Thank you so much for your summary of the issue of
Piaget abd Vygotsky. I agree on many points you summarized
concerning Piaget and Vygotsky.
However, I do not think that Piaget' s approach has any relation
to the issue of socially, politically, mediationally, contextually
and interactionally constituted "individual's mind" and the
concept ot "individual" such as Bateson, Foucault, Ray McDermott,
and ethnomethodologists have argued.
Further, it seems to me that treating "social interaction"
as a kind of environmental factor for "individual' s development"
and tacitly, naively presupposing "individual' s mind" do not open
the new dimension of discussion at all even though one thinks
the relation between "social interaction" and "individual
development" in a more complicated way.
Your referred to the issue of boundary crossing and,
this issue will be a big challenge not only to artifatcs
designers, designers of learning environment, and
researchers of workplace but to all developlmental
pyschologists.
The issue of boundary crossing is concerning communities,
divisions of labour. For example, the boundary of communities
are organized, maintained, crossed, and reconstructed by using
artifacts and interaction.
That is the true in the case of "individual".
For example, the boundary of "individuals" is organized,
maintained, crossed, and reconstructed by using artifacts
and by a specific interaction with others.
If so, develpment is not the development of
the previously given "individual" as an objective entity or
as a container of mind but the sequence of more dynamic,
mutual, political, complicated boundary constitutions and
crossings.
Let us ask and doubt the tacit presupposition of "individuality"
or "( diane' s referring) the ideology of individualism" of
developmental pyschologists. I think that is the starting points
of discussion at present, here.
Naoki Ueno
NIER, Tokyo