In response to Nate:
>So, would it be right to see emergentism as a "constructivism" or "social
>constructivism"? It would appear so with your Cobb references.
Yes, I think so. More broadly I think of socioculturalism as "social
constructivism" and emergentism is a variety of socioculturalism, so being
constructivist is not unique to emergentism.
>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.
Yes, exactly, and that's the language I use in my articles, too: "levels of
analysis." Giddens and the inseparability theorists cannot speak about
"levels of analysis" because they argue that the individual and the social
are analytically inseparable. So if you speak of levels of analysis then
you are opposed to Giddens; and also, Rogoff has on many occasions rejected
the "levels of analysis" language, which is consistent with her
inseparability position (I discuss her alternative term "planes" of
analysis in my article "Unresolved tensions").
R. Keith Sawyer
http://www.keithsawyer.com/
Assistant Professor
Department of Education
Washington University
Campus Box 1183
St. Louis, MO 63130
314-935-8724
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