The common features common to the folks whose work I review is:
- Its emphasis on mediated action in a context
- Its insistence on the importance of the "genetic method"
understood broadly to include historical, ontogenetic and
microgenetic levels of analysis
- It seeks to ground its analysis in everyday life events
- It assumes that mind emerges in the joint mediated activity of
people. Mind, then, is in an important sense, "co-constructed"
and distributed.
- It assumes that individuals are active agents in their own
development, but they do not act in settings entirely of their
own choosing.
-It rejects cause-effect, stimulus-response, explanatory
science in favor of a science that emphasizes the emergent nature
of mind in activity and that acknowledges a central role for
interpretation in its explanatory framework.
(Both of these points are ways of talking about constraints)
- It draws upon methodologies from the humanities as well as the
biological and social sciences.
mike