Re: [xmca] Aristotle's PRACTICAL philosophy as providing historical perspective

[ERIC.RAMBERG@spps.org]

Hello Mary:

This is a very interesting article from the LCHC archives that addresses 
the concept of culture and how is culture analyzed:

http://lchc.ucsd.edu/Pubs/what-is-cultural-about-crosscultural.pdf

I find it interesting because it discusses culture as being an independent 
variable which I found surprising because Mike Cole never really writes of 
culture in the terms of a cartesian dualist behavioral perspective.  As 
one goes through the archives of the LCHC newsletter one can see the 
gradual shift in terminology towards a more dialectic perspective when 
referring to culture.

perhaps helpful, perhaps not
eric



From:   "Mary van der Riet" <vanderriet@ukzn.ac.za>
To:     <lpscholar2@gmail.com>, <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date:   05/13/2011 06:58 AM
Subject:        Re: [xmca] Aristotle's PRACTICAL philosophy as providing 
historical perspective
Sent by:        xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu



Dear Jay, Larry, Christine et al
I really appreciated your post Jay, because it highlighted all the
difficulties of Soft;vs hard’ research practice. And I have been
following the discussion on method/methodology. I wanted to make a few
points. 
As a researcher trying to work with CHAT, there really is no clear
method, because it is a set of epistemological/ontological assumptions
about human behaviour. If you are going to use it as an approach one has
to draw from the wealth of research methods that exist in the social
sciences. The trick is to match these methods with the CHAT assumptions.
For example, how does one get at an ‘historical’ account of a
phenomenon? Can you use historical records, or biographies or oral
history? For me these operate on the level of ‘methods’, to achieve the
‘methodology’. 
In HIV research which is heavily biased towards quantitative predictive
research designs, there has been a shift towards understanding
‘context’, but it is treated primarily as a variable. I argued in
my thesis that one of the things a CHAT analysis does is it ‘produces’
context. It provides a way of working with he many interwoven processes
which mediate behavior. 
On the point raised by Jay, there is a lot of politics in research
funding. I have recently been fortunate to receive a grant for Change
Lab/interventionist research  in my doctoral study site, a rural,
poverty-stricken context in SA. It was not easy to propose such a study
(which I called rather vaguely ‘activity theory and behavior change 
research’) which has no defined outcome and follows broad questions
about practices. The grant is from our national research fund which
tends to prefer clear hypothesis driven quantitative designs. I wonder
how much the current ethos in SA contributed to granting the funding.
There is  strong emphasis on community involvement and “participation’
of research participants in research concerning the poor and vulnerable,
for ethical and political reasons. Sometimes participation is just
involving the local chief in a meeting and in presenting the findings to
the community. I argued that the CL approach combined with participatory
research has the potential to be participatory in ways that conventional
research is not. Where else do participants engage in analysis of data
which profoundly affects their lives?

Mary




Mary van der Riet; School of Psychology; University of KwaZulu-Natal
Private Bag X01, Scottsville, 3209

email: vanderriet@ukzn.ac.za
tel: 033 260 6163;  fax: 033 2605809

>>> Larry Purss <lpscholar2@gmail.com> 05/13/11 08:27 AM >>>
Jay

I appreciate your reply as it gives some validation to my questions
about
*perspectives* or *forms* of awareness such as Aristotle's 3 *modes* of
intelligence.  He suggests each form is a valid way of constructing
knowledge but makes a value statement that phronesis is the most
fundamental.  If we are skillful at constructing *theory* [episteme] or
PRODUCING *techne* but don't engage with *value-knowledge*, then
Aristotle
suggests we will remain adrift.  Philosophical hermeneutics as a
tradition
is exploring this mode of knowledge.

Anna Stetsenko seems to me to be clearly engaging in explicit phronetic
social research which takes a strong *collaborative* value STANCE within
cultural historical narratives.  Mike has mentioned she is
representative of
a particular approach within CHAT which also includes Vladimer Zinchenko
and
Dot Robbins, among others. [others think she is moving beyond CHAT]
Stetsenko, Zinchenko, and Robbins are including *motivation* and
*subjectivity* as concepts within cultural historical perspectives. I'm
wondering if their perspective of CHAT can link up with Aristotle view
of
*episteme*,   *productive techne* [art & craft],  and *phronesis*  as
contrasting FORMS of  intelligence?  This linking may lead to a way to
bridge across various traditions that are engaging with issues of value
and
power within evolving historical consciousness.

The statement that we have a "prejudice against prejudice" captures the
value of embracing uncertainty and inquiry as a *disposition* that can
be
developed which embraces historical consciousness.

