DOCSLIB.ORG

Matthew Crippen Art and Pragmatism

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Matthew Crippen Art and Pragmatism View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by YorkSpace Matthew Crippen Art and Pragmatism: James and Dewey on the Reconstructive Presuppositions of Experience A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctorate of Philosophy Graduate Programme in Philosophy York University Toronto, Ontario May 2010 Abstract This dissertation connects the claims of James and Dewey (and to a lesser extent Peirce) to historically specific concerns that occasioned them, attending particularly to claims made with respect to the centrality of the reconstructive practices of art to those of experience. In unpacking these claims, I employ exegetical methods that R. G. Collingwood advocated when he emphasized that we cannot understand what philosophers have said without first comprehending the questions they meant to answer. At the same time, I also connect what classical pragmatists said to what others have said since, thereby heeding Dewey’s admonition that it is only from the standpoint of where we have arrived that we can coherently register anything at all. By approaching the ideas of pragmatists in these ways—and by drawing occasional support from other thinkers such as Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein—I especially endeavour to establish that pragmatic conceptions of “experience as art” show that interactions in the world achieve outcomes traditionally attributed to inner operations of mind or brain; that insensitivity to this fuels seriously misplaced conceptions about how we relate to “reality”; and that these misplaced conceptions promulgate subjectivism on such a scale that even scientists become unwitting promoters of it. My overarching aims are to demonstrate, first, that classical pragmatists, contrary to what some recent interpretations suggest, understood their projects to be anti-sceptical; and, second, that classical pragmatists have bequeathed to us means by which we, too, may counter scepticism. Throughout this dissertation, I bear in mind that James called pragmatism “a new name for some old ways of thinking” and that Dewey repeatedly stressed that new ideas are reconstructed out of old ones. So while arguing that classical pragmatists challenged scepticism by turning traditional modern Western conceptions of experience inside out, I also examine how their work might be used to reorient and reinvigorate certain traditional notions. ii Acknowledgements I owe much to Dr. Evan William Cameron, Department of Philosophy and Department of Film & Video, York University. He has directed me through two theses, a dissertation and a number of superbly taught courses. He has spent uncounted hours reviewing and commenting upon my work. He has encouraged and actively helped me to pursue my own intellectual interests. That he has done so testifies to his intellectual breadth and flexibility, for I have, while under his supervision, earned degrees in three different fields and toured through an eclectic array of sub-disciplines that fall both inside and outside of these fields. A number of other people also deserve credit: Dr. Jeanette Bicknell, Dr. David Jopling and Dr. Stuart Shanker, who served on one or both of my graduate committees; Dr. Henry Jackman, who supplied me with a thorough introduction to William James; Dr. Samuel Mallin and Dr. Diego Nigro, who vastly increased my comprehension of the Continental philosophical traditions that figure in my dissertation; Franca DeAngelis, Matthew Dixon and Fred Nix, who edited materials that ended up in my dissertation; Cristal Del Biondo, who remained patient with me when I was losing patience with myself; Scott Jordan and Elaine Powney, without whom I may not have pursued a university education; my immediate family—Bob, Paula, Marc and Shannan Crippen— who have tolerated my self-absorbed years of study; and Katharine Straut, who has stimulated me intellectually. iii Table of Contents INTRODUCTION 1 I. SCULPTING EXPERIENTIAL WORLDS: JAMES AND HIS DARWINIAN CONCEPT OF CONSIOUSNESS 16 Pre-Darwinism and Darwinism 17 Rationalism, Empiricism and Neo-Lamarckism 19 Assimilating the Darwinian Idea of Indirect Adaptation 24 Copernican and Darwinian Revolutions 30 II. THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE: TURNING DARWINISM AGAINST EMPIRICISTIC SCEPTICISM 38 Early Roots in Darwinism 40 