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Situated Cognition

Situated cognition

Situated cognition is a new movement in cognitive psychology which derives from pragmatism, Gibsonian ecological psychology, ethnomethodology, the theories of Vygotsky and the writings of Heidegger. However, the key impetus of its development was work done in the late 1980s in educational psychology. Empirical work on how children and young people learned showed that traditional cognitivist 'rule bound' approaches were inadequate to describe how learning actually took place in the real world. Instead, it was suggested that learning was "situated": that is, it always took place in a specific context (cf contextualism). This is similar to the view of "situated activity" proposed by Lucy Suchman, "social context" proposed by Giuseppe Mantovani, and "Situated Learning" proposed by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger. Situated cognition emphasises studies of human behaviour that have 'ecological validity': that is, which take place in real situations (i.e. outside the laboratory). In more traditional laboratory studies of (for example) how people behave in the workplace, real-world complications such as personal interruptions, office politics, scheduling constraints, private agendas and so forth, are generally ignored, even though these necessarily change the nature of the activity. Situated cognition attempts to integrate these complexities into its analytic framework. More than ever before, theorists have been pushing for more authentic research. Situating our students and research participants in authentic situations will help us achieve better research results and ultimately enhace our understanding of educational theories.

Cognitive psychology

Cognitive psychology is the psychological science that studies cognition, the mental processes that underlie behavior, including thinking, deciding, reasoning, and to some extent motivation and emotion. This covers a broad range of research domains, examining questions about the workings of memory, attention, perception, knowledge representation, reasoning, creativity and problem solving. The term came into use with the publication of the book Cognitive Psychology by Ulric Neisser in 1967. There he gives a very broad definition of cognitive psychology, emphasising that it is a point of view which postulates the mind as having a certain conceptual structure, thus giving the discipline scope to study more than the higher-level concepts such as "reasoning" that modern books often enumerate in an attempt to give a definition. Neisser's definition of cognition illustrates this well:

...the term "cognition" refers to all processes by which the sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered, and used. It is concerned with these processes even when they operate in the absence of relevant stimulation, as in images and hallucinations... Given such a sweeping definition, it is apparent that cognition is involved in everything a human being might possibly do; that every psychological phenomenon is a cognitive phenomenon. But although cognitive psychology is concerned with all human activity rather than some fraction of it, the concern is from a particular point of view. Other viewpoints are equally legitimate and necessary. Dynamic psychology, which begins with motives rather than with sensory input, is a case in point. Instead of asking how a man's actions and experiences result from what he saw, remembered, or believed, the dynamic psychologist asks how they follow from the subject's goals, needs, or instincts.

Cognitive psychology is radically different from previous psychological approaches in two key ways.
- It accepts the use of the scientific method, and generally rejects introspection as a valid method of investigation, unlike phenomenological methods such as Freudian psychology.
- It explicitly acknowledges the existence of internal mental states (such as beliefs, desires and motivations) unlike behaviourist psychology. The school of thought arising from this approach is known as cognitivism. Cognitive psychology is one of the more recent additions to psychological research, having only developed as a separate area within the discipline since the late 1950s and early 1960s (though there are examples of cognitive thinking from earlier researchers). The cognitive approach was brought to prominence by Donald Broadbent's book Perception and Communication in 1958. Since that time, the dominant paradigm in the area has been the information processing model of cognition that Broadbent put forward. This is a way of thinking and reasoning about mental processes, envisaging them like software running on the computer that is the brain. Theories commonly refer to forms of input, representation, computation or processing, and outputs. This way of conceiving mental processes has pervaded psychology more generally over the past few decades, and it is not uncommon to find cognitive theories within social psychology, personality, abnormal psychology, developmental psychology; the application of cognitive theories in comparative psychology has led to many recent studies in animal cognition. The information processing approach to cognitive functioning is currently being questioned by new approaches in psychology, such as dynamical systems, and the embodiment perspective. Because of the use of computational metaphors and terminology, cognitive psychology was able to benefit greatly from the flourishing of research in artificial intelligence and other related areas in the 1960s and 1970s. In fact, it developed as one of the significant aspects of the inter-disciplinary subject of cognitive science, which attempts to integrate a range of approaches in research on the mind and mental processes.

Major research areas in cognitive psychology

Perception
- Attention and Filter theories (the ability to focus mental effort on specific stimuli while excluding other stimuli from consideration)
- Pattern recognition (the ability to correctly interpret ambiguous sensory information) Memory
- Short-term memory and long-term memory
- Autobiographical memory
- Episodic memory
- Flashbulb memory
- Semantic memory
- Constructive memory
- Encoding, storing and retrieving memory-based information Knowledge representation
- Mental imagery
- Propositional encoding
- Imagery versus proposition debate
- Dual-coding theories
- Mental models Language
- Grammar and linguistics
- Phonetics and phonology
- Language acquisition Thinking
- Logic, formal and natural reasoning
- Concept formation
- Problem solving
- Judgment and decision making

Famous and/or influential cognitive psychologists

- Alan Baddeley
- Frederic Bartlett
- Donald Broadbent
- Jerome Bruner
- Hermann Ebbinghaus
- William Estes
- Daniel Kahneman
- George A. Miller
- Ulrich Neisser
- Allen Newell
- Jean Piaget
- Michael Posner
- David Rumelhart
- Daniel Schacter
- Roger Shepard
- Herbert Simon
- Endel Tulving
- Anne Treisman
- Amos Tversky

External links

- [http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/topic.htm#cognition Famous papers in the history of cognition] Category:Cognition Psychology ja:認知心理学

Pragmatism

Pragmatism is belief of the teaching of philosophy which originated in the United States in the late 1800s. Pragmatism is characterized by the insistence on consequences, utility and practicality as vital components of meaning and truth. Pragmatism objects to the view that human concepts and intellect represent reality, and therefore stands in opposition to both formalist and rationalist schools of philosophy. Rather, pragmatism holds that it is only in the struggle of intelligent organisms with the surrounding environment that theories acquire significance, and only with a theory's success in this struggle that it becomes true. Pragmatism does not hold, however, that just anything that is useful or practical should be regarded as true, or anything that helps us to survive merely in the short-term; pragmatists argue that what should be taken as true is that which most contributes to the most human good over the longest course. In practice, this means that for pragmatists, theoretical claims should be tied to verification practices--i.e., that one should be able to make predictions and test them--and that ultimately the needs of humankind should guide the path of human inquiry.

