In examining the individual/society antimony Wertsch suggests that the task
is to link rather than reduce differing perspectives and that, following
Dewey (p 11), that a partial solution might lie in recognizing the
constructed nature of the tools that foster the antinomy. He uses that to
launch into Burke an using Burke's pentad as a _method_. I wonder about
that. Looking for the right method has been a pretty good sized distraction
since Descartes. I believe I would prefer to stay with the pragmatists and
explain the utility of maintaining differing perspectives on the basis of
what in ongoing experience is taken as a problem by different actor and the
consequences of asserting one or another perspective for the concerns that
motivate those actors. Of course, what is wrong with that is focused on
later in the book: we don't really "choose" these tools so rationally--and
often distort our own interests in the attempt to apply a given tool that
is taken as appropriate by the community. (The perennial story of objective
testing in civics/history when our end is to promote 'citizenship" for
instance.--The result is usually an uncritical approach to just accepting
what an authority says is fact. Not what we actually want from 'citizens in
a democracy.')
Anyway I am not sure that it isn't sufficient to just say that one is
focusing on mediated action because that seems consequential for certain
worthy problems. Like the Eastern European history narratives that emerge
in subsequent chapters or the identity issues in the former Yugoslavia that
he mentions in this chapter. I suspect that Burke's problems were not
Wertsch's in many ways and that his tools may be a terministic screen here.
Especially since mediated action doesn't seem to fit very well with the
objects that the method of the pentad (however circumspectly applied) seem
to produce.
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John St. Julien (stjulien who-is-at udel.edu)
School of Education
University of Delaware