Thinking about the two threads we have now at the list, one on
constructivism ("All the way with Piaget" and one on "18th century China,
forks and cyborgs" (oops!) I would like to add:
In "Radical Constructivism: A way of knowing and learning" Ernst von
Glaserfeld, (Falmer Press, 1995, p. 1) writes:
"It [this book] is an attempt to explain a way of thinking and makes no
claim to describe an independent reality. That is why I prefer to call it
and approach to or a theory of _knowing_. Though I have used them in the
past, I now try to avoid the terms `epistemology' or 'theory of knowledge'
for constructivism, because they tend to imply the traditional scenario
according to which novice subjects are born into a ready-made world, which
they must try to discover and 'represent' to themselves. From the
constructivist point of view, the subject cannot transcend the limits of
the individual experience. This condition, however, by no means eliminates
the influence and the shaping effects of social interaction".
I have the same impression.
He continues: "As the Italian philosopher Giambatista VIco (1744-1961)
remarked, we cannot reconstruct the past exactly as it was, because we
cannot avoid framing and understanding our recollections in terms of the
concepts we have at present"
1) Is it possible to separate and "ontology" from an "epistemology"
when adopting either "constructivism" or a "cultural historical" approach?
I don't think it is even desirable, although it is important to
understand why we keep doing that.
Considering that "learning" and "doing" a world are inseparable and
mutually dependent, not only for both this approaches, but also for others
like Bateson's, Gibson's, Heiddeger's, Freire's work, how can the study
of being (ontology) be separated form the study of knowing (epistemology).
It is exactly this gulf that these approaches are bridging.
My point on the message about mediation and triads was that although
the theory is very clear about the need for simultaneous mediation or
construction in learning or interacting, in practice, the construal of
this models and their application is always at the borderline between
drifting towards either objects or processes tied to more traditional
frameworks.
2) How can we enrich these models or taxonomies of activity, mediation,
representation etc., in order to present or visualize them for new comers
in such a way that both the dynamical (historical-developmental) and the
situated aspects could be mastered easily.
Luiz
ps: I was not following the discussion closely, but the following quote
may be of interest for the discussion too:
"At root, constructivism simply represents a preference for the Kantian
model of knowledge over the Lokean. The 18th-century philosopher Immanuel
Kant, one of the pillars of Western tradition, regarded knowledge as an
invention of an active organism interacting with an environment. In
contrast, John Locke, founder of British Empiricism, saw knowledge as the
result of the outside world's etching a copy of itself onto our initially
blank 'tabula rasa' minds (Rychlak, 1981). Thus, the card-carrying Lockean
regards mental images as basically 'representations' of something
_outside_ the world, while Kantian assumes that mental images are wholly
creations _of_ the organism, produced as a by-product of its navigation
through life. Thus the images of the objectivist can be thought as
'discoveries' about the outside world, and the images of the
constructivist are more like 'inventions' about what is out there" in (Jay
S Efran, Robert J. Lukens and Michael D. Lukens "Constructivism: What's in
it for you? knowing when a table is not a sofa" in "The evolving
Therapist" edit by Richard Simon et al. Guilford Press 1992, pag 255-277).
_____________________________________________________________
Luiz Ernesto Merkle merkle who-is-at csd.uwo.ca
University of Western Ontario voice: +1 519 858 3375 (home)
Department of Computer Science fax: +1 519 661 3515 (work)
N6A 5B7 London Ontario Canada http://www.csd.uwo.ca/~merkle