xmcamail.2007_06: RE: [Possible SPAM] Re: [Possible SPAM] Re:

From: Louise Hawkins <l.hawkins who-is-at cqu.edu.au>
Date: Thu Jun 28 2007 - 18:21:06 PDT

I would love to read your article. I am finding that not having multiple
languages at my disposal does limit what I can read from the original
source :)

Louise

-----Original Message-----
From: Wolff-Michael Roth [mailto:mroth@uvic.ca]
Sent: Friday, 29 June 2007 10:31 AM
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
Subject: Re: [Possible SPAM] Re: [Possible SPAM] Re: [xmca]
Copernicus,Darwinand Bohr

Hi Luise,
much of what KH wrote is in German, a good number of things online, but
in German. I can't find my copies of:
Holzkamp, K. (1991). Societal and individual life processes. In C. W.
Tolman & W. Maiers (Eds.), Critical psychology: Contributions to an
historical science of the subject (pp. 50-64). Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Holzkamp, K. (1991). Experience of self and scientific objectivity.
In C. W. Tolman & W. Maiers (eds), Critical psychology: Contributions to
an historical science of the subject (pp. 65-80). Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.

to tell you whether he develops his ideas about "categorical analysis"
or "categorical reconstruction" in one of those chapters. I describe it
in a piece:
Cybernetics And Human Knowing. Vol. 10, no. 2, pp. 8-28 From
Environmental Determination to Cultural-Historical Mediation:
Toward Biologically Plausible Social Theories

I can make it available to you as PDF file.

Cheers,
Michael

On 28-Jun-07, at 4:57 PM, Louise Hawkins wrote:

Michael,

Do you have some references that I can look at dicuss 'how psychological
constructs need to be categorically constructed on evolutionary and
cultural-historical grounds'?

Regards

Louise

-----Original Message-----
From: Wolff-Michael Roth [mailto:mroth@uvic.ca]
Sent: Friday, 29 June 2007 01:59 AM
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
Subject: Re: [Possible SPAM] Re: [Possible SPAM] Re: [xmca]
Copernicus,Darwinand Bohr

Hi Paul,
it would perhaps be of interest to you to follow the thinking of
philosophers of difference, which I think take up Marx's agenda that
also was taken up by Vygotsky and his students, including Klaus Holzkamp
who suggested that much of psychology is a reification of folk beliefs
rather than a real science. He, his wife Ute Osterkamp, and some others
then showed how psychological constructs need to be categorically
constructed on evolutionary and cultural-historical grounds.

I see this as a parallel effort to philosophy of difference, first
philosophies, that take into account their very own beginnings. Thus, as
one of Emmanuel Levina's book title suggests, it is a move to go "Beyond
Essence" and think Being as being grounded, historically, in something
that is "Otherwise than Being."

Jean-Luc Nancy, another philosopher of difference, grounds being in the
"with" that precedes being; Thus, we have GROUPS of chimpanzees, and
chimpanzee experience of WITHness prior to and constituting the ground
of consciousness.

:-)

Michael

Levinas, Emmanuel (1998). Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence
(Alphonso Lingis, transl.). Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press.
Nancy, J.-L. (2000). Being singular plural. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press.

On 28-Jun-07, at 8:41 AM, Paul Dillon wrote:

Michael,

I'm not at all clear as to why you think the distinction between
expert and novice essentializes any more than recognizing hot and cold
essentializes, light and dark. There are continuums:
temperature, luminosity, and knowledge/skill for which each of these
terms functions as a place marker. But there are also limits on the the
continuum, no?

I'm also unclear as to what you are trying to say by invoking
Ilyenkov. I have been sitting on a post-in-preparation since this
thread began concerning Ilyenkov's theory of the "ideal" which I
consider very relevant to what is being attempted in "toolsforthought".
I hope to post it soon along with a discussion of the work of Andrew
Chitty and Peter Jones both of whom have done work that is much more
intelligible on how "intelligence" is present in tools, one which
doesn't however transform tools into "agents" or "actants". Hopefullly
I will get it distilled into something suitable before this discussion
ends.

Paul Dillon

Wolff-Michael Roth <mroth@uvic.ca> wrote:
Think about culture as being produced and reproduced simultaneously,
that is, always also transformed, never the same, always in flux.

I am trying to provide resources that people can use to jolt them out of
their ontologies.... and into the one Vygotsky and his students had
adopted from Marx.... an ontology of difference as Il'enkov shows, not
one of the same that dominates the current discussion, which
ESSENTIALIZES experts and novices.

Michael

On 28-Jun-07, at 7:36 AM, Paul Dillon wrote:

Michael,

I haven't read your article yet I'm wondering whether you equate
professor with expert, student with novice? This clearly would make your
statement about expertise being up for grabs a bit circular, no?

Often a student has insights into a specific problem that the professor
doesn't, but you are now at the graduate level, right?
That is already stratospheric in relation to the first year physics
student being taught a section by the grad student. It is unlikely that
the freshman could distinguish between the expertise of the professor or
the grad student in a conversation about physics.