A Pragmatic Challenge to Materialism 42 A Darwinian Challenge to the Concept of Belief as Correspondence 49 A Pragmatic Account of Belief 53 From Belief to Action to Experience 55 James, Dawkins and the Necessity of Faith 70 III. ART, EXPERIENCE AND MUTUAL PARTICIPATION 80 Mutual Adaptation 81 Systems of Activity 93 IV. WORLD-BUILDING AND WORLD-GRAMMARS 102 World, Meaning and Form 103 World-Grammars and Our Sense of Reality 112 V. EXPERIENCE AND SUBJECTIVITY AS ACTIONS OF BEING IN THE WORLD 121 Emotional Experience 122 Experience, Self and World 125 Pre-Reflective Intelligence 133 Body-Mind 139 iv VI. AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE 145 Art as Experience: An Overview 149 Having an Experience 152 Formal Conditions of Aesthetic Experience 155 Perception Revisited 162 Temporality and Reconstruction 168 VII. ART, MEANING AND APPEARANCE 175 Intensified Meanings 179 Expanded Meanings 185 Eidos Revisited 191 CONCLUSION 205 Menand’s “Story” 205 The Moral of the “Story” 207 REFERENCES 211 v Introduction I shall be attending in this dissertation to the core tenets of pragmatism, particularly as articulated by William James and John Dewey. Others have done so before me. What could I possibly hope to achieve by attending yet again to them? Robin Collingwood (1939), nearing the end of his life, put his finger squarely on the problem that has led so many philosophers to render unfruitful accounts of their predecessors. Most have presumed they can register and weigh what others have said before them by attending to the statements they have made. As Collingwood protested, however, we “…cannot find out what a man means by simply studying his spoken or written statements” (p. 31). We cannot, he insisted, because a statement is an answer to a question, and identically worded statements can have very different meanings when they are responses to different questions. Hence we are not in a position to “…think [we] understand any statement made by a philosopher until [we] have decided, with the utmost possible accuracy, what the question is to which he means it for an answer” (p. 74); and we are not in a position to ascertain this unless we investigate the historical context in which the question arose as a viable provocation to inquiry (see pp. 61-63). This kind of investigation is open-ended and subject to ongoing revision, for the scope and limits of our own historical context of inquiry differ from those of the past, changing what we must do if we are to understand what others did before us (see pp. 75-76 & 114; also see Cameron 2004, pp. 21-26). 1 In the case of classical pragmatists, Collingwood’s approach is especially helpful, for their choice of words was, as James (1909a) admitted, “unguarded” at times (p. 824). Consequently it is easy to misconstrue what they said, especially if one abstracts their statements from the contexts out of which they arose. Along just such lines, James complained that his detractors engaged in “vicious abstractionism” (p. 964), treating his words as “self-sufficients [sic.] with no context of varying relation that might be further asked about” (p. 964). This, in turn, led them to wrongly convict him and other pragmatists of “self-contradiction and absurdity” (p. 964). The mistake, James argued, was that critics assumed that “meanings and things meant, definitions and things defined, are equivalent and interchangeable, and nothing extraneous to its definition can be meant when a term is used” (p. 964). They failed to recognize, for example, that “[t]he social proposition that ‘other men exist’ and the pragmatist proposition ‘it is expedient to believe that other men exist’”—though similarly worded—“come from different universes of discourse” (p. 965), and thus have different meanings. “The first expresses an object of belief, the second tells of one condition of the belief’s power to maintain itself” (p. 965). Hence we “can believe [one] without being logically compelled to believe the [other]” (p. 965). We can also believe both, and even if one turns out to be false, we will not be guilty of a logical contradiction. We will not be because the two propositions answer different questions, and, as Collingwood observed, “[n]o two propositions . can contradict one another unless they are answers to the same question” (1939, p. 33). 