Jay-
When reading dense messages like yours and Keith's on the topic
of emergence, aside from being overwhelmed and scrambling to find toeholds
before I fall off the mountain altogether, I constantly find myself
wishing for graspable concrete examples of the consequences of what is
being said.
Being up to my armpits in my own melange of readings, writings, doings,
it is most often impossible for me to turn aside and wander down one of the
tempting trails laid out for the reader.
So, to take an example of immediate relevance to me (but probably
not others!) thelen's treatment of the development of bipedalism in
ontogeny might be a place to worry about top down "versus" bottom up
processes, but darned if I could relate anything in this example to an
argument in Gidden's (other than the notion that constraints are both
enabling and constraining, which seems always useful to keep in mind) or
in Bourdieu.
I know there are some interesting attempts to use chaos theory
in developmental psych (van Geert actually uses this approach to analyze
the concept of a zoped, for example) but the demonstrations have a kind of
magic show quality for me that leave me wondering how to move the trick
to a new domain and learn something surprising.
Do you have a couple of examples that you could provide that help
me, and perhaps others, to rise to the concrete? Maybe its too time
consuming or we are to diverse to benefit across examples, but perhaps not.
Thanks to you and Keith for your efforts to enlighten us!
mike
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