American philosophy

Like any philosophical movement, the nature and content of pragmatism is a subject of considerable debate, whether it is one of exegesis (determining what the original pragmatists thought it was) or subtantive philosophical theory (what is the most defensible theory that satisfies certain goals). The term pragmatism was first used by William James, who attributed the doctrine to Charles Sanders Peirce (pronounced 'purse'). Peirce later went on to disavow the term in favour of 'pragmaticism', in order to distinguish his views from those of William James and the other major pragmatist thinker, John Dewey. Peirce and James were colleagues at Harvard in the 1870s, and were members of the same 'metaphysical club' or philosophical discussion group (for an excellent account of which, see the Pulitzer-prize-winning book by Louis Menand). Dewey was educated in Vermont but is most commonly associated with the University of Chicago (though he also taught at Michigan and Columbia).

What is common to all three thinkers' philosophy - and with other loosely affiliated thinkers such as Oliver Wendell Holmes - is a broad emphasis on the primacy of the practical over the theoretical in inquiry in general (particularly philosophical inquiry). One famous aspect of this view is Peirce's insistence that contrary to Descartes' famous and influential method in the Meditations, doubt cannot be feigned or created for the purpose of conducting philosophical inquiry. Doubt, like belief, requires justification, that is, it arises from confrontation with some specific recalcitrant matter of fact (from what Dewey called a 'situation'), which unsettles our belief in some specific proposition. Inquiry is then the rationally self-controlled process of attempting to return to a settled state of belief about that proposition.

Hilary Putnam (a contemporary or 'neo' pragmatist) has characterised pragmatism in terms of these and other themes: (1) the primacy of practice, (2) the collapse of any broad-ranging fact/value dichotomy, (3) antiscepticism (or the view that sceptical doubt, like any doubt, requires justification in order to be genuine) and (4) fallibilism: there is never an absolute or metaphysical guarantee that a given belief is true and will never be revised. Indeed Putnam goes on to suggest that the reconciliation of (3) and (4) is the central claim of American pragmatism.

Perhaps the most notorious pragmatist view - its theory of truth - appears frequently in James' work, but occupies a much smaller portion of the work of Peirce and Dewey. This theory is often caricatured in contemporary literature as the view that 'truth is what works', or that any idea that has practical utility is true. In reality the theory is a great deal more subtle, and bears a striking resemblance to better respected contemporary views, particularly Crispin Wright's 'superassertibility' (see his book 'Truth & Objectivity').

Pragmatism in history

A useful general account of pragmatism's origins during the late 19th and early 20th centuries is Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club. According to Menand, pragmatism took form largely in response to the work of Charles Darwin (evolution, ongoing process, and a non-epistemological view of history), statistics (the recognition of the role of randomness in the unfolding of events, and of the presence of regularity within randomness), American democracy (values of pluralism and consensus applied to knowledge as well as politics), and in particular the American Civil War (a rejection of the sort of absolutizing or dualizing claims [i.e., to Truth] that provide the philosophical underpinnings of war). Some scholars have noted a similarity between pragmatism and some elements in Buddhist philosophical thought, see Buddhism. William James himself noticed the similarity, writing in The Varieties of Religious Experience that "I am ignorant of Buddhism and speak under correction ... but as I apprehend the Buddhistic doctrine of Karma, I agree in principle with that."

Notable pragmatists

Classical Pragmatists
- John Dewey (prominent philosopher of education, referred to his brand of pragmatism as instrumentalism)
- William James (influential psychologist and theorist of religion, as well as philosopher. First to be widely associated with the term "pragmatism" due to Peirce's lifelong unpopularity.)
- Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) was the founder of American pragmatism (later called by Peirce pragmaticism), an extender of the Scotistic theory of signs (called by Peirce semeiotic), an extraordinarily prolific logician and mathematician, and a developer of an evolutionary, psycho-physically monistic metaphysical system. A practicing chemist and geodesist by profession, he nevertheless considered scientific philosophy, and especially logic, to be his vocation. In the course of his polymathic researches, he wrote on a wide range of topics, from mathematical logic to psychology.
- George Herbert Mead (philosopher and social psychologist)
- Reinhold Niebuhr (theologian and social critic)
- Giovanni Papini
- Josiah Royce (colleague of James who employed pragmatism in an idealist metaphysical framework, he was particularly interested in the philosophy of religion and community; his work is often associated with neo-Hegelianism)
- George Santayana (often not considered to be a canonical pragmatist, he applied pragmatist methodologies to naturalism (philosophy), exemplified in his early masterwork, The Life of Reason)
- F.C.S. Schiller (one of the most important pragmatists of his time, Schiller is largely forgotten today) Neo-Classical Pragmatists
- Susan Haack (teaches at the University of Miami, sometimes called the grand-daughter of C.S. Peirce)
- Richard A. Posner (Judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, law professor, and prolific author of scholarly articles and books)
- Hilary Putnam Neo-Pragmatists
- Cornel West (important thinker on race, politics, and religion; operates under the sign of "prophetic pragmatism")
- Richard Rorty (author of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature)
- Stephen Breyer (U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice) Pragmatists in the Extended Sense
- Willard van Orman Quine (pragmatist philosopher, concerned with language, logic, and philosophy of mathematics)
- Wilfrid Sellars (broad thinker, attacked foundationalism in the analytic tradition)
- Rudolph Carnap (important exponent of logical positivism, teacher of Quine)
- Clarence Irving Lewis
- Frank P. Ramsey
- Karl-Otto Apel
- Nicholas Rescher

References

- [http://www.pragmatism.org/ The Pragmatism Cybrary]
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
- [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/femapproach-pragmatism/ Pragmatist Feminism]
- On James and Buddhism, http://ccbs.ntu.edu.tw/FULLTEXT/JR-PHIL/shaw2.htm Category:Philosophical schools and traditions Category:Philosophy of science ja:プラグマティズム

Ethnomethodology

Ethnomethodology (literally, 'the study of people's methods') is a sociological discipline and paradigm which focuses on the way people make sense of the world and display their understandings of it. It focuses on the ways in which people already understand the world and how they use that understanding. In so far as this is key behavior in human society, Ethnomethodology holds out the promise of a comprehensive and coherent alternative to mainstream sociology. The term was initially coined by Harold Garfinkel in the 1950s, to signify the methods members of the society use to make and maintain sense of the social world around them. While sociology seeks to provide accounts of society which compete with those offered by other members, ethnomethodology focuses on how these accounts are organised in the ongoing moment to moment maintenance of social order. Since this is usually taken for granted, ethnomethodologists have used research methods in the past that 'breach' or 'break' the everyday routine of interaction in order to reveal the work that goes into maintaining the normal flow of life. Some examples from early studies include: pretending to be a stranger in one's own home; blatantly cheating at board games; or attempting to bargain for goods on sale in stores. These interventions have demonstrated the creativity with which ordinary members of society are able to interpret and maintain the social order.