2 If past critics easily misconstrued the questions that preoccupied James and Dewey, then the potential to misconstrue them today is especially great. It is, in the words of Collingwood (1939), because most philosophers “…write for their contemporaries, and in particular for those who are ‘likely to be interested,’ which means those who are already asking the question to which an answer is being offered” (p. 39). This means that “a writer very seldom explains what the question is that he is trying to answer. Later on, when he has become a ‘classic’ and his contemporaries are long dead, the question has been forgotten” (p. 39), and if the question is forgotten, the import of his response is obscured. To weigh fruitfully the claims of pragmatists, therefore, we must identify the questions they were asking (for only then can the richness of their answers be assessed with respect to them),
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Contributions of John Dewey and Louise M
    THE EMERGING PARADIGM OF READER-TEXT TRANSACTION: CONTRIBUTIONS OF JOHN DEWEY AND LOUISE M. ROSENBLATT, WITH IMPLICATIONS FOR EDUCATORS by Elizabeth H. Roth Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Curriculum and Instruction Jim Garrison, Chair Patricia P. Kelly Jan Nespor Warren P. Self Robert C. Small, Jr. December 4, 1998 Blacksburg, Virginia Key words: philosophy of education, teaching of literature, literary theory, John Dewey, Louise M. Rosenblatt The Emerging Paradigm of Reader-Text Transaction: Contributions of John Dewey and Louise M. Rosenblatt, With Implications for Educators Elizabeth H. Roth (ABSTRACT) This dissertation will trace the emerging paradigm of transaction as a model for the dynamics of the reading process. The paradigm of transaction, implicit in John Dewey's writings as early as 1896 in "The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology," was originally described in terms of "interaction" between organism and environment. Only in 1949, in the twilight of his career, did Dewey definitively distinguish between "transaction" and "interaction," ascribing a mutually transformative character to the former process. In Knowing and the Known, Dewey and co-author Arthur F. Bentley (1949) proposed adoption of a wholly new "transactional vocabulary" as a precision tool for a new mode of scientific inquiry, whereby inquiry itself was recognized as a species of transaction between inquirer and observed phenomena. Even before the publication of Knowing and the Known, literary theorist Louise M. Rosenblatt had applied an implicitly transactional model of the relationship between organism and environment to the relationship between reader and text.
    [Show full text]
  • Social Epistemology and Online Knowledge Exchange
    Social Epistemology and Online Knowledge Exchange Paul Daniel Matthews A statement submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the University of the West of England, Bristol for the degree of DPhil Faculty of Environment and Technology, University of the West of England, Bristol October 2015 Abstract This document summarises the submitted research, which has investigated online knowledge exchange and related it to the philosophical field of social epistemology. The broad aims have been: firstly to investigate what social epistemology theory can offer in the way of guidance and evaluative frameworks for the design of knowledge systems; and secondly, to determine what the empirical study of knowledge exchange platforms can tell us about knowledge as emerging from online practice. The submitted work consists of six papers that are a mixture of review/position papers and reports of empirical investigation. These have been published in information science journals and conference proceedings. However, following the established tradition of information science, the work is positioned as being cross-disciplinary in ambition. After introducing the submitted papers and the inspiration for the research, the main theoretical positions of the research are outlined and justified. These were a naturalised social epistemological position, inspired by Alvin Goldman, but widened to a situated and systems-oriented view. The naturalised view of epistemology allows for consideration of evidence from psychology, and here some key theories in social and cognitive psychology are outlined. Finally, as the subject is human- computer-human interaction, the sociotechnical setting is established. Further, the main platforms of study in the empirical work — social question answering systems — are introduced and described.
