RE: [xmca] New Valsiner SEmiots paper on MCA website at lchc

From: ERIC.RAMBERG@spps.org
Date: Tue Nov 21 2006 - 08:08:41 PST


 I'm wondering if being an experimentalist and being a
realist has become so conflated in our dialogue that we have forgotten
that one is process and the other is a specific philosophical position
(not that process is not a philosophical position).

Yes Michael:

I believe this is the case. Realism as a philosophy is specific about
applications to what can be realistically represented via sense data and
what can merely be mimicked. Again this position would posit a dualism
between external and internal.

The best arguments I have read against dualism (and people always seem
to be angry at dualism but there is never a discussion why. It took me
a really long time to understand why dualism is such a difficult and
perhaps dangerous position) suggest that you really shouldn't even pay
attention to intra or even inter - you concentrate on the activity
people are engaged in and its relationship to the movement of nature
(the naturalistic difficulty with dualism being that it separates human
from nature - related to the reasons why we should worry about dualism).
My question is, once you bring up "intra" is there any possibility at
all of escaping dualism.

As a professional that works primarily with individuals and the measurement
of development over a period of time I certainly struggle with how it is
possible to speak to psychological changes without discussing the "intra".
Focusing on activity and how a person operates within the parameters of an
activity is my interest in CHAT. CHAT is great in explanatory powers but
within the realm of data driven educational bureaucracies it lacks bite.
That is where my interest in Jaan Valsiner developed. His ideas about
"process structure" and hierarchacical language speak to a methodology that
may be the answer to data driven mass testing.

perhaps?
eric

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