Re: Silent participation

Paul Dillon (dillonph who-is-at northcoast.com)
Sun, 12 Sep 1999 12:14:04 -0700

Phillip,

I thought your examples were wonderful. I've already read Eva's post about
the current discussion of silence as an example of what Kort calls
"community building" in the three layer model she adapts for her CoCoMu
paper. Your examples provide an excellent illustration of what could almost
be called a moral framework (rules) for handling the implicit hierarchies of
the academic division of labor in an activity system pursuing abductive
multilogue. The division of labor of course being the unevenly distributed
access to the resources (knowledge? ideas?) that are a precondition of the
multilogue in the first place. There is a bind here: Eva points out that at
the level of abductive multilogue, the community is defined by a principle
where everybody may have something to contribute. Its as though the
hierarchy of the academic community in the second level constitutes the very
boundary/contradiction that must be transcended (subsumed) for the
realization third level (abductive multilogue as zone of proximal
development). In a beautiful example of structuration, the negotiation of
these contradictions both draws on and creates the conditions for the
multilogue.

I was unaware of previous discussions of the half-baked metaphor. The old
raw and cooked again, huh? I should have known.

You stated that you haven't a clue as to what I meant by "metaphor, not as
an analysis, but as an expressive expansion not instrumental application".
You wrote, "i've not a clue what you mean by this. i've always thought that
a metaphor was one way of analysis through comparison - what have i
missed?" I guess I was making a distinction between concepts inherent in
a system constituting some primary object (half-baked in this case as
applied in the novice brioche baker's case) from those cases where the
term's use is extended to objects from another activity system. You could
probably tell whether a term is used in this sense by seeing if procedures
can be specified to evaluate the statemement: "x is half-baked." In the
case of the brioche, one could specify texture, temperature, moistness (esp
as relates to burnt), color, etc. In the case of the idea, it is hard to
say what procedures could be specified for saying an idea is or isn't
half-baked, and probably, if one got to the level of such procedures, one
would find that the term "half-baked" (or any other similar term) had been
abandoned in favor of terms proceeding from the primary activity's inherent
vocabulary, e.g., fully thought through, fully researched, etc.

Paul H. Dillon