So, would it be right to see emergentism as a "constructivism" or "social
constructivism"? It would appear so with your Cobb references. Last time I
read him he had a difficult time acknowledging anything social larger than a
small group.
Initially, I was responding to what I saw as contrasting the psychological
to the social, but here you seem to characterize them more as "levels of
analysis". This makes sense to me, if that was where you were going. I think
explaining the social factors of psychological functioning is an area that
needs to be addressed. However; I am not entirely clear how an "emergentism"
would address this issue.
In general though I don't see the major problem of socioculturalism as the
denial of the individual. As far as analytics go most pieces of social
culturalism centrates on the individual to a great extent. Socioculturlist
by definition (mine) is the relationship between individual and
culture/context etc. Analytically, its deficit is not going into greater
detail with other aspects of activity.
I guess what I'm saying is that I first don't see inseperability as a
problem in sociocultural research. I guess I would be interested in the
"degrees of seperability" since I'm not entirely clear what it would be.
My two cents
nate
>From: Keith Sawyer <ksawyer@artsci.wustl.edu>
>Reply-To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
>To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
>Subject: The "individual" in socioculturalism
>Date: Tue, 30 Apr 2002 16:47:24 -0500
>
>Regarding Nate Schmolze's response to my comments about "degrees of
>separability":
>
>I think I was implicitly raising a new issue. To me, it seems that a lot
>of socioculturalists take a rather strong position that all knowledge and
>cognition is fundamentally socially embedded, and consequently that
>individualistic psychology is wrong-headed and should not exist at all. I
>quote such claims in the "Unresolved tensions" article, and this is
>Giddens' position as well. But to my mind, this is too extreme; I think
>that there will always be a place for traditional--and even
>experimental--cognitive psychology, and that it's a mistake for us to try
>to construct a research program that can only succeed if cognitive
>psychology fails.
>
>In this I am thinking along the lines of many of the math educators in
>Kirshner and Whitson's volume SITUATED COGNITION (1997 Erlbaum), which I
>have just been reading since the AERA. In their introduction, the editors
>argue a focus on "communities of practice" has often resulted in
>a-psychological ethnographic study, and they claim "the notion of the
>individual in situated cognition theory needs to be fundamentally
>reformulated" (p. 9). (Jaan Valsiner has frequently made similar arguments
>that "the individual" is neglected in sociocultural work.) Paul Cobb et
>al., in their awesome chapter, contrast the "sociocultural perspective"
>with the "emergent perspective." The former "give priority to social and
>cultural processes" and thus they leave little room for psychological
>approaches; they associate this with Vygotsky, I think accurately. In the
>emergent perspective, "individual thought and social and cultural processes
>are considered to be reflexively related, with neither attributed absolute
>priority over the other" (p. 152). And like I conclude in my "emergence in
>psychology" article, they write "The extent to which either a psychological
>or a social analysis is brought to the fore in any particular situation is
>a pragmatic issue that reflects the purposes at hand" (p. 152).
>
>The implications are that sometimes the psychological analysis will be the
>best one, and will then inform our understanding of the sociocultural
>level; not always the other way around. It depends on the "degree of
>separability"--that's what I was trying to get at in my last posting.
>
>R. Keith Sawyer
>
>
>http://www.keithsawyer.com/
>Assistant Professor
>Department of Education
>Washington University
>Campus Box 1183
>St. Louis, MO 63130
>314-935-8724
>
nAtE
vygotsky@charter.net
http://webpages.charter.net/schmolze1/
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