Mike,
I've just reread your chapter with Yrjo and generally go along with your
argument. But I should like you to be rather more specific about how you
conceptualize "knowledge". Putting quotes round "in" alerts us to the
metaphorical use of "in" (not water in a bucket), but leaves unexplained
what exactly it is that is distributed.
Here is a sample of passages in which you use the term in that chapter:
"The cultural environment into which children are born contains the
accumulated knowledge of prior generations." (p.9)
"This point has been emphasized by Ted Schwartz (1978, 1990), who
explores the way in which knowledge is distributed differentially across
persons, generations, occupations, classes, religions, institutions, and
so on." (p.15)
"As Fussell and Krauss (1989) clearly demonstrate, part of one's cultural
knowledge is knowledge about the extent to which others are likely to
share one's knowledge and cultural perspective." (p.15)
One reading of the last two quotes is that different people (as
individuals and as members of different classes, institutions, etc.) know
differently with respect to any particular activity system. That is to
say, they will participate differently - making different discursive
contributions, selecting different mediating artifacts and using them
differently, with somewhat different goals in view - and that these
different knowings will interact, both supportively and contestedly, in
the enactment of the activity.
The first quote, on the other hand, implies that knowledge is also "in"
cultural artifacts - "the cognitive residue of prior actions
crystallized in the object" (p.14). But the knowledge "in" cultural
artifacts is rather different from the knowledge "in" people.
Certainly, artifacts afford - or even constrain - certain modes of
knowing; but it takes a person who knows how to use the artifact,
doesn't it, for the knowledge "in" the artifact to contribute to the
activity? For example, a printing press or a document produced by the
press cannot contribute to the dissemination of information unless they
are used by people who know how they function as mediators of that activity.
What I am trying to understand is what it is that is "in" both people and
artifacts that can be referred to as "knowledge". Or to put it
differently: people engaged in an activity know with the aid of
artifacts, but what and where is "knowledge"?
Gordon Wells, gwells who-is-at oise.on.ca
OISE, Toronto.