History and Influence

The approach was developed by Harold Garfinkel, based on Alfred Schütz's phenomenological reconstruction of Max Weber's verstehen sociology. While ethnomethodology is often seen as removed from more mainstream sociology, it has been extremely influential. For instance, ethnomethodology has always focused on the ways in which words are reliant for their meaning on the context in which they are used (they are 'indexical'). This has led to insights into the objectivity of social science and the difficulty in establishing a description of human behavior which has an objective status outside the context of its creation. Ethnomethodology has had an impact on linguistics and particularly on pragmatics, spawning a whole new discipline of conversation analysis. Ethnomethodological studies of work have played a significant role in the field of human-computer interaction, improving design by providing engineers with descriptions of the practices of users. Ethnomethodology has also influenced the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge by providing a research strategy that precisely describes the methods of its research subjects without the necessity of evaluating their validity. This proved to be useful to researchers studying social order in laboratories who wished to understand how scientists understood their experiments without either endorsing or criticising their activities.

Some leading policies and methods

; Ethnomethodological Indifference: This is a policy of deliberate agnosticism towards social theory. It is a specialised application of the phenomenological technique of bracketing. By deliberately suspending our preconceived notions of how the social order is maintained, we are able to more clearly see the social order in its actual, real-time, moment-to-moment production. ; First Time Through: This is a practice of treating any social activity as if it was happening for the very first time, in an attempt to discover how that particular activity is put together by those who participate in it. ; Breaching Experiment: Not really an experiment, but rather an 'aid to the sluggish imagination'. Another way of making clear the work that is done by members to maintain the social order (see above). ; Sacks' Gloss: A question about an aspect of the social order that recommends, as a method of answering it, that the researcher should seek out members of society who, in their daily lives, are responsible for the maintenance of that aspect of the social order. Sacks' original question concerned objects in public places and how it was possible to see that such objects did or did not belong to somebody. He found his answer in the activities of police officers who had to decide whether cars were abandoned. ; Durkheim's Aphorism: Durkheim famously recommended that we 'treat social facts as things'. This is usually taken to mean that we should assume the objectivity of social facts as a principal of study (thus providing the basis of sociology as a science). Harold Garfinkel's alternative reading of Durkheim is that we should treat the objectivity of social facts as an achievement of society' members, thus making this achievement of objectivity the focus of study.

References

- Garfinkel, Harold. 1984. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Malden MA: Polity Press/Blackwell Publishing. (ISBN 0-7456-0005-0) (first published in 1967)
- Garfinkel, Harold. (Hrsg.) 1986. Ethnomethodological Studies of Work, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (ISBN 0-7100-9664-X)
- Garfinkel, Harold. 2002. Ethnomethodology's Program. New York: Rowan and Littlefield. (ISBN 0-7425-1642-3)
- "Lectures on Conversation" by Harvey Sacks 1992 (two volumes) Backwell, Oxford.

External Links

- http://www.stswiki.org STS Wiki Category: Behavior Category:Sociology Category:Science and technology studies

Vygotsky

Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky (Лев Семенович Выготский) (November 12 (November 5 Old Style), 1896—June 11, 1934) was a Belarusian developmental psychologist, discovered by the Western world in the 1960's. According to Vygotsky, the intellectual development of children is a function of human communities, rather than of individuals. His contributions are widely respected and influential within the fields of developmental psychology, education, and child development.

Biography

He was born in Orsha, Belarus (then Russian empire) and grew up in Homel (sothern Belarus) in a prosperous Jewish family. Vygotsky attended Moscow University, majoring in law. He graduated in 1918 and returned to Gomel where he worked as a school teacher and studied psychology. In 1924 he moved to Moscow, working on a diverse set of projects. He died of tuberculosis in 1934, leaving a wealth of work that is still being explored.

Work

Vygotsky's work includes several key concepts, one of which is the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) which relates to the gap or difference between what the child can learn unaided and what he or she can learn with the help of an adult or a more capable peer. This idea of assisting the learner is known as scaffolding. When a child works unaided on a task or problem, that individual is said to be at their actual development level. Potential development level is the level of competence a child can reach when he or she is guided and supported by another person. This concept was later developed by Jerome Bruner and influenced Bruner's related concept of instructional scaffolding. Another important Vygotskyan contribution relates to the development of language as related to thought. This concept is explored in his brilliant book "Thought and Language" in which Vygotsky establishes the explicit and profound connection between oral language (speech) and the development of concepts (mental constructs) and one's conscious awareness of them--providing the underlying theoretical rationale for such truisms as "If you want to learn something, teach it to someone." And for the observation that by "talking it out" we clarify an issue in our own minds. Vygotsky's model of human development has been termed as a sociocultural approach. For him, the individual’s development is a result of his or her culture. Development, in Vygotsky’s theory, applies mainly to mental development, such as thought, language and reasoning processes. These abilities were understood to develop through social interactions with others (especially parents) and therefore represented the shared knowledge of the culture. These abilities are developed through a process called internalization. Internalization describes how children’s social activities develop to become mental activities. When children listen and participate with parents, teachers, and peers, they begin to internalize and process new information. Vygotsky's work appeared largely forgotten after his death, and his work in early cognitive development does not appear to have influenced cognitive developmentalists such as Jean Piaget. However, early - albeit indirectly - influence on growing cognitive science community in the United States was already apparent in the late 1950s and early 1960s through the work of Vygotsky's student and later collaborator Alexander Luria which was read by early pioneers of cognitive science J. S. Bruner and George Miller. By the 1980s, Vygotsky's work became well known in the United States in part due to the opening of the Soviet Union due to glasnost. Vygotsky's work became extremely influential because it offered a way of reconciling the competing notions of maturation by which a child is seen as an unfolding flower best left to develop on his or her own, and behaviourism, in which a child is seen as a blank slate onto which must be poured knowledge. His views are influential on activity theory, distributed cognition, and Cognitive [http://moodle.ed.uiuc.edu/wiked/index.php/Apprenticeship Apprenticeships]. Works of Vygotsky are also studied today by linguists regarding language and its influence on the formation of the perception of reality.

