Re: chat unit of analysis

From: Paul H.Dillon (illonph@pacbell.net)
Date: Tue Aug 08 2000 - 09:35:54 PDT


Nate,

The idea of a CHAT unit of analysis seems to run counter to the way that Vygotsky himself used the term. Speaking of psychology as a "complex holistic system" he pointed to the need to find a unit that is further unanalyzable yet retained the properties of the whole. (Note that a simple translation: properties=determination, whole=totality, puts this into a hegelian-marxist terminology). Bakhurst argued that Vygotsky's "unit analysis" as an example of concrete universal was specific to its domain, and offered "no general procedure for establishing the units of psychological analysis", rather meaning serves as the unit/concrete universal for consciousness which is the concrete totality of Vygotsky's inquiries.

What then is the object, the concrete totality, of CHAT? A quick perusal of the related web-sites available through your own kind services will quickly show that there really isn't one but many objects. Correspondingly there would be many units of analysis corresponding to these different objects -- for those who pursue this direction.

I think that the idea that there is ONE unit of analysis that encompasses all of the objects under investigation by those who pitch their tents in the CHAT campground (a summer image) runs counter to the direction of the theoretical basis from which the notion of unit analysis itself derives.

Of course this does not deny that the domains of human practice are not interrelated but then, this would be a question of concrete research and would constitute a domain that would presume the existence of well formed theories of the concrete universals/units of analysis in question. The attempt to reduce all of the domains of human practice to the determinations of one, the reductionist enterprise, has well known, disastrous results.

The one thing that can be said about concrete universals/units of analysis is that they are encountered as individual phenomena in the everyday world of practice (e.g., commodities, meaning, and instructional-units come to mind), not simply as theories existing primarily in the minds of the theorists who invent them as part of the circulation of intellectual commodities.

My twenty cents (inflation you know).

Paul H. Dillon



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