[Xmca-l] Re: Unit of analysis RE: experience

[Glassman, Michael]

Hi Lubomir,

My feeling right now is that Dewey might disagree with your argument.  It's a pretty compelling argument and I probably cannot do it justice.  Dewey thinks that one of the mistakes we have made in the progress of human society is in creating a knowledge base that is in some way separate from what people are actually doing to solve problems.  This create an elite population of people who have knowledge, based on what other people do, and then use that knowledge as a form of control.  This is seems happened first in religion and then in academics.  The intellectual elites (Dewey doesn't use that word and I wish I could come up with a better one right now) develop a knowledge pool separate from the actual activity of problem solving that is then used to control those very problem solvers.

It's a pretty radical idea (I have been surprised how radical a book Experience and Nature actually is, but also how prescient it is).

Michael
________________________________________
From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu [xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu] on behalf of Lubomir Savov Popov [lspopov@bgsu.edu]
Sent: Friday, July 04, 2014 11:04 AM
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity; ablunden@mira.net
Subject: [Xmca-l]  Unit of analysis RE: experience

Hello every one,

The unit of analysis is conceptualized in relation to the nature of phenomenon, the paradigm selected, and the objectives of the project, to name just a few. There is no problem in conceptualizing experience as an unit of analysis. The questions are:  in what projects, regarding which situations, etc. We can conceptualize alternative units of analysis regarding one project. The issue is which of them will be more heuristic or more productive regarding our project. There are always competing conceptualizations, coming from different paradigmatic traditions or ways to look at the phenonon that is studied. We have to make a choice based on our epistemological and methodological expertese.

Just a few thoughts,

Lubomir