External links

- [http://www.psy.pdx.edu/PsiCafe/KeyTheorists/Vygotsky.htm Short bio]
- [http://www2.cddc.vt.edu/marxists/archive/vygotsky/index.htm Vygotsky Internet Archive]
- [http://www.educationau.edu.au/archives/CP/04l.htm Social Development Theory]
- [http://lib.aldebaran.ru/author/vygotskii_lev/vygotskii_lev_psihologiya_iskusstva/ Lev Vygotsky's Phychology of Art] Vygotsky, Lev Vygotsky, Lev Vygotsky, Lev Vygotsky, Lev Vygotsky, Lev Vygotsky, Lev

Heidegger

Martin Heidegger (September 26, 1889 – May 26, 1976) was a German philosopher. He studied at the University of Freiburg under Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, and became a professor there in 1928. He influenced many other major philosophers, and his own students at various times included Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hans Jonas, Emmanuel Levinas, Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, Xavier Zubiri and Karl Löwith. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe also studied his work more or less closely. Beyond his relation to phenomenology, Heidegger is regarded as a major or indispensable influence on existentialism, deconstruction, hermeneutics and postmodernism. He attempted to reorient Western philosophy away from metaphysical and epistemological and toward ontological questions, that is, questions concerning the meaning of being, or what it means to be. He was also a prominent academic member of the Nazi Party.

Early life and education

Heidegger was born to a rural family in Meßkirch, Germany, and raised to be a clergyman. He was influenced as a teenager by Aristotle mediated through Christian theology. The concept of being, in this traditional sense, dating back to Plato, was his first exposure to an idea he would plant at the core of his most famous work Being and Time (1927). His family was not wealthy enough to send him to university and he required a scholarship, which itself required he study for the religious order. Mathematics was also his early major. During his time as a student he left theology for philosophy as he gradually found other academic funding. He wrote his doctorate thesis on a text then thought to be by Duns Scotus, a 14th century ethical and religious thinker, but later attributed to Thomas of Erfurt. Heidegger was originally a phenomenologist. To oversimplify, phenomenologists approach philosophy by attempting to perceive experience unmediated by prior knowledge and abstract theoretical assumptions. Husserl was its founder and major exponent. In fact, Heidegger studied under Husserl and it was this that persuaded him to become a phenomenologist. Heidegger became interested in the question of being (or what it means to be). His famous work Being and Time is characterized as phenomenological ontology. The idea of being dates back to Parmenides and has traditionally served as one of the key thoughts of Western philosophy. The question of being was revived by Heidegger after being eclipsed by the metaphysical tradition from Plato to Descartes, and more recently in the Enlightenment. He tried to ground being in time, and thus discover its real essence or meaning, that is, its intelligibility for us. Thus Heidegger began where being began — in ancient Greek thought, resurrecting a lost, under-appreciated issue in contemporary philosophy. Heidegger's great opening was to take Plato seriously again, and at the same time undermine the entire Platonic world by challenging the core of Platonism — treating being not as timeless and transcendent, but as immanent in time and history. This is partially why Platonists such as George Grant regard Heidegger as a great thinker, even if they disagree with his analysis of Being and conception of Platonic thought. Although Heidegger was a supremely creative and original thinker, he also borrowed heavily from Friedrich Nietzsche and Søren Kierkegaard, the latter of whom goes mostly unacknowledged by Heidegger. Heidegger can be compared to Aristotle, who took Plato's dialogues and systematically presented them as treatises and concepts. Similarly, Heidegger extracted Nietzsche's unpublished fragments and interpreted them as the culminating expression of Western metaphysics. Heidegger's published lectures during 1936 on Nietzsche’s Will to Power as Art are less scholarly commentaries than original philosophical works in their own right. Heidegger's concepts of angst and Da-sein draw on Kierkegaard's notions of anxiety, the importance of subjective relation to the truth, existence in the face of death, the temporality of existence, and the importance of passionate affirmation of one's individual being-in-the-world. Martin Heidegger is regarded as one of the most significant philosophers of the 20th century. His prominence is rivaled only by Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein, and his ideas have seeped into an incredibly large number of research areas. It is because of Heidegger's discussion of ontology that he is often cited as one of the founders of existentialism and his ideas inspired some great philosophical works, such as by the philosopher Sartre who adopts many of his ideas from Heidegger (although Heidegger insists that Sartre misunderstood his works). His philosophical work was taken up throughout Germany, France, and Japan and has gained, since the 1970s at least, a strong following in North America as well; it was scorned as rubbish, however, by contemporaries such as the Vienna Circle, Theodor Adorno, and British philosophers such as Bertrand Russell and Alfred Ayer. Heidegger's refusal to adopt current concepts such as the fact-value distinction, his criticism of modern science and technology, and his refusal to offer an "ethical" component to his theory, claiming such a suggestion was a fundamental misunderstanding of his thought, often puzzled and confused philosophers. Attacking him seemed like the only thing to do, especially since his private behavior was morally and politically ambiguous.

