What's to disagree with? My question boils down to this -- are you more interested in a theory of ethics, or more interested in the ethics of theories/theorists? IMHO, working on the former may be the long road to the latter, as it is aimed at addressing primarily a mediating artifact (the development of chat theory), while the latter (to take our recent episode as evidence) primarily indexes the troubles between subjects and rules -- the activity system being xmca.
It is a system that has a history of being resistant to the clarification of its rules (evidence the voting episode), save one -- a sort of 'free speech'. Other email lists have different rules to prevent and remove troubles between subjects and rules, i.e. moderation (as a shift in DoL) with more explicit rules followed by the moderator for what is acceptable and not, or (not "exclusive or") the expulsion of subjects from the system ( a different rule set) when violations occur.
I think it is important to be very clear in what we are talking about and what are our individual goals if we are planning intervention (a design experiment?), that will change the elements and relations of the xmca system.
There is evidence in recent postings that several people (me included) consider schizmogenetic pas de deux (folie a deux?) to be objectionable. If THAT is what we want to exclude from our future, I think we should address it directly and explicitly (though I have no confidence that such a discussion will result in any changes).
bb
>I appreciate your concerns, Bill, but basically I disagree. I do think that
>a theory of the social is necessarily an ethical one, so we may as well
>make the question of its ethic a topic of discussion, or we will be
>negligent in furthering the development of it. That is not to imply AT ALL
>that my proposals were sound ones. It's a collective project, right? The
>investigator ventriloquates the ethic of a CHAT community, at best, and in
>the course of investigation, implicates others in its development too.
>
>I realize that the community investigated 'has' its rules, but under a CHAT
>lens, certain values (e.g., re-distributive values) would guide the
>analysis, no? Do I have that wrong? I am at a disadvantage here, since I
>can only speculate about an AT intervention, never having actually done it.
>
>As for wizardliness as exemplary, that would not be my view. You're right
>that anything below the level of principle -- like strategies -- is
>problematic as an ethical model....
>
>What do others think?
>
>Judy
>
>
>
>At 04:25 PM 4/27/01 -0400, you wrote:
>>I'm not sure what CHAT-like is. It would seem that as a theory of human
>>activity, CAHT might be able to account for the diverse strategies that
>>have arisen in a culture. Imposing values on those strategies is something
>>that people in a group may choose to do, and the theory may account for
>>that too, if it were made more explicit about such things. I suppose
>>unpacking more the categories of rules and community and their
>>interrelations in Yrjo's model would help. One could then understand the
>>interplay of values that are shared and not shared among participants in
>>their interaction dynamics. What I am concerned with is ascribing detailed
>>cultural values to the theory per se, or selecting one ensemble of
>>strategies (i.e wizardry) as as exemplary of the theory. Doing so does not
>>seem to follow from the historical development of CHAT, nor from its
>>structure. A critical question too is that if CHAT is a theory in which
>>the investigator's value system is built in to its structure, then how can
>>it be used to describe cultures other than the investigators, without major
>>distortions of the target cultures value system? What do you think?
>>Bill Barowy, Associate Professor,
>>Lesley University, 29 Everett Street, Cambridge, MA 02138-2790
>>Phone: 617-349-8168 / Fax: 617-349-8169
>>http://www.lesley.edu/faculty/wbarowy/Barowy.html
>>
>>
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