= Naoki asked if the emphasis on the global and macrostructural might be
itself a specifically masculinist pre-occupation. My instincts say that yes
it is, and therefore we need to think much more critically about these
issues. I do not think the notion of multi-scale complexity in itself
represents a particular gender bias, but the privileging of the large-scale
over the small-scale probably does.
= Diane (I think) roiled my placid (on the surface) waters by accusing much
socio-cultural developmentalism, as well as Piagetian theory, of not being
critical enough of its romantic inheritance. Are our notions of the
relevant social and cultural "context" too often built on the paradigm of
the "normal" well-cared for child, in a safe middle-class environment,
where the only relevant social factors are the helpful scaffolding from
adults, and the only relevant cultural ones the prevailing middle-class
social norms, values, beliefs and practices? Where in our accounts of
social context is the place of the real horror of the lives of too many
children, and the specific and typical events that produce those
conditions? NOT in terms of grand schemes of the evils of capitalism or
racism, but in terms of the concrete society and culture of evil: abuse,
fear, pain, death, deprivation, unlove, hate, violence ... that is far
more real to real children, even in many middle-class communities, than is
its romantic counter-fantasy ...
= Radical constructivism has alwasys seemed to me a rather "agnostic"
theory in relation to over-confident realisms, but not an "atheistic" one
... "Reality" being, after all, the God of the mainstream secular
philosophers of the Anglo-Saxon canon today. In this RadCon reminds me of
the Maturana-Varela version of autopoeisis: that the sytem insulates itself
from its environment in order to function as a system, and so it deals with
the outside only through the filters that define its being and the space
for its self-organization. Its Umwelt is all that it can know of that
outside, and all it needs to know... to be of its own kind (though not
enough perhaps, to allow it to change if the exterior ceases to maintain
the boundary tolerances it requires). As Pribram's talk and work reminded
me, our reality is an inference from our interaction with "something", but
what happens at the other end of the efferent-afferent loops of differences
that make differences to us is known only relationally, via the filters
that let us be what we are. It is an important point, though not perhaps
the whole story.
= I think Piaget was a bit of a radical constructivist himself. We often
forget that he was not really interested in development as such, but in a
"genetic" (i.e. generative or developmental) _epistemology_. He wanted to
know where the boundaries lay between the Kantian a priori vs. a posteriori
(later dumbed down to the innate vs. the learned); he wanted to know in a
sense how we come to construct the basic categories through which we
perceive, or constitute, reality. That is why he was more interested in
"scientific" categories, not because they were ones appropriated by
science, but because they were the basic philosophical candidates for the a
priori (space, time, matter, cause ...). He also had a pretty good sense of
epigenetic developmental biology in the 1970s (see _Biologie et
connaissance_), which means there was no neglect of the role of the
environment, and if the emphasis was on the material rather than the social
environment, it was precisely because what he wanted to know was how far
humans could go _without_ being taught about these candidate a priori
categories. Social input was a contamination of his design (an
exaggeration, to make the point).
= And on the other side, I think Vygotsky was still very much a
psychologist, with an orientation to mind and to feeling as the central
concerns, rather than to social evolution or cultural change or the ways in
which communities are constituted. But his notion of mind was more
materialist, or at least less Cartesian; it was more concerned with doings
than with mental entities, though there was not much else by way of
terminology then to speak of these things. Even Saussure fell back on
mentalist vocabulary to talk about semiology. Piaget, on the other hand,
was not a psychologist at all; he was a natural scientist turned empirical
philosopher. If you had asked Piaget where his famous schemas were, I don't
think he would have told you they were in the mind (Kantians are not very
Cartesian); he might more likely have said they were in the interactive
relations of the organism and its environment, and meant by that that they
were _necessary_ relations, given what the organism is in relation to what
the material world is, or perhaps something even more congenial to a
radical constructivist. What would Vygotsky have said differently? except
that his premises would have emphasized the material processes of action in
the world, rather than the formal structures of relations among those
actions. Both of their views were, for me, far more sophisticated than the
cognitivist models of the 1970s, in which Chomsky and others revived an
amateur Cartesianism and a lot of philosophically naive psychologists
embraced a theoretical framework that interfered very little with their
Will to Science.
JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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