Philosophy

Being and Time

Heidegger's most important work is the dense and challenging Being and Time (German Sein und Zeit, 1927). Although the book as published represents only a third of the total project outlined in its introduction, it marked a turning point in continental philosophy. It has been massively influential and remains one of the most discussed works of 20th century philosophy; many subsequent philosophical views and approaches, such as existentialism and deconstruction, have been strongly influenced by Being and Time. In this work, Heidegger takes up the question of the meaning of being: what does it mean to say that an entity is? This is the fundamental question of ontology, defined by Aristotle as the study of being qua (Latin, tr. roughly as 'as', or 'in the capacity of') being. In his approach to this question, Heidegger departs from the tradition of Aristotle and of Kant, both of whom, despite the vast difference between their respective philosophical positions, approach the question of the meaning of being from the perspective of the logic of propositional statements. Implicit in this traditional approach is the thesis that theoretical knowledge represents the most fundamental relation between the human individual and the beings in his surrounding world (including himself). Explicitly rejecting this thesis, Heidegger instead adopts a version of the phenomenological method, purged of what he regards as the residue of Aristotelian/Kantian cognitivism still present in Husserl's formulation of this method. Like Husserl, Heidegger takes as his starting point the phenomenon of intentionality. Human behavior is intentional insofar as it is directed at some object or end (all building is building of something, all talking is talking about something, etc). Intentionality was an activity termed by Heidegger as "Sorge" (care) and reflected a positive aspect of Angst. Sorge, or caring, as the fundamental concept of the intentional being, presupposed an ontological significance that distinguishes ontological being from mere ontic being (thinghood). Theoretical knowledge represents only one kind of intentional behavior, and Heidegger asserts that it is founded on more fundamental modes of behavior, modes of practical engagement with the surrounding world, rather than being their ultimate foundation. He divides the understanding between the existentiell understanding, which understands existence through existence itself, and existential understanding, which is the theoretical analysis of what constitutes existence. An entity is what it is (i.e., it has being) insofar as it "shows up" within a context of practical engagement (Heidegger calls such a context a 'world'), not because it has certain inherent properties ascertainable by disinterested contemplation. A hammer is a hammer not because it has certain hammer-like properties, but because it is used for hammering. This also necessitated a rejection of the Cartesian, disembodied 'I': that is, an 'I' as a purely thinking object. Instead, Heidegger insisted that any analysis of human behaviour should begin with the fact that we are in the world (not viewing it in an 'abstract' fashion): therefore the fundamental fact about human existence is our 'being-in-the-world'. Human beings, Heidegger insisted, were embodied beings who acted in the world. He also said that the world was a characteristic of Being in the World, "Da-Sein." He therefore rejected the 'subject-object' distinction assumed by most philosophers since Descartes. Things are meaningful to us in terms of their use in certain contexts, which are defined by social norms. However, all of these norms are radically contingent. Their contingency is revealed in the fundamental phenomenon of Angst, in which all norms fall away and beings show up as nothing in particular, in their essential meaninglessness. (Contrary to some existentialist interpretations of Heidegger, this does not mean that all existence is absurd; rather, it means that existence always has the potential for absurdity.) The experience of Angst reveals the essential finitude of human being. The fact that beings can show up, either as meaningful in a context or as meaningless in the experience of Angst, depends on a prior phenomenon: that beings can show up at all. Heidegger calls the showing up of beings "truth", which he defines as unconcealment rather than correctness. This "truth of beings", their self-revelation, involves a more fundamental kind of truth, the "disclosure of being in which the being of beings is unconcealed." It is this unconcealment of being that defines human existence for Heidegger: the human being is that being for whom being is an issue, that is, for whom being shows up as such (Heidegger's word for such an entity, which could conceivably have non-human instantiations, is Da-sein). This is why Heidegger begins his inquiry into the meaning of being with an inquiry into the essence of human being; the ontology of Da-sein is fundamental ontology. The unconcealment of being is an essentially temporal and historical phenomenon (hence the "time" in Being and Time); what we call past, present, and future correspond originarily to aspects of this unconcealment and not to three mutually exclusive regions of the homogeneous time that clocks measure (although clock-time is derivative from the originary time of unconcealment, as Heidegger attempts to show in the book's difficult final chapters). The total understanding of being results from an explication of the implicit knowledge of being that inheres in all human behavior. Philosophy thus becomes a form of interpretation; this is why Heidegger's technique in Being and Time is often referred to as hermeneutical phenomenology. Being and Time, being incomplete, contains Heidegger's statement of this project and his interpretation of human existence and its temporal horizon, but does not contain the working out of the meaning of being as such on the basis of this interpretation. This ambitious task is taken up in a different way in his later works (see below). As part of his ontological project, Heidegger undertakes a reinterpretation of previous Western philosophy. He wants to explain why and how theoretical knowledge came to seem like the most fundamental relation to being. This explanation takes the form of a destructuring (Destruktion) of the philosophical tradition, an interpretive strategy that reveals the fundamental experience of being at the base of previous philosophies. In Being and Time he briefly destructures the philosophy of Descartes; in later works he uses this approach to interpret the philosophies of Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, and Plato, among others. This technique exerted a profound influence on Derrida's deconstructive approach, although there are very important differences between the two methods. Being and Time is the towering achievement of Heidegger's early career, but there are other important works from this period, including Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie (The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, 1927), Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik (Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 1929), and "Was ist Metaphysik?" ("What Is Metaphysics?", 1929).

Later works

Although Heidegger claimed that all of his writings concerned a single question, the question of being, in the years after the publication of Being and Time the focus of his work gradually changed. This change is often referred to as Heidegger's Kehre (turn). In his later works, Heidegger turns from "doing" to "dwelling." He focuses less on the way in which the structures of being are revealed in everyday behavior and in the experience of Angst, and more on the way in which behavior itself depends on a prior "openness to being." The essence of being human is the maintenance of this openness. (The difference between Heidegger's early and late works is more a difference of emphasis than a radical break like that between the early and late works of Wittgenstein, but it is important enough to justify a division of the Heideggerian corpus into "early" (roughly, pre-1930) and "late" writings.) Heidegger opposes this openness to the "will to power" of the modern human subject, who subordinates beings to his own ends rather than letting them "be what they are." Heidegger interprets the history of western philosophy as a brief period of authentic openness to being in the time of the pre-Socratics, especially Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Anaximander, followed by a long period increasingly dominated by nihilistic subjectivity, initiated by Plato and culminating in Nietzsche. In the later writings, two recurring themes are poetry and technology. Heidegger sees poetry as a preeminent way in which beings are revealed "in their being." The play of poetic language (which is, for Heidegger, the essence of language itself) reveals the play of presence and absence that is being itself. Heidegger focuses especially on the poetry of Hölderlin. Against the revealing power of poetry, Heidegger sets the force of technology. The essence of technology is the conversion of the whole universe of beings into an undifferentiated "standing reserve" (Bestand) of energy available for any use to which humans choose to put it. The standing reserve represents the most extreme nihilism, since the being of beings is totally subordinated to the will of the human subject. Heidegger does not unequivocally condemn technology; he believes that its increasing dominance might make it possible for humanity to return to its authentic task of the stewardship of being. Nevertheless, many of Heidegger's later works are characterized by an unmistakable agrarian nostalgia. Heidegger's important later works include Vom Wesen der Wahrheit ("On the Essence of Truth," 1930), Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes ("The Origin of the Work of Art," 1935), Bauen Wohnen Denken ("Building Dwelling Thinking," 1951), and Die Frage nach der Technik ("The Question Concerning Technology," 1953) and Was heisst Denken? ("What Is Called Thinking?" 1954).

