Bourdieu on Chomsky and Vygotsky

AGRE Phil 44.27.71.39 Professeur invite d'A Collinot (agre who-is-at laforia.ibp.fr)
Thu, 12 Oct 1995 15:29:38 +0100

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.