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[xmca] Human Sciences linking with CHAT



Hi Kevin and Mike

I'm away from the internet on the "gulf Islands" off of Vancouver.  I have
to go to the library in the village to get on the web.
However, yesterday I downloaded the chapter on human sciences and learning
and I want to say how powerfully the article speaks to me.

It puts at the forefront the fundamental need to explicitly discuss values
and explaining how we ought to proceed.  It then speaks to agency but more
explicitly MORAL agency and says it is a very slippery concept.  I agree it
is slippery but also fundamental to notions of learning. Learning in schools
is about developing moral agency and I welcome the explicit call to examine
various accounts of moral agency.  The 3rd framework asking us to
be explicit about our teleological assumptions is also a fundamental point
of discussion when we explore where we believe we are headed in the future.
Finally, the question, Who gets to decide? is of central importance to
notions of mutuality in learning.
It is my hope that others on CHAT see these as central questions to
explore.  Kevin, you mentioned human sciences embrace the "interpretive
turn" and there is also discussions of the "relational turn" and the
"sociocultural turn" which I see as challenging "the linquistic turn" and
"postmodernism" and returning the focus to values and "traditions" and
"forms of life".  Activity and mediation are central concepts in the human
sciences as you outlined but it is moral activity and questioning how we
ought to proceed that is central to activity.

Kevin, you  mention that history as  a discipline is a core area of inquiry
in the human sciences and learning.  From this perspective "thinking" [how
we conceptualize the processes of conceptualizing] is a historical process.
>From this perspective the history of philosophy is the history of thinking.
Thinking develops historically as documented in the history of philosophy.
Therefore thinking as a human science can gain insights by exploring how we
have historically conceptualized conceptualizing.
For example is the metaphor of thinking "as reading text" the dominant
metaphor or is the metaphor of speech "as dialogue" a better metaphor of
thinking or the more recent metaphor of thinking as "information processing"
the dominant metaphor?  By historical inquiry into the history of philosophy
learning as a human science can be enriched and our horizons of
understanding expanded.

Larry
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