Re: a comment from Wertsch

Eva Ekeblad (eva.ekeblad who-is-at ped.gu.se)
Sun, 20 Jun 1999 09:16:57 +0200

Thanks Mike,
for channeling the topic to Jim,
and thanks, Jim,
for the answer -- leaving dichotomizing polemics to stormy youth ;-)

At 14.35 -0700 99-06-19, Mike Cole forwarded what Jim Wertsch wrote:
>Hence I continue to think that there is much more complementarity than
>opposition in our various perspectives. The differences that exist derive
>primarily from the empirical phenomena we have chosen to examine rather
>than from a principled difference in theoretical commitment.

-- which was pretty much what you, Jim, and Arne Raeithel came to agree
upon in the 1995 discussion (before Arne went on to dialogue with other
voices in that channel).

I appreciate the Kuhnian point about exemplars, but also cannot help but
thinking that the perspectives we are afflicted with also derive from what
parts of the unkempt forests of literature we have traversed and where in
those forests we have made ourselves at home and planted our own sprigs:
these wanderings in the overflowing underbrush (there is always too much to
read) will, through the years, have been in dialogue with the "phenomena we
have chosen to examine".

Somebody out there to take up the defense for " principled difference in
theoretical commitment"?

Eva