At 08:52 AM 2/21/2002 -0800, you wrote:
David-- In your reply to Tina, I was wondering what the enculturation/
deliberate instruction contrast has in common, or not, with the Vygotskian
notion of everyday and scientific concepts. My colleague, Margie Gallego,
has been wondering in what ways everyday concepts might promote transformations
in scientific concepts -- her interpretation being that Vygotsky treats
scientific concepts as transformers of everyday, but perhaps not the other
way around.
mike
-----------------------
The other way around does present an interesting issue I think.
Everyday _concepts_ tend not to influence scientific ones, except at the
origins of the latter (a historical effect), because the strategy of
science is to insulate itself from contradiction by everyday experience;
this is a slightly jaundiced, but still fair I hope, reading of Latour.
On the other hand, everyday _thinking_ (the processes and strategies,
insofar as they can be separated from the contents) is, as Gary noted,
still quite basic to scientific reasoning. And not just abductions and
inferences, prototype categorization, etc., but even narrative -- there are
a lot of narrative forms of meaning-making carefully buried out of sight in
scientific work (as it proceeds from, say, the experimental or fieldwork
stage to the finished/published generalization stage). Science has not
really invented any new forms of reasoning; it just tends to sustain
systematic inquiry over longer timescales, I think, with more institutional
memory, more collective winnowing, and of course more precise and
specialized contents (measurements, definitions).
The everyday does of course influence the scientific when the scientific
deigns to the concrete .... i.e. when it is applied science, for then its
careful insulation must be frayed away, if it is to be of any use (mostly
of course it is not of any instrumental use; we use it for legitimation,
rhetorically, as in education or political science or even, I think, much
of economics). Good applied science has to make major compromises with the
logics of practice, and in doing so it can learn from them ... and take
away new variations to be re-insulated in the creation of new theories or
sciences. I think this has happened, for example, when linguistics has
tried to deal with text and meaning and come away changed (or at least new
schools of linguistics have been born in this way). One might say that
(some) psychology has been influenced likewise by its encounters with child
development, cultural difference, everyday practices ... though I am not
entirely sure it has taken any lessons from its encounters with education.
I think that ecology is starting to learn from its encounters with
environmentalism (for example that people and social institutions are part
of, not outside, ecosystems).
By and large, though, science abhors the everyday ... it's just too messy
for the paradigms of theoretical neatness and all-cases generalizations.
Applying science to the everyday is usually a terrible mistake ... fraught
with danger for the everyday, if nonetheless also filled with new
possibilities for future sciences.
JAY.
---------------------------
JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
---------------------------
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Mar 01 2002 - 01:00:21 PST