Re: [xmca] Aristotle's PRACTICAL philosophy as providing historical perspective

[Larry Purss <lpscholar2@gmail.com>]

Jay

I appreciate your reply as it gives some validation to my questions about
*perspectives* or *forms* of awareness such as Aristotle's 3 *modes* of
intelligence.  He suggests each form is a valid way of constructing
knowledge but makes a value statement that phronesis is the most
fundamental.  If we are skillful at constructing *theory* [episteme] or
PRODUCING *techne* but don't engage with *value-knowledge*, then Aristotle
suggests we will remain adrift.  Philosophical hermeneutics as a tradition
is exploring this mode of knowledge.

Anna Stetsenko seems to me to be clearly engaging in explicit phronetic
social research which takes a strong *collaborative* value STANCE within
cultural historical narratives.  Mike has mentioned she is representative of
a particular approach within CHAT which also includes Vladimer Zinchenko and
Dot Robbins, among others. [others think she is moving beyond CHAT]
Stetsenko, Zinchenko, and Robbins are including *motivation* and
*subjectivity* as concepts within cultural historical perspectives. I'm
wondering if their perspective of CHAT can link up with Aristotle view of
*episteme*,   *productive techne* [art & craft],  and *phronesis*  as
contrasting FORMS of  intelligence?  This linking may lead to a way to
bridge across various traditions that are engaging with issues of value and
power within evolving historical consciousness.

The statement that we have a "prejudice against prejudice" captures the
value of embracing uncertainty and inquiry as a *disposition* that can be
developed which embraces historical consciousness.

I have a particular question if "historical consciousness" requires a
narrative form and if narrative as a particular form of communication is
central to phronesis [as historical]

Larry








On Thu, May 12, 2011 at 10:33 PM, Jay Lemke <jaylemke@umich.edu> wrote:

>
> Christine and all --
>
> Important observations about the relationships among progressive modes of
> research praxis, dominant paradigms, and policy aims in this thread!
>
> Doing genuinely collaborative-participatory research is really not easy for
> many reasons, including both the problems of including the very different
> cultures of academic researchers and of participants oriented to their own
> practice, needs, and goals AND the conflict between the nature of the system
> we create in such studies and the dominant paradigms of planned, controlled
> research.
>
> Someone who has done a pretty good job I think on both counts is Michelle
> Fine at City U of NY Grad School, a former colleague whose work I much
> admire.
>
> But I am rather conflicted about some of the paradigm assumptions. I don't
> happen to believe that there are useful general laws about social systems.
> They are not the kind of objects of study about which such laws are
> possible, primarily because what usually turns out to matter about them are
> more their differences rather than their similarities (as opposed to the
> ways in which natural science's objects are defined, so that similarities
> matter more than differences). Social systems are in this sense a bit more
> like literary texts. So there are ways of not having to start from scratch
> in understanding a new one, but not ways that rely on general laws of their
> behavior. More like check lists of things to pay attention to, and of
> possible or frequent kinds of connections seen before. Weak similarities,
> embedded in strong differences (the uniqueness, individuality, and
> unpredictability of real complex systems).
>
> The methods of controlled research depend on predictability, and on the
> dominance of similarity over difference. They have their uses in social
> science and psychology, but they don't get one very far, and in particular
> they don't enable social engineering. Which may be a good thing! As someone
> like Latour might note, academic disciplines, and indeed all organized,
> historically long-lived institutionalized activity systems work at making
> things seem and sometimes even be more predictable and regular than they
> would be "in the wild". But when their norms are violated, when objects of
> study are defined in new ways, when systems under study combine things that
> do not normally combine, or combine them in new ways (e.g. combining
> researcher culture and practitioner culture), the predictability and the
> illusion of control and regularity quickly evaporates.
>
> The pursuit of general laws is not a good route to the practical knowledge
> and wisdom needed to make our way toward a better society. We cannot afford
> to be misled by superficial generalizations when we are dealing with real,
> particular communities and their problems. We need particularist research
> that adds to our capacity to help out in the next particular case.
>
> So how do you write a grant proposal, or a dissertation, or even a journal
> article about such studies? The dominant future-oriented genres are hardest:
> they expect predictability when what you're going to learn depends mainly on
> the aspects you can't predict and which will come as a surprise to you. The
> retrospective genres are easier, you can say what happened, and even what it
> probably means, but you can't meet the dominant expectation for broad
> generalizations, for universal laws, or even for findings people can count
> on seeing again in every new instance. What you can do is add to the
> checklist of phenomena, to the toolkit of methods, to our collective
> capacity to generate helpful hypotheses and potentially insightful theory.
> Theoretical models in this view are just little boats bobbing on the waves
> of particularity. They are not the currents that drive those waves. Research
> communities should aim to make good theoreticians, not general theories.
> Because very good research program has to create its own local theory. Good
> luck with yours! :-)
>
> JAY.
>
>
> Jay Lemke
> Senior Research Scientist
> Laboratory for Comparative Human Cognition
> University of California - San Diego
> 9500 Gilman Drive
> La Jolla, California 92093-0506
>
> Professor (Adjunct status 2009-11)
> School of Education
> University of Michigan
> Ann Arbor, MI 48109
> www.umich.edu/~jaylemke <http://www.umich.edu/%7Ejaylemke>
>
> Professor Emeritus
> City University of New York
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On May 6, 2011, at 9:17 AM, christine schweighart wrote:
>
> >
> > Dear Andy,
> >
> > Thanks for being so frank, it helps ! Research proposals  which 'begin'
> having engineered access and manipulated various threads hide this really
> important observation. Not that this 'engineering '  is wrong necessarily,
> but it can be a  blind spot ripe for many kinds of influences , including
> funding and prestige, to go through the back door in the context of
>  agreements and  publications.   Things happen for the 'prestigious'  in
> ways that they might not otherwise- of course.
> > I tried to 'begin' to enter academic research practice 'officially'
> without doing this - probably too naively, with a notion that I would find
> out what the  thresholds and ' advantages of belonging to a research
> community and its costs' were,  perhaps I rather hoped to rediscover a
> reaffirmation of  collaboration in academic research practice, which had
> seemed to be eroded in my teaching settings..... I remember thinking that if
> I failed to gain access to research in an educational context, it would
> still reveal something important to discuss about the nature of academic
> practice. I now think this might be one value which sits in the 'costs' -
> one that is not upheld as much as it might need to be- in many instances.
> > Learning about  the timing of what to propose and how to align that to
> personal preferences and sacrifices  in morals, is as much part of the
> inter-generational project as writing and polishing research products (
> appearing in many researcher conferences and communities). I get the feeling
> that the two are related (a need for frankness in relation to the process of
> doing and writing about research). Anyway for my part, hearing this
> acknowledged takes a bit of the edge out of an opaque boundary area, makes
> it easier to live with..
> > Christine.
> >
> __________________________________________
> > _____
> > xmca mailing list
> > xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> > http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
> >
> >
>
> __________________________________________
> _____
> xmca mailing list
> xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
>
__________________________________________
_____
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca