I appreciate your concerns, Bill, but basically I disagree. I do think that
a theory of the social is necessarily an ethical one, so we may as well
make the question of its ethic a topic of discussion, or we will be
negligent in furthering the development of it. That is not to imply AT ALL
that my proposals were sound ones. It's a collective project, right? The
investigator ventriloquates the ethic of a CHAT community, at best, and in
the course of investigation, implicates others in its development too.
I realize that the community investigated 'has' its rules, but under a CHAT
lens, certain values (e.g., re-distributive values) would guide the
analysis, no? Do I have that wrong? I am at a disadvantage here, since I
can only speculate about an AT intervention, never having actually done it.
As for wizardliness as exemplary, that would not be my view. You're right
that anything below the level of principle -- like strategies -- is
problematic as an ethical model....
What do others think?
Judy
At 04:25 PM 4/27/01 -0400, you wrote:
>I'm not sure what CHAT-like is. It would seem that as a theory of human
>activity, CAHT might be able to account for the diverse strategies that
>have arisen in a culture. Imposing values on those strategies is something
>that people in a group may choose to do, and the theory may account for
>that too, if it were made more explicit about such things. I suppose
>unpacking more the categories of rules and community and their
>interrelations in Yrjo's model would help. One could then understand the
>interplay of values that are shared and not shared among participants in
>their interaction dynamics. What I am concerned with is ascribing detailed
>cultural values to the theory per se, or selecting one ensemble of
>strategies (i.e wizardry) as as exemplary of the theory. Doing so does not
>seem to follow from the historical development of CHAT, nor from its
>structure. A critical question too is that if CHAT is a theory in which
>the investigator's value system is built in to its structure, then how can
>it be used to describe cultures other than the investigators, without major
>distortions of the target cultures value system? What do you think?
>Bill Barowy, Associate Professor,
>Lesley University, 29 Everett Street, Cambridge, MA 02138-2790
>Phone: 617-349-8168 / Fax: 617-349-8169
>http://www.lesley.edu/faculty/wbarowy/Barowy.html
>
>
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