    [Show full text]
  • Methodological Transactionalism and the Sociology of Education Daniel A
    Methodological Transactionalism and the Sociology of Education Daniel A. McFarland, David Diehl and Craig Rawlings (Stanford University) Abstract: The development and spread of research methods in sociology can be understood as a story about the increasing sophistication of tools in order to better answer fundamental disciplinary questions. In this chapter we argue that recent developments, related to both increased computing power and data collection ability along with broader cultural shifts emphasizing interdependencies, have positioned Social Network Analysis (SNA) as a powerful tool for empirically studying the dynamic and processual view of schooling that is at the heart of educational theory. More specifically, we explore how SNA can help us both better understand as well as reconceptualize two central topics in the sociology of education: classroom interaction and status attainment. We conclude with a brief discussion about possible future directions network analysis may take in educational research, positing that it will become an increasingly valuable research approach because our ability to collect streaming behavioral and transactional data is growing rapidly. INTRODUCTION In recent years Social Network Analysis (SNA) has become increasingly common in numerous sociological sub-disciplines, the result being a host of innovative research that tackles old and new problems alike. Students of the sociology of knowledge, for example, use networks of journal co-citations as a novel method for tracking the diffusion of new ideas through the academy (e.g., Hargens 2000; Moody 2004). Political sociologists are drawing on SNA to understand the dynamics of collective action (Diani 1995; Tarrow 1994). Organizational sociologists use formal and informal work networks to study organizational learning (Hansen 1999; Rawlings et.al.
    [Show full text]
  • It's Only Wrong If It's Transactional: Moral Perceptions of Obfuscated
    It’s Only Wrong If It’s Transactional: Moral Perceptions of Obfuscated Exchange Forthcoming in American Sociological Review Acknowledgments: The authors gratefully acknowledge the comments and contributions provided by Aleksander Ellis, Alan Fiske, Sarah Harkness, Linda Molm, Martin Reimann, Reihan Salam, three anonymous reviewers, the ASR Editors, and participants of the Innovation and Creativity Workshop at UCLA Anderson School of Management, the 2016 Southern California Symposium on Network Economics and Game Theory at UCLA, the Organizational Behavior Seminar at Stanford GSB, the Duke University Department of Sociology Colloquium, and the 2017 American Sociological Association Regular Session on Economic Sociology. Oliver Schilke The University of Arizona, Eller College of Management Gabriel Rossman UCLA, Department of Sociology Funding: Preparation of this article was supported in part by a Research Small Grant from the Center for Leadership Ethics, Eller College of Management to the first author and a UCLA Senate Faculty Research Grant to the second author. Keywords: obfuscation, economic sociology, bribery, legitimacy, vignette experiments Corresponding Author: Gabriel Rossman, UCLA, Department of Sociology, 264 Haines Hall, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1551, USA Phone: 310-206-8904, Fax: 310-206-9838, E-mail: [email protected] ABSTRACT A wide class of economic exchanges, such as bribery and compensated adoption, are considered morally disreputable precisely because they are seen as economic exchanges. However, parties to these exchanges can structurally obfuscate them by arranging the transfers so as to obscure that a disreputable exchange is occurring at all. In this paper, we propose that four obfuscation structures—bundling, brokerage, gift exchange, and pawning—will decrease the moral opprobrium of external audiences by (1) masking intentionality, (2) reducing the explicitness of the reciprocal nature, and (3) making the exchange appear to be a type of common practice.
    [Show full text]
  • Explicating Emotions
    View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by D-Scholarship@Pitt EXPLICATING EMOTIONS by Andrea Scarantino B.S., Economics, Bocconi University, 1994 M.S., Philosophy of the Social Sciences, London School of Economics and Political Science, 1997 Ph.D., Economics, Universita’ Cattolica, 2000 M.A., Philosophy, University of Pittsburgh, 2005 Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of University of Pittsburgh in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Pittsburgh 2005 UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH FACULTY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES This dissertation was presented by Andrea Scarantino It was defended on July 20, 2005 and approved by Paul Griffiths, ARC Federation Fellow and Professor of Philosophy, Department of Philosophy, University of Queensland (Co-Director) Peter Machamer, Professor of Philosophy, Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh (Co-Director) Bob Brandom, Distinguished Service Professor of Philosophy, Department of Philosophy, University of Pittsburgh Ruth Millikan, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, Department of Philosophy, University of Connecticut (Outside Reader) ii Copyright © by Andrea Scarantino 2005 iii EXPLICATING EMOTIONS Andrea Scarantino, PhD University of Pittsburgh, 2005 In the course of their long intellectual history, emotions have been identified with items as diverse as perceptions of bodily changes (feeling tradition), judgments (cognitivist tradition), behavioral predispositions (behaviorist tradition), biologically based solutions to fundamental life tasks (evolutionary tradition), and culturally specific social artifacts (social constructionist tradition). The first objective of my work is to put some order in the mare magnum of theories of emotions. I taxonomize them into families and explore the historical origin and current credentials of the arguments and intuitions supporting them.