Influences and difficulties of French reception

Heidegger, like Husserl, is an explicitly acknowledged influence on existentialism, despite his explicit disavowal and objection, in texts such as the "Letter on Humanism," of the importation of key elements of his work into existentialist contexts. While Heidegger was banned from university teaching for a period shortly after the war on account of his activities as Rector of Freiburg, he developed a number of contacts in France who continued to teach his work and brought their students to visit him in Todtnauberg (see, for example, Jean-François Lyotard's brief account in "Heidegger and 'the jews': A Conference in Vienna and Freiburg," which discusses a Franco-German conference held in Freiburg in 1947, a first step in bringing together French and German students after the War). Heidegger subsequently made efforts to keep abreast of developments in French philosophy by way of recommendations from Jean Beaufret, who was an early French translator, and Lucien Braun. Deconstruction as it is generally understood (i.e., as French and Anglo-American phenomena profoundly rooted in Heidegger's work, with limited general exposure in a German context until the 1980s) came to Heidegger's attention in 1967 by way of Lucien Braun's recommendation of Jacques Derrida's work (Hans-Georg Gadamer was present at an initial discussion and indicated to Heidegger that Derrida's work came to his attention by way of an assistant). Heidegger expressed interest in meeting Derrida personally after the latter sent him some of his work. (There was discussion of a meeting in 1972, but this did not happen.) Heidegger's interest in Derrida is said by Braun to have been considerable (as is evident in two letters, of 29 September 1967 and 16 May 1972, from Heidegger to Braun). Braun also brought to Heidegger's attention the work of Michel Foucault. Foucault's relation to Heidegger is a matter of considerable difficulty; Foucault acknowledged Heidegger as the philosopher whom he read but never wrote about. (For more on this see Penser à Strasbourg, Jacques Derrida, et al, which includes reproductions of both letters and an account by Braun, "À mi-chemin entre Heidegger et Derrida"). One feature that garnered initial interest in a French context (which propagated rather quickly to scholars of French literature and philosophy working in American universities) was Derrida's efforts to displace the understanding of Heidegger's work prevalent in France from the period of the ban against Heidegger teaching in German universities, which amounts in part to rejecting almost wholesale the influence of Jean-Paul Sartre and existentialist terms. In Derrida's view, deconstruction is a tradition inherited via Heidegger (the French term "déconstruction" is a translation of Heidegger's "Destruktion" - literally "destruction"), whereas Sartre's interpretation of Dasein and other key Heideggerian terms is overly psychologistic and (ironically) anthropocentric, consisting of a radical misconception of the limited number of Heidegger's texts commonly studied in France up to that point (namely Being and Time, What is Metaphysics?, and Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics). Derrida, on the other hand, is at times presented as an ultra-orthodox "French Heidegger," to such an extent that he, his colleagues, and his former students are made to go proxy for Heidegger's worst (political) mistakes, despite ample evidence that the reception of Heidegger's work by later practitioners of deconstruction is anything but doctrinaire "Heideggerianism". The work of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe may be taken as exemplary in this regard and was often commended as such by Derrida, who further contrasted Lacoue-Labarthe's extended work on Heidegger with Foucault's silence. Having earlier mentioned the contributions of Derrida, Lacoue-Labarthe, and Lyotard to scholarship on Heidegger and National Socialism, it is worth noting that Heidegger's relation to the Holocaust and Nazism was the subject of great and occasionally fractious debate across various "deconstructions". These included the extent to which specific practitioners of deconstruction could entirely do without Heideggerian deconstruction (as Lyotard in particular may have wished) or were - rather - obliged to further (and in the cases of many mis- and uninformed criticisms, recall) already extensive criticisms of Heidegger which considerably predated (in the case of Derrida, by decades) the broad recognition of Heidegger's activities as a National Socialist. The latter were precipitated by press attention to the Victor Farias book "Heidegger et le nazisme" (Farias was an ex-student of Heidegger) and extensive treatments of the Holocaust and its implications. These included for example, the proceedings of the first conference dedicated to Derrida's work, published as "Les Fins de l'Homme" (the essay from which that title was taken), Derrida's "Feu la cendre/cio' che resta del fuoco", or the studies on Celan by Lacoue-Labarthe and Derrida which shortly preceded the detailed studies of Heidegger's politics published in and after 1987.

Criticism

Heidegger's importance to the world of continental philosophy (which he largely created, there being no distinction between analytical and continental philosophy prior to him) is probably unsurpassed. His reception amongst philosophers of the analytic school, however, is quite another story. Saving a somewhat favorable review by Gilbert Ryle in the journal Mind of Being and Time at the time of its publication, Heidegger's contemporaries from the analytic tradition (which was still young, but already quite sharply delineated from other branches of philosophy) generally regarded both the content, insofar as they believed there to be any at all, and the style by which he delivered it, as evidence of the worst possible way of doing philosophy. The analytic tradition values clarity of expression, whereas Heidegger thought that "making itself intelligible was suicide for philosophy." Apart from the charge of obscurantism, analytic philosophers generally considered the actual content that could be gleaned from Heidegger's work to be either trivially false, non-verifiable or uninteresting. This view has largely survived, and Heidegger is still spoken of with derision in most quarters of analytical philosophy, and his influence is considered to have been disastrous for philosophy, in that a clear line can be traced from it to most varieties of postmodern philosophical thinking.

Heidegger and Nazi Germany

Heidegger joined the Nazi Party on May 1, 1933, before being appointed the rector of the university in Freiburg. He resigned from the rectorship in April 1934. During this time Heidegger's former teacher Husserl, who was Jewish, was denied the use of the university library at Freiburg because of the racial cleansing laws issued by the Nazi Party. Heidegger also removed the dedication to Husserl from Being and Time when it was reissued in 1941. Heidegger later claimed that this was due to pressure from his publisher, Max Niemeyer. Additionally, when Heidegger's Introduction to Metaphysics (lectures originally given in 1935) was published in 1953, he declined to remove a reference to the "inner truth and greatness of this movement [die innere Wahrheit und Größe dieser Bewegnung]," i.e. National Socialism. Instead of deleting or altering the text, he merely added the parenthetical gloss, "(namely, the confrontation of planetary technology and modern humanity) (nämlich [die] Begegnung der planetarisch bestimmten Technik und des neuzeitlichen Menschen)." Many readers, notably Jürgen Habermas, came to interpret this ambiguous remark as evidence of his continued commitment to National Socialism. Critics further cite Heidegger's affair with Hannah Arendt, when she was a doctoral student of his at the University of Marburg. This affair mostly went along in the 20s, some time before Heidegger's involvement in Nazism, but it did not end when she "fled" from him and moved to Heidelberg to continue with Karl Jaspers, and she later spoke on his behalf at his denazification hearings. Jaspers spoke against him at these same hearings, suggesting he would have a detrimental influence on young German students because of his powerful teaching presence. Arendt, who was Jewish, resumed their friendship, if extremely cautiously, after the war, despite or even because of the widespread contempt that Heidegger was held in for his political sympathies, and despite his being forbidden from teaching for a number of years.

