server so that everyone could have an access to them. (Mike, is
> >> it possible to organize it?).
> >>
> >> The conference was held in 3 buildings of the Department of
Psychology,
> >> Sociology and Philosophy, at the University of Sevilla. Those are new
> >> buildings (not part of the University main venue in the old Tobacco
> >> Factory), built with inner balconies and great visibility, so they
were
> >> easy to navigate. The workshops were held in auditoriums, most of
which
> >> had a classic layout: a podium with a blackboard and projection
screen,
> >> and then rows of seats and desks. Everything fixed -- unmovable. There
> >> were just a few rooms without fixed benches -- with panels and chairs.
> >> They were used for Poster sessions. My first fear was that the first
> >> part of our session was assigned a room with fixed benches. We would
> >> have to move it -- since it was an interactive drama workshop where
> >> people have to have space to move, group and regroups and play!!
> >> Fortunately, it was not: we were given one of the poster rooms!!
> >>
> >> We usually don't consciously think of the space and its qualities when
> >> we participate in activities with intellectual content. But it is
> >> important. If our beliefs about the mediated quality of intellectual
> >> growth and functioning are true, then we have to think about the space
> >> as mediated and mediating. European universities (at least three of
> them
> >> I know, and now Sevilla) are still mediated by another paradigm about
> >> intellectual processing and education. A paradigm that Vygotsky
started
> >> to question 100 years ago. It takes much more to have this
> understanding
> >> of ourselves trickle down to those who plan and build schools and
> >> universities.
> >>
> >> Participants came from many parts of the world. But not from
> everywhere.
> >> I was happy to see people from Africa -- some of them from Rwanda!
> There
> >> were not many Africans in the previous ISCRAT conferences.
Participants
> >> came from all continents. There were many people known to us on the
> XMCA
> >> discussion list in the conference: N. Ares, D. Bakhurst, S. Chaiklin,
> M.
> >> Cole, M. de Haan, J. Derry, Y. Engeström, S. Gaskin, A. Goncu, P.
> >> Hakkarainen, L. Holzman, V. John-Stainer, E. Lampert-Shepel, C. Lee,
E.
> >> Matusov, D. Robbins, W-M. Roth, A. Stetsenko, A. Surmava, J. Valsiner,
> >> B. van Oers, N. Veresov, G. Wells, J. Wertsch..., There were many more
> >> we have to learn about.
> >>
> >> The conference program listed two main themes with lots of sub themes:
> >> THEME A.- Theoretical and Methodological Issues
> >> THEME B.- Acting in changing worlds
> >> Each workshop was classified within one of the two themes and within
> one
> >> of its subtopics. What was hard on the conference organizers and on
the
> >> conference attendees was to separate workshops that tackled similar
> >> problems in time: there were many workshops I wanted to go to, but
they
> >> were held at the same time. I always had to choose between, at least
> two
> >> competing workshops and more often between three or four. That was
very
> >> hard to juggle. I ended up running from one to another, missing chunks
> >> from each workshop that I wanted to hear, or just worrying that I was
> >> missing something else.
> >>
> >> Before the conference, I made my own selection of workshops which have
> >> something to do with play and imagination. That was my personal
program
> >> guide, I am attaching here. However, I ended up changing it to
> >> accommodate other talks which were also important to me. [Other
> >> participants in Sevilla: Please send your own selection of the
> >> workshops!"]. In my next postings, I will discuss some of the
> >> presentations I attended. I invite you who went to Sevilla to discuss
> at
> >> least one of the presentations: one paper, one concept you heard
> >> discussed, one thought you found important in Sevilla. Each one of us
> >> has a special "pet" interest, and sometimes, special ways to
understand
> >> or to "objectify" this interest through different selection of topics
> >> and different people. Maybe you want to connect the questions we asked
> >> before the Conference with your experience in the conference? Or maybe
> >> you would want to mention just something unexpected, something that
> made
> >> you think?
> >>
> >> Until later.
> >>
> >> Ana
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> --
> >>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >> Ana Marjanovic-Shane
> >>
> >> 151 W. Tulpehocken St.
> >>
> >> Philadelphia, PA 19144
> >>
> >> Home office: (215) 843-2909
> >>
> >> Mobile: (267) 334-2905
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> xmca mailing list
> >> xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> >> http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
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