Re: Wertsch's Motorcycle...

John St. Julien (stjulien who-is-at UDel.Edu)
Tue, 15 Sep 1998 10:12:03 -0400

Bill,

Just a simple reaction--The work of Mitch Resnick and others that you cite
(what I think of as the Tech-complexity gang) doesn't necessarily imply
that the individual is the unit of analysis. At least not as I read it. The
emphasis is on the emergent properties of the system examined. Granted all
the "rules" are rules about the "individuals," the "units," the "nodes."
But it is precisely the point that the larger dynamics are not directly
deducible from these rules. They surprise--and this, I think, is why they
fascinate researchers.

The larger dynamics are _relational_ and in really interesting cases
entities emerge that appear to function as higher-level "individuals"
within the large field. (Flocks emerge, divide and coalesce.)

So I don't know that you need to be worried about the unit of analysis
quite yet--I do not see why you can't treat the motorcycle as an emergent
unity and your understanding as informed by your relational understanding
of its parts. It remains true that a single unit explains nothing of
interest--for both Resnick and Wertsch. I'd bet Pirsig wouldn't find much
quality in a carburetor either.

What I suggest as an alternate worry--I don't want to deprive us of our
angst!--is that even in as mechanistic an example as the motorcycle the
parts that combine are not the same. The research strand that we are
talking about treats all the units as as interchangeable as Laplace's
monads. Even my favorite strands of this research fall into what seems to
me to be this obvious error. I don't know of any sophisticated modeling
based on difference. Maybe in ecology? And I don't really know how to begin
to think about it in a modeling context.

John

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John St. Julien (stjulien who-is-at udel.edu)
School of Education
University of Delaware