Der Spiegel interview

Some years later, hoping to quiet controversy, Heidegger gave an interview to Der Spiegel magazine, in which he promised to discuss the issue provided it was published posthumously. It should also be mentioned that the published version was not a real interview, but the protocol had been largely "corrected" on Heidegger's demand. In this interview, Heidegger's defense of his Nazi involvement runs in two tracks: first, he argues that there would have been no alternative; he says he had tried to save the university (and science in general) from being politicized and had to make compromises with the Nazi administration. Second, he saw an "awakening" ("Aufbruch"), something which might help to find a "new national and social approach". From 1934 on, he says, he would have been more critical towards the government. Heidegger is evasive on some questions in this interview. For example, when he talks about a "national and social approach" in national socialism he links this to Friedrich Naumann. But Naumann's "national-sozialer Verein" was not at all national socialist, but liberal. This confusion seems to be deliberately created by Heidegger. Also, he changes between his two arguments quickly, disregarding their contradictions. And his statements often tend to take the form "others were much more Nazis than me" and "the Nazis did bad things to me, too", both of which are true, but miss the point. Also, the Der Spiegel interviewers did not bring to question Heidegger's quote from 1949 where he compares engineered food production to the Holocaust ("essentially the same"); in fact, they were not in possession of much of the evidence for Heidegger's sympathies towards Nazism which is known today. To further evaluate this issue, read "Only a God Can Save Us," Der Spiegel interview with Heidegger (1966) and Jürgen Habermas, "Work and Weltanschauung: The Heidegger Controversy from a German Perspective." translated by John McCumber, Critical Inquiry 15 (Winter 1989): pp. 431-456.

Obligations and unsplendid silence: Celan at "Todtnauberg"

Shortly after giving the Spiegel interview and following Celan's lecture at Freiburg, Heidegger hosted Paul Celan at his chalet at Todtnauberg. The two walked in the woods. Celan impressed Heidegger with his knowledge of botany (also evident in his poetry), and Heidegger is thought to have spoken about elements of his press interview. Celan signed Heidegger's guest book. In his Poetry as Experience, Lacoue-Labarthe advanced the argument that, although Celan's poetry was deeply informed by Heidegger's philosophy, Celan was long aware of Heidegger's association with the Nazi party and therefore fundamentally circumspect toward the man and transformative in his reception of his work. Celan was nonetheless willing to meet Heidegger (although he may not have been willing to be photographed with him or to contribute to Festschriften honoring Heidegger's work). Heidegger was a professed admirer of Celan's writing, although he did not attend to it as Hölderlin or Trakl (neither did he attend to Celan as a Jewish poet working within that German tradition). "Todtnauberg", however, seems to hold out the unrealized possibility of a profound rapprochement between their work, albeit on the condition that Heidegger break a silence that virtually blanketed his work to the end (Lacoue-Labarthe has commented on the insufficiency of Heidegger's one known remark about the gas chambers, made in 1949). In this respect Heidegger's work was perhaps redeemable for Celan, even if that redemption or what need was had for it was never transacted between the two men. Lest one implicitly take this as Celan simply demanding an apology of Heidegger (such a scenario seems simplistic, the more so given that neither was given to simplism), there are reasonable grounds to argue that it was (and still is) at least as important to specify how the Nazi period is das Unheil (disaster, calamity) (which is to say: specificity as to a great deal more than counting the dead). What compelled Heidegger to write about poetry, technology, and truth ought to have compelled him to write about the German disaster, all the more so because, on the basis of his thought, Heidegger attributed an "inner greatness" to the movement that brought about that disaster. Lacoue-Labarthe and Jacques Derrida have both commented extensively on Heidegger's corpus, and both have identified an idiomatically Heideggerian National Socialism that persisted until the end. It is perhaps of greater importance that Lacoue-Labarthe and Derrida, following Celan to a degree, believed Heidegger to be also capable of a profound criticism of Nazism and the horrors it brought forth. They consider Heidegger's greatest failure not to be his involvement in the National Socialist movement but his "silence on the extermination" (Lacoue-Labarthe) and his refusal to engage in a thorough deconstruction of Nazism beyond laying out certain of his considerable objections to party orthodoxies and (particularly in the case of Lacoue-Labarthe) their passage through Nietzsche, Hölderlin, and Richard Wagner, all taken to be susceptible to Nazi appropriation. It would be reasonable to say that both Lacoue-Labarthe and Derrida regarded Heidegger as capable of confronting Nazism in this more radical fashion and have themselves undertaken such work on the basis of this (one ought to note in due course the questions raised by Derrida in "Desistance" in calling attention to Lacoue-Labarthe's parenthetical comment: "(in any case, Heidegger never avoids anything)").

Conclusion

Heidegger's involvements with the Nazis and the lack of a clear apology for them complicated many of his friendships, and continues to complicate the reception of his work. It is disputable whether Heidegger was antisemitic or if he was taken in by the charismatic projections of Nazi propaganda, but he had clear sympathies for certain elements of Nazism. Whether this is in any way a result of his philosophy is still contested. It has also been noted that many parts of "Sein und Zeit" can be read as anti-democratic, anti-modernist and anti-liberal, e.g. the condemnations against the "lordship of the they" (Herrschaft des Man), the "chatter" (Gerede) and the Dasein's Verfallenheit (roughly, being-fallen-to) the world. However these critisims misunderstand Heidegger. Heidegger took pains to ensure that his use of terms like "Verfallenheit" were not interpreted as having negative implications. He states this explicitly in the opening paragraph of section 38 of "Being and Time". The possibility that Heidegger's affiliation with the Nazi party was the result of his philosophy would lead many to discredit Heidegger as a philosopher solely on this basis, as Jean-François Lyotard remarked, the formula becomes "if a Nazi, then not a great thinker" or, conversely, "if a great thinker, then not a Nazi")

Selected Bibliography

(major works in bold)
- Question Concerning Technology
- Gelassenheit (1959). Translated as Discourse On Thinking.
- Identität und Differenz (1955-57). Translated as Identity and Difference.
- Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik (1929). Translated as Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics.
- Der Satz vom Grund (1955-56). Translated as The Principle of Reason.
- Sein und Zeit (1927). Translated as Being and Time.
- Unterwegs zur Sprache (1959). Translated as On the Way To Language with the omission of the essay Die Sprache (Language) by arrangement with Herr Heidegger.

