> At 7:45 PM +0900 5/5/98, Naoki Ueno wrote:
> >
> >A kind of "preconceptions" are also mutually, collaboratively,
> >situatedly constituted with a teacher, an experimenter who give
> >students to strange, sometime very funny, nosnsese problems or who
> >try to organize the very strange langauge game.
>
> I see your point. I would like to rejoin that, of the sciences,
> physics in particular is definitely a very strange language game.
>
> It does go farther than that. In the work I did with Paul Horwitz
> and Ed Taylor, I found research indicating the reason for one kind
> of difficulty with visually observing objects in motion, to be
> traced to eye-tracking.
this sounds interesting... is it possible to provide a couple of
references?
>The human visual system tends to track
> objects in such a way that makes it difficult to 'percieve' an event
> the way a physicist conceptualizes it.
a good question is: does it have anything to do with the human visual
system per se?
>A good example of this
> phenomenon is to observe an airplane landing while driving on the
> highway. The airplane appears not to be moving.
if you're going as fast as the airoplane, then it would seem
motionless indeed... but if you look at the background you'll readily
realize that you're moving too... an independent observer would
confirm that both you and the airoplain are moving and thus the
motion is relative and you have to establish a frame of reference for
describing it....
> The human visual
> system is comparing the motion of the aircraft image on your retina
> with respect to the much faster motion of the image of the ground.
> Such perceptions are not socially, mutually negotiated with some
> other person. It is you in the car looking at an airplane.
I attended a lecture by Daniel Dennet last year on the nature of
consciousness which mainly focused on perception... the same point
was made (more or less)... he used notions like direct perception
to describe a number of phenomanal where humans err visually...
I tend to think that perception is socially conditioned as well...
the late Rosalind Driver gave the example of conducting a
physics experiment and reporting observations by an expert physicist
and a lay person... the observations of the two are bound to be
different not because of the fact that their perception is
registering different physical manipulations but because of the
framework they use to make sense of what they see...
this is typically put within science education as follows:
'you don't embark on a boat to sail around the world if you believe
that the world is flat'...
even at a purely epistemological level (and always with respect to
epxerimentation), Gooding brilliantly pointed out that, when it comes
to observing data of an experiment, "one could not really look and
see; one had to act"....
this brings up the issue of activity (agency) as he calls it in
making sense of the observations...
I wonder how perception and activity are related... and what the
differences between Piaget & Leont'ev are on this issue...
regards,
Ilias
_______________________________________________
Ilias Karasavvidis
Department of Curriculum Technology
Faculty of Educational Science and Technology
University of Twente, P.O. Box 217
7500 AE Enschede, The Netherlands
Voice: +31534894473
Fax: +31534892895
Email: Karasavvidis who-is-at edte.utwente.nl
http://13.89.40.26/www
http://130.89.40.26/ilias
"The ancient Greeks did not know the main thing
about themselves, that they were ancient Greeks"
Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin
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