I have a particular question if "historical consciousness" requires a
narrative form and if narrative as a particular form of communication is
central to phronesis [as historical]

Larry








On Thu, May 12, 2011 at 10:33 PM, Jay Lemke <jaylemke@umich.edu> wrote:

>
> Christine and all --
>
> Important observations about the relationships among progressive modes
of
> research praxis, dominant paradigms, and policy aims in this thread!
>
> Doing genuinely collaborative-participatory research is really not
easy for
> many reasons, including both the problems of including the very
different
> cultures of academic researchers and of participants oriented to their
own
> practice, needs, and goals AND the conflict between the nature of the
system
> we create in such studies and the dominant paradigms of planned,
controlled
> research.
>
> Someone who has done a pretty good job I think on both counts is
Michelle
> Fine at City U of NY Grad School, a former colleague whose work I much
> admire.
>
> But I am rather conflicted about some of the paradigm assumptions. I
don't
> happen to believe that there are useful general laws about social
systems.
> They are not the kind of objects of study about which such laws are
> possible, primarily because what usually turns out to matter about
them are
> more their differences rather than their similarities (as opposed to
the
> ways in which natural science's objects are defined, so that
similarities
> matter more than differences). Social systems are in this sense a bit
more
> like literary texts. So there are ways of not having to start from
scratch
> in understanding a new one, but not ways that rely on general laws of
their
> behavior. More like check lists of things to pay attention to, and of
> possible or frequent kinds of connections seen before. Weak
similarities,
> embedded in strong differences (the uniqueness, individuality, and
> unpredictability of real complex systems).
>
> The methods of controlled research depend on predictability, and on
the
> dominance of similarity over difference. They have their uses in
social
> science and psychology, but they don't get one very far, and in
particular
> they don't enable social engineering. Which may be a good thing! As
someone
> like Latour might note, academic disciplines, and indeed all
organized,
> historically long-lived institutionalized activity systems work at
making
> things seem and sometimes even be more predictable and regular than
they
> would be "in the wild". But when their norms are violated, when
objects of
> study are defined in new ways, when systems under study combine things
that
> do not normally combine, or combine them in new ways (e.g. combining
> researcher culture and practitioner culture), the predictability and
the
> illusion of control and regularity quickly evaporates.
>
> The pursuit of general laws is not a good route to the practical
knowledge
> and wisdom needed to make our way toward a better society. We cannot
afford
> to be misled by superficial generalizations when we are dealing with
real,
> particular communities and their problems. We need particularist
research
> that adds to our capacity to help out in the next particular case.
>
> So how do you write a grant proposal, or a dissertation, or even a
journal
> article about such studies? The dominant future-oriented genres are
hardest:
> they expect predictability when what you're going to learn depends
mainly on
> the aspects you can't predict and which will come as a surprise to
you. The
> retrospective genres are easier, you can say what happened, and even
what it
> probably means, but you can't meet the dominant expectation for broad
> generalizations, for universal laws, or even for findings people can
count
> on seeing again in every new instance. What you can do is add to the
> checklist of phenomena, to the toolkit of methods, to our collective
> capacity to generate helpful hypotheses and potentially insightful
theory.
> Theoretical models in this view are just little boats bobbing on the
waves
> of particularity. They are not the currents that drive those waves.
Research
> communities should aim to make good theoreticians, not general
theories.
> Because very good research program has to create its own local theory.
Good
> luck with yours! :-)
>
> JAY.
>
>
> Jay Lemke
> Senior Research Scientist
> Laboratory for Comparative Human Cognition
> University of California - San Diego
> 9500 Gilman Drive
> La Jolla, California 92093-0506
>
> Professor (Adjunct status 2009-11)
> School of Education
> University of Michigan
> Ann Arbor, MI 48109
> www.umich.edu/~jaylemke <http://www.umich.edu/%7Ejaylemke>
>
> Professor Emeritus
> City University of New York
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On May 6, 2011, at 9:17 AM, christine schweighart wrote:
>
> >
> > Dear Andy,
> >
> > Thanks for being so frank, it helps ! Research proposals  which
'begin'
> having engineered access and manipulated various threads hide this
really
> important observation. Not that this 'engineering '  is wrong
necessarily,
> but it can be a  blind spot ripe for many kinds of influences ,
including
> funding and prestige, to go through the back door in the context of
>  agreements and  publications.   Things happen for the 'prestigious' 
in
> ways that they might not otherwise- of course.
> > I tried to 'begin' to enter academic research practice 'officially'
> without doing this - probably too naively, with a notion that I would
find
> out what the  thresholds and ' advantages of belonging to a research
> community and its costs' were,  perhaps I rather hoped to rediscover a
> reaffirmation of  collaboration in academic research practice, which
had
> seemed to be eroded in my teaching settings..... I remember thinking
that if
> I failed to gain access to research in an educational context, it
would
> still reveal something important to discuss about the nature of
academic
> practice. I now think this might be one value which sits in the
'costs' -
> one that is not upheld as much as it might need to be- in many
instances.
> > Learning about  the timing of what to propose and how to align that
to
> personal preferences and sacrifices  in morals, is as much part of the
> inter-generational project as writing and polishing research products
(
> appearing in many researcher conferences and communities). I get the
feeling
> that the two are related (a need for frankness in relation to the
process of
> doing and writing about research). Anyway for my part, hearing this
> acknowledged takes a bit of the edge out of an opaque boundary area,
makes
> it easier to live with..
> > Christine.
> >
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