The agreement to accept that we disagree is what defines the academic
environment. It is also perhaps at the basis of the popular term, "it's
only academic", since that agreement implies that action will not be taken
to change the position of the person or institution disagreeing with you.
The insistence upon this meta-discourse principle leads some to become
offended when their position is directly challenged as wrong and in that
context we hear the litanies of "many truths". Of course even those who
chant this litany must be careful. Landa, the first bishop of the Yucatan
told the same thing to the Mayans thereby getting them to concentrate all of
their codices in one library which he promptly burned. One also remembers
that the Cultural Revolution in China began with the invocation to allow
many flowers (1000?) to bloom. But let's give it the benefit of the doubt
and assume that it's guided by another meta-discourse principle of
sincerity: you do your thing, I'll do mine, let's see if we can
cross-pollinate.
Of course xmca is not dedicated exclusively to activity theory, which is my
principal interest. The Cole, Engstrom, Vasquez introduction to Seminal
Papers from the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition makes it very
clear that activity theory is only one among a variety of directions taken
to look into the area that mike described as "the relationships between
mind, culture, and activity as an academic undertaking." The latter
qualification, "as an academic undertaking", concurs well with Judith's
proposal, but from the point of view of activity theory, which has been
pointed to as a development out of Marx's Theses on Feuerbach, I'd just like
to quote one of those: 'Philosophers have only interpreted the world - the
point is to change it.'
From this perspective one can value Ilyenkov's discussion of how Kantian
metaphysics laid down the ground rules or framework for "agreeing about how
to disagree": the contradictions (which he demonstrated to be inherent to
understanding as paralogism and antinomy) are only viewed from their
subjective side (partially), they don't exist in the object of
understanding, and it is agreed that nothing can be said about the reality
of that object: the "thing-in-itself." To wit: our understanding, being
divorced from knowledge of any reality other than that constructed with the
categories of thought that derive nothing from the phenomenal world, can't
really do anything to change that world. But that is really opposed to the
fundamental position of activity theory.
So, for me, it's just not so simple as "agreeing to disagree", without
reverting to a philosophical (not necessarily academic) position from which
activity theory itself becomes inconceivable.
Paul H. Dillon