Hi David,
It's rather difficult to make a comment on a statement that has been
bulwarked with a reference to a work that I haven't read, ie Gee's book, but
maybe you could briefly summarize exactly what you mean by "the truth about
what one thinks" in opposition to "the cultural practice" of talking about
what is in one's mind. In particular I would be interested to know if you
think there is some discourse that yields a way to talking about what is in
one's mind that isn't a "cultural practice" and that therefor confers an
"objective" order of truth to what is thought or said about what is in one's
mind. Or would you hold that one can't know the truth of what is in one's
mind but only the truth of what is in another's mind?
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Paul.
As regards another's mind, I think most people recognize the tentative
nature of their knowledge and understanding. But the dualist suppositions
of our culture give us our own mind as introspectively accessible.
Thus we claim to know our motivations and intentions as given to us
through intropsection. Indeed, the heart of mind/body dualism is that
it is our motivations and intentions (as consciously received) that
"cause" our behavior.
Gee's (1992) position is that our talk about ourselves reveals the
ideologies by which we have been colonized, rather than something
veridical about our cognitive processes. Indeed, from a connectionist
perspective, Gee (1992) believes cognitive processes are waves of
associative connections pulsating through the brain---not the sort
of thing that can be talked about at all. But Gee's political analysis of
oppressive ideologies is not the only way to go. My own work on
mathematical cognition, for example, regards the discourse of logicality
of the mathematics community as inherently valuable, even though
ones competence in, say, manipulating algebraic expressions doesn't
have much to do with the logical overlays one gets from the surrounding
culture and then applies in rationalizing our own cognitive processes.
In short, to answer your question, the usual cognitivist theories of mind
provide a discourse that "confers an 'objective' order of truth to what is
thought or said about what is in one's mind." It is this discourse that
produced the notion of metacognition that Eva urged Mike to employ
with caution.
David