    [Show full text]
  • Contextual Adaptation. Human Functioning As Dynamic Interaction: a Social Work Perspective
    University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Doctorate in Social Work (DSW) Dissertations School of Social Policy and Practice Spring 5-13-2013 Contextual Adaptation. Human Functioning as Dynamic Interaction: A Social Work Perspective Naomi B F Pollock University of Pennsylvania, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations_sp2 Part of the Social Work Commons Recommended Citation Pollock, Naomi B F, "Contextual Adaptation. Human Functioning as Dynamic Interaction: A Social Work Perspective" (2013). Doctorate in Social Work (DSW) Dissertations. 35. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations_sp2/35 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations_sp2/35 For more information, please contact [email protected]. Contextual Adaptation. Human Functioning as Dynamic Interaction: A Social Work Perspective Abstract Despite the recent development of theories in the social sciences that define human development and functioning in an integrated, nuanced and complex manner, the social work concept of “person-in- environment” remains outdated and limited. This is in part due to the “person” and “environment”--the biological, psychological, and social environments--being defined in distinction from one another. In order to remain current and effective in arguing on behalf of a clear professional voice in the field, social workers must not only engender but also promote a fundamental practice perspective that addresses complexity. A reformulation of “person-in-environment” can help social workers more fully realize the desire to unite under the common professional mandates requiring that both a “person-in-environment” perspective and a full biopsychosocial picture be taken into clinical accounts. To meet this aim I develop the concept of contextual adaptation, a new definition of person-in-envir“ onment” reliant on tenets of nonlinear dynamic systems theory, specifically chaos theory.
    [Show full text]
  • Theoretical Underpinnings of European Union
    IOSR Journal Of Humanities And Social Science (IOSR-JHSS) Volume 20, Issue 1, Ver. III (Jan. 2015), PP 29-33 e-ISSN: 2279-0837, p-ISSN: 2279-0845. www.iosrjournals.org Theoretical Underpinnings of European Union Maneesha Tripathi*1 1Ph.D. Scholar, Department of Political Science, JamiaMilliaIslamia, New Delhi Abstract: The aftermath of Second World War offered a prospect of utter misery and desolation. Europeans felt hopeless and exhausted. The objective of peace went hand in hand with desire to ensure that Europe was able to get back on its feet economically after 1945. The proponents of European integration advanced theories for integration that involved gradual surrendering of sovereignty to a supranational entity. The ECSC was the first step towards European Union. The post 1945, regionalism emerged out of gradual process of integration from a six member organization to today 27 members European Union; from an inter-governmental organization to a supranational entity.The paper looks at the theoretical framework of European integration. Keywords:European Union, Functionalism, Liberalism, Realism, Regional Integration. I. Introduction The institutional architecture and the multi-level governance make European Union a reference point or a yardstick for regional integration experiments. EU is the only example of regional integration which has endeavoured for political integration along with economic integration where approach has been supranational. It was set up with the aim of ending the frequent wars within Europe. Extreme form of nationalism had devastated the continent. European integration was seen as the remedy to create a no war zone within Europe. This process began with the formation of council of Europe in1949, the European steel and coal community in 1950.
