Regarding Nate Schmolze's response to my comments about "degrees of
separability":
I think I was implicitly raising a new issue. To me, it seems that a lot
of socioculturalists take a rather strong position that all knowledge and
cognition is fundamentally socially embedded, and consequently that
individualistic psychology is wrong-headed and should not exist at all. I
quote such claims in the "Unresolved tensions" article, and this is
Giddens' position as well. But to my mind, this is too extreme; I think
that there will always be a place for traditional--and even
experimental--cognitive psychology, and that it's a mistake for us to try
to construct a research program that can only succeed if cognitive
psychology fails.
In this I am thinking along the lines of many of the math educators in
Kirshner and Whitson's volume SITUATED COGNITION (1997 Erlbaum), which I
have just been reading since the AERA. In their introduction, the editors
argue a focus on "communities of practice" has often resulted in
a-psychological ethnographic study, and they claim "the notion of the
individual in situated cognition theory needs to be fundamentally
reformulated" (p. 9). (Jaan Valsiner has frequently made similar arguments
that "the individual" is neglected in sociocultural work.) Paul Cobb et
al., in their awesome chapter, contrast the "sociocultural perspective"
with the "emergent perspective." The former "give priority to social and
cultural processes" and thus they leave little room for psychological
approaches; they associate this with Vygotsky, I think accurately. In the
emergent perspective, "individual thought and social and cultural processes
are considered to be reflexively related, with neither attributed absolute
priority over the other" (p. 152). And like I conclude in my "emergence in
psychology" article, they write "The extent to which either a psychological
or a social analysis is brought to the fore in any particular situation is
a pragmatic issue that reflects the purposes at hand" (p. 152).
The implications are that sometimes the psychological analysis will be the
best one, and will then inform our understanding of the sociocultural
level; not always the other way around. It depends on the "degree of
separability"--that's what I was trying to get at in my last posting.
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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