Paul Dillon

Wolff-Michael Roth wrote:
Hi,
thinking from an ontology of difference----the hardest thing for many
Westerners subject to individualist ideology---means that we are
different from ourselves, that heterogeneity is at the hard of sameness
and Self. This also means that expertise is heterogeneous, within
individuals and across, and even within itself. This, then, makes the
ontological opposition of THE expert and THE novice highly questionable.
In a paper that David Middleton and I published not too long ago, we
show how this turns out to be the case in research interviews conducted
with respect to graphing by an undergraduate physics students with
professors in his own department, and who is expert and who is novice
with respect to a particular issue continuously is up for grab.
Cheers,
Michael

Roth, W.-M., & Middleton, D. (2006). The making of asymmetries of
knowing, identity, and accountability in the sequential organization of
graph interpretation. Cultural Studies of Science Education, 1, 11- 81.

On 27-Jun-07, at 7:36 PM, Louise Hawkins wrote:

I also find issue with the distinction between expert and novice, as if
the expert has something to give and the novice something to receive.
How many times is it the student who poses a question that raises a
point that the 'expert' learns from?

Louise

________________________________

From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu]
On Behalf Of Michael Glassman
Sent: Wednesday, 27 June 2007 04:37 AM
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
Subject: RE: [Possible SPAM] Re: [Possible SPAM] Re: [xmca] Copernicus,
Darwinand Bohr

Martin

Why this distinction between expert and novice? What does it really buy
us? And who gets to make the distinction? It seems to me in an
expert/novice scenario all power lies in the hands of those who get to
make this distinction on whatever level, and get to define the two
classes. Take a look at the political class in the United States, we
define experts as those who have the right cultural capital, wear the
right type of ties and suits, who speak in somber, modulated voices with
a weary sigh of resignation, suggesting "of course you cannot see what I
can see, but trust me."

This is not to say every generation starts from scratch. Every
generation starts with the tools that they have, but then they figure
out how to use those tools to solve what invariably must be new
problems, or they develop new tools out of the old tools. Let's say we
have a set of spears we use to hunt food. There are great spear throwers
who use those spears and teach others to use them as well.
Their "expertise" in spear throwing gives them great power within the
community. But things change, and the spears that were once used on
larger animals are not as good for smaller animals. Are the spear
throwers going to give up their place in the community as "experts?" Or
are they going to say, well if we just wait, or if we use the spear in a
different way, or it is the fault of our lazy children who do not train
in spear throwing the way previous generations did. Meanwhile the food
supply dwindles for the community. A young person examines the spear and
says, hmmm, the arrow head pierces the skin but it cannot reach the skin
with these new animals that we hunt. Perhaps I can create something else
- a bow and arrow perhaps. But she is not an expert.
Who, in a hierarchical system of knowledge development would listen and
adopt the work of this young innovator? This is always the danger of a
heirarchical system of knowledge development.

In a more lateral system of development information is everything. As a
species were are problem solvers, but our problem solving is based on
the easy access and flow of information. I just read the most
fascinating article by the economist Amriyat (sp?) Sen. In it he talks
about famine. He makes a really good argument that famine is almost
never about food. There is always enough food even in some of the major
famines of the twentieth century. It is about the lack of capability for
getting to the food. At its core the lack of information as a tool in
obtaining this basic human function. What else is there other than
information. When we define information as static and give it value
separate from the problems we are working on, isn't that when we find
the most trouble, have the most difficulties in problems solving?

I watch my son play his World of Warcraft game. I wish I knew more about
it. But I see him adapting and recalibrating constantly, developing
strategies and processes that see incredible to me. It is a virtual
world in which there are no "experts." The world and my son and the
other players co-exist.

I don't know if I've done such a good job trying to explore this.
Perhaps a problem that needs greater consideration.

Michael

________________________________

From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu on behalf of Martin Packer
Sent: Tue 6/26/2007 2:04 PM
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
Subject: [Possible SPAM] Re: [Possible SPAM] Re: [xmca] Copernicus,
Darwinand Bohr

Michael, you would have each generation start on their own, from
scratch? No experts, just novices? That really is a post-apocalyptic
vision!

My point was there is more to life (and education) than "functioning"
and
"information." The danger with the tool metaphor, and the emphasis on
artifacts as tools, is that they reduce all of life to the production
process. That is not just a conceptual mistake, it is a political
agenda. To argue that thinking is not important, only tool use, is not
to argue against formalization, it is to promote a purely instrumental
conception of human action and interaction. It is to promote an extreme
version of the division of labor, in which only a tiny elite get to
think about the nature of thinking, and everyone else is simply using
tools skillfully but thoughtlessly.

On 6/26/07 12:40 PM, "Michael Glassman" wrote:

> But if this information is so important, and it exists as part of the
problem
> solving tools of humanity, don't we trust humans to discover it
through their
> own activities?

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RE: [Possible SPAM] Re: [Possible SPAM] Re: [xmca] Copernicus, Darwinand Bohr