    [Show full text]
  • Hilary Putnam (1926–2016): a Lifetime Quest to Understand the Relationship Between Mind, Language, and Reality
    c 2016 Imprint Academic Mind & Matter Vol. 14(1), pp. 87{95 Hilary Putnam (1926{2016): A Lifetime Quest to Understand the Relationship between Mind, Language, and Reality David Leech Anderson Department of Philosophy Illinois State University, Normal, USA Hilary Putnam was one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century. His peers have called him \one of the finest minds I've ever encountered" (Noam Chomsky) and \one of the greatest philosophers this nation has ever produced" (Martha Nussbaum). Standard obituaries covering his \life and times" are available in the mass media.1 This essay 1See, e.g., the New York Times (www.nytimes.com/2016/03/18/arts/hilary- putnam-giant-of-modern-philosophy-dies-at-89.html), the Guardian (www. theguardian.com/books/2016/mar/14/hilary-putnam-obituary), or the Huffington 88 Anderson will focus exclusively on the legacy he has left from his published works and from the way he has modeled a philosopher's life. Hilary Putnam was a towering figure in philosophy of language, phi- losophy of mind, and in metaphysics, and special attention will be paid (below) to those contributions. His influence, however, extends well be- yond those boundaries. He has published works in dozens of different research areas, of which the following is only a small sample. Early in his career he contributed (with Martin Davis, Yuri Matiyasevich, and Julia Robinson) to the solution of Hilbert's 10th problem, a major result in mathematics which, together with other related accomplishments, would have warranted an appointment in a mathematics department. While his central focus was not ethics and political philosophy he advanced a sus- tained attack on the fact-value distinction { a central presupposition of logical positivism and a position that he thought continued to influence research in many areas to deleterious effect.
    [Show full text]
  • {FREE} Does the Center Hold? an Introduction to Western Philosophy
    DOES THE CENTER HOLD? AN INTRODUCTION TO WESTERN PHILOSOPHY 6TH EDITION PDF, EPUB, EBOOK Donald Palmer | --- | --- | --- | 9780078038372 | --- | --- Does the Center Hold? An Introduction to Western Philosophy 6th edition PDF Book The Nicene definition established the meaning of faith which Christians were to hold and its defenders had recourse less to philosophical or theological speculation than to the Scripture as they understood it. No CD Included. Ideas do not have origin in experience…we approach the world with ideals: truth, beauty, the good; in addition to the value-concepts. In addition, intrigued by the manner in which Christian theology was drawing on nineteeth- and twentieth-century European philosophies, pockets of so-called Buddhist-Christian dialogue began to emerge and fully blossomed in the post-censorship era after This means, especially, that even while a crisis may exist its nature may not be what it is commonly held to be. Jacobi — The universe is a cosmos—a beautiful, well-ordered, perfect whole. Should that arrangement end, each of the pair returns to his or her originally discrete individuality and attendant rights. As for utilitarianism, they admired its consequentialist ethics that used an empirically derived cost-benefit analysis to determine what would bring maximum happiness or pleasure for society as a whole. Paper Cavalier Italia via United States. At the time, Descartes was working on The World , a study he thought would revolutionize the study of physics. Usually ships within 4 to 5 days. Book Deals via United States. My comment: yet it is clear to imagine ways in which synthetic judgments may be universal and necessary: our very formation may be so in attune with the universe that certain facets of our perceptual-cognitive systems may render synthetic contentful judgments that are always true universal and represent the very nature of the universe necessary.
