Jay's principles, RRPs in the human sciences,
Charles Bazerman (bazerman who-is-at humanitas.ucsb.edu)
Thu, 24 Jul 1997 10:06:51 -0700 (PDT)
Mike, Jay, and all,
Jay's four principles are fine with me in the abstract, but in
terms of rising to the concrete it is always the situations of application
and the practices of application that make them circumstantially useful,
irrelevant, digressive, or downright unhelpful.
The exchanges of the last couple of days have got me wondering
about two issues in the study of human life. 1
1) It seems the research problem Mike confronted in the latter
chapters of CP was that because of variations of individual resources,
perceptions and stances; variations of situations; variations of
configurations of indiiduals; variations of cultural context; varuiations
of moment; etc. that he could not locate any RRPs or perhaps for
observational work (as opposed to experimental)
Reliably Locatable Phenomena (RLPs)--because they upon
further investigation where at interpretive distance from the motives and
perceptions of the participants. Those motivces and perceptions would
indeed drive further behavior, which would confound predictions based on
prior interpretations. The only thing that he found continuity with was
the principles that guided his own interactions, which then provided
sometimes successful scaffolding for the activities of others. That is he
"knew" (in the sense of perceptual categories and articulated
principles) enough grow activities and cognitive development. But he also
came to know that he had to watch the unfolding situations to know which
and when of his principles and perceptions should be instantiated in
practice. Would cultural psychology then be seen as a kind of
interpersonal craft informed by "scientific concepts" rather than a
distanced "science" that is removed from any practice of application?
2) Why is it that with respect to matter we are regularly (at
least at this moment in history) able to develop dispassionate accounts of
material phenomena, even material phenomena of human biology, but our
investigations of human behavior regularly become embued with negative or
positive evaluations? Is the only way to deal with our investments in
each others' behavior and our perceptions of those human behaviors torun
towards thereduced "objectivity" of external measures.
It seems that both my questions circle around the onld conundrum about
human life being interpretive and therefore human sciences also being
interpretive. And that issue is precisely the one of meaning-making,
where Jay and I had our misunderstanding.
Chuck
On Tue, 22 Jul 1997, Mike Cole wrote:
>
> Jay & Chuck:
>
> Is there agreement among us on the following:
> Mike
>
> >From: Jay Lemke <JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU>
>
>
> I don't think there is too great a distance between the position
> Chuck Bazerman is putting forth on the materiality of actants and
> the replicability of 'phenomena' and my own views. I was a bit
> confused by his opening sentence about my paradoxically
> preferring mind within the traditional mind/body division.
> Perhaps this confusion arises because of our deeply ingrained
> habit of identifying meaning-making processes with cognitive or
> mental ones, whereas for me they are (a) material, (b) semiotic,
> and (c) processes in systems which are never limited to the
> organism as a unit of analysis -- and maybe (d) never limited to
> the apparent time-scale on which them seem to us to be occurring.
>
>