Mike, thanks for your explanation of your ice cream analogy! It makes
much more sense this way. It does seem that heterogeneity would have
its conceptual limits--I guess the problem is deciding on those
limits or boundaries! That is, what can we agree to include within
the rubric "cultural psychology"? What is the title of your book, Mike?
In my own book on culture and attachment, I say that despite their
diversity, symbolic approaches to the social sciences generally share the
assumption that human beings construct meaning through their cultural
symbol systems, with language being one of culture's most powerful symbol
systems, and that many of these approaches go on to assert that this
construction occurs within a matrix of social interaction. Pretty
broad and vague, I know, but it was the best distillation I could
come up with. I actually had to debate the last point with one of
my co-authors, who felt this was too limiting! The final wording was
something of a compromise between us ("many of these approaches go
on to assert that...").
Helena wrote:
>Two (or more) sets of principles can be "both true" in this sense
>but profoundly different in the ways they move from principle to
>implication.
This is an intriguing statement. Could you give an example?
Dewey, I like your description of the necessity of holding in tension
and in perspective both the individual and the socio-cultural-historical
context of learning. This seems to be one of the fundamental theoretical
tensions in the history of the social sciences, and people seem
inevitably to focus more heavily on one side of the issue or the other.
It's almost like looking through a telescope: through one end of it,
everything is close up (the individual is in focus); through the other
end, everything is far away (the whole is in focus); simultaneously
accounting for or seeing both seems to be what's difficult.
I was also intrigued by your final sentence:
> So, in my view, while we cannot talk about equality
>of or relative validity, we can talk of implications taken-as-agreed-upon
>by groups of people and hegemonies of implications.
The idea of agreed-upon HEGEMONIES of implications is interesting.
Could you give some examples? I guess I am also interested in hearing
people's thoughts about Mike's comment in which he admits to distinguishing
"context" from "activity".
Robin