    [Show full text]
  • Perception and Scientific Observation: a Challenge to the Assumption of Objectivity
    University of New Hampshire University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository Doctoral Dissertations Student Scholarship Winter 1971 PERCEPTION AND SCIENTIFIC OBSERVATION: A CHALLENGE TO THE ASSUMPTION OF OBJECTIVITY RAYMOND E. RAINVILLE Follow this and additional works at: https://scholars.unh.edu/dissertation Recommended Citation RAINVILLE, RAYMOND E., "PERCEPTION AND SCIENTIFIC OBSERVATION: A CHALLENGE TO THE ASSUMPTION OF OBJECTIVITY" (1971). Doctoral Dissertations. 939. https://scholars.unh.edu/dissertation/939 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Student Scholarship at University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. RAINVILLE, Raymond E., 1940- PERCEPTION AND SCIENTIFIC OBSERVATION: A CHALLENGE TO THE ASSUMPTION OF OBJECTIVITY. University of New Hampshire, Ph.D., 1971 Psychology, general University Microfilms, AXEROX Company, Ann Arbor, Michigan I ___________ _ r_______ ___________________ J THIS DISSERTATION HAS BEEN MICROFILMED EXACTLY AS RECEIVED PERCEPTION AND SCIENTIFIC OBSERVATION: A CHALLENGE TO THE ASSUMPTION OF OBJECTIVITY by RAYMOND E. RAINVILLE A THESIS Submitted to the University of New Hampshire In Partial Fulfillment of The Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate School Department of Psychology December, 1970 This thesis has been examined and approved. Thesis director, Frederick Jervis, Professor of Psychology RaymoA6 Erickson,Professor of Psychology Eugene Mills, Professor of Psychology Cecil Schneer, Professor of Geology ft oM/jcb Robert Watson, Professor of Psychology / J /ia m Duane Whittier, ‘Associate Professor of Philosophy TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF TABLES..................................... iv LIST OF FIGURES...................................
    [Show full text]
  • Dewey's Transactional Constructivism
    Journal of Philosophy of Education, Vol. 36, No. 2, 2002 Dewey’s Transactional Constructivism RAF VANDERSTRAETEN Constructivism is very influential in education. However, its underlying ideas and assumptions have not yet been critically analysed sufficiently. In this paper, I argue that John Dewey’s analyses of the transaction of organism and environment can be read as an account of the construction processes that lie beneath all human activity. Dewey’s work anticipates, if it does not explicitly articulate, much of what is important and interesting about constructivist epistemology and constructivist pedagogy. The paper is devoted to a reconstruction of the formulation of this transactional constructivism, and to an analysis of its consequences for a constructivist understanding of communication and education. INTRODUCTION There is much ado about constructivism in education. Constructivism informs a wide variety of reflection on information processing and cognition, on student learning and classroom teaching methods. Educational researchers, curriculum developers, school administrators and teachers have appropriated the constructivist label in one or other of its various manifestations. Some critical observers have argued that this perspective is invoked to counterbalance the overwhelming dominance in schools of content-oriented, test-driven methods. As such, construc- tivism has ‘attained the status of political correctness’(Phillips, 1997, p. 154). But it can also be argued that questions about how construction actually takes place offer an important starting point for thinking about education and instruction, since the way persons generally construct understandings and misunderstandings may be a good guide for how these processes take place in classrooms and other educational contexts. Until now, the philosophical and epistemological foundations of constructivism have received comparatively little attention.
    [Show full text]
  • 1 Bringing the World Back In: Revolutions and Relations Before
    Bringing the World Back In: Revolutions and Relations Before and After the Quantum Event Jairus Victor Grove University of Hawai’i at Manoa [Work in Progres. Please Do Not Cite Without Permission [email protected]] 1 “All matter, indeed, is capable of entertaining thought.” -Thoreau, 1845 “The only laws of matter are those which our minds must fabricate, and the only laws of mind are fabricated for it by matter.” -James Clerk Maxwell Introduction In 2013 I was invited to attend a symposium at the University of Sydney on quantum theory. The invite was an accident of sorts. Someone else had to withdraw from the event and a seat needed to be filled. I had never been to Australia and James Der Derian was organizing it. I was only a couple of years into my career, and travel and room and board were being covered. What could go wrong? I accepted immediately. Then the panic set in. Everything I knew about quantum theory came from Billy Bob Thorton’s courtroom monologue in the Coen Brother’s The Man Who Wasn’t There. I had been very invested in the ways complexity theory could be folded into the social sciences, but my understanding of psychics began and ended with the phrase ‘Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle’. I had two months to read everything I could before walking into a room of experts, and this is what I did in the intervening weeks. I was happy to find that nearly all of the major contributors to quantum physics had written collections of philosophical essays.
    [Show full text]