Cinema

- A 2004 film, The Ister, is based on Heidegger's 1942 lectures on Friedrich Hölderlin, and features Jean-Luc Nancy, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Bernard Stiegler, and Hans-Juergen Syberberg.
- [http://www.theister.com/ Official site]
- A 1979 film, Being There, is based upon a political, satirical 1971 novel by Jerzy Kosiński, and is a comedic spoof of Heigegger's notions of Dasein (Being There) and getting back to one's roots (our forgetfulness of Being). The film stars Peter Sellers, Shirley MacLaine, Melvyn Douglas, Jack Warden, Richard A. Dysart and Richard Basehart.

Quotes

"The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking."
-What is Called Thinking?

External links

- [http://www.transordinator.de/erzaehler/1.html Be there...] Act out Heidegger's concept of time.
- [http://www.phainomena.de phainomena.de] Heidegger-Blog (German) – Literature, activities and news about Hermeneutical Phenomenology
- [http://www.iep.utm.edu/h/heidegge.htm "Martin Heidegger" [Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy]] - Informative article, summarizing Heidegger's philosophy, including his theories on Angst, and criticisms from other philosophers such as Husserl.
- [http://www.denisdutton.com/heidegger.htm "Kaufmann, Heidegger, and Nazism"] by Denis Dutton, Philosophy and Literature 12 (1988): 325-36. A positive review of Walter Kaufmann's and George Steiner's negative treatments of Heidegger
- [http://www.egwald.com/ubcstudent/theory/heidegger.php Hearing Heidegger and Saussure] by Elmer G. Wiens.
- [http://www.waste.org/~roadrunner/writing/thesis.htm "Viewing Power in Heidegger and Levinas"] by Mitchell Cowen Verter Heidegger, Martin Heidegger, Martin Heidegger, Martin Heidegger, Martin Heidegger, Martin Heidegger, Martin Heidegger, Martin Heidegger, Martin Heidegger, Martin ja:マルティン・ハイデッガー

Educational psychology

Educational psychology is the study of how humans learn in educational settings, the effectiveness of educational treatments, the psychology of teachers, and the social psychology of schools as organizations. Although the terms "educational psychology" and "school psychology" are often used interchangeably, researchers and theorists are likely to be identified as educational psychologists, while practitioners in schools or school-related settings are identified as school psychologists. While educational psychology deals with all types of learning, some psychologists and researchers focus on specific areas such as learning disability, Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, and mood disorder. Educational psychology can perhaps be best understood through its relationship with other disciplines. It is informed primarily by psychology, bearing an analogous relationship to that discipline as medicine to biology, and engineering to physics. Educational psychology in turn informs a wide range of specialities within educational studies, including instructional design, educational technology, curriculum development, organizational learning, special education and classroom management. Educational psychology both draws from, and contributes to, cognitive science and the learning sciences. In universities, departments of educational psychology are usually housed within faculties of education.

Social, Moral and Cognitive Development

To understand the characteristics of learners in childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and old age, educational psychology develops and applies theories of human development. Often cast as stages through which people pass as they mature, developmental theories describe changes in mental abilities (cognition), social roles, moral reasoning, and beliefs about the nature of knowledge. For example, educational psychologists have researched the instructional applicability of Jean Piaget's theory of development, according to which children mature through four stages of cognitive capability. Piaget hypothesized that children are not capable of abstract logical thought until they are older than about 11 years, and therefore younger children need to be taught using concrete objects and examples. Researchers have found that transitions, such as from concrete to abstract logical thought, do not occur at the same time in all domains. A child may be able to think abstractly about mathematics, but remain limited to concrete thought when reasoning about human relationships.
- Developmental psychology
- Kohlberg's stages of moral development

Individual Differences and Disabilities

- Autism
- Cerebral palsy
- Intelligence (trait)
- Giftedness
- Hearing impairment
- ADHD
- Learning disability

Learning and Cognition

Several perspectives have been established within which the theories used in educational psychology are formed and contested. These include Behaviorism, Cognitivism, Social Cognitivism, and Constructivism.
- Operant conditioning
- Observational learning
- Memory
- Problem solving
- Situated cognition
- Metacognition
- Self-Regulation

Motivation

- Motivational Theory
- Maslow's hierarchy of needs
- Goal Theory
- Attribution theory

Applications in Teaching and Learning

- Classroom management
- Cooperative learning
- Instructional design
- Special education

Careers in Educational Psychology

A person is generally considered an Educational Psychologist if he or she has completed a graduate degree in educational psychology or a closely related field. Universities usually establish educational psychology graduate programs in either psychology departments or faculties of education. Psychologists that work in a k-12 school setting are usually trained at either the masters or doctoral (PhD or EdD) level. In addition to conducting assessments, school psychologists provide services such as academic and behavioral intervention, counseling, teacher consultation, and crisis intervention.

Influential Educational Psychologists and Theorists

- Albert Bandura 1925
- Alfred Binet 1857-1911
- Benjamin Bloom 1913-1999
- Ann Brown 1943-1999
- Jerome Bruner 1915
- Lee Cronbach 1916-2001
- John Dewey 1859-1952
- Nathaniel Gage
- Robert Gagné 1916-2002
- William James 1842-1910
- Charles H. Judd 1873-1972
- Lawrence Kohlberg 1927-1987
- Maria Montessori 1870-1952
- Jean Piaget 1896-1980
- Herbert Simon 1916–2001
- Burrhus Frederic Skinner 1904-1990
- Charles Spearman 1863-1945
- Lewis Terman 1877-1956
- Edward L. Thorndike 1874-1949
- Lev Semenovich Vygotsky 1896-1934

External links

- [http://psych.athabascau.ca/html/aupr/educational.shtml Educational Psychology Resources] by Athabasca University
- [http://wik.ed.uiuc.edu/index.php/School-based_interventions school-based interventions]
- [http://wik.ed.uiuc.edu WikEd] is a MediaWiki by the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- [http://www.schoolpsychology.net/ School Psychology on the Web]
- Folk Knowledge and Academic Learning [http://web.missouri.edu/~psycorie/FolkKnowledgePDF.pdf]

Sources

Zimmerman, B. J., & Schunk, D. H. (Eds.)(2003). Educational psychology: A century of contributions. Mahwah, NJ, US: Erlbaum. Category:Educational psychology Category:Education Category:Psychology Category:Applied psychology Category:Human behavior Category:Social sciences Category:Academic disciplines ja:教育心理学

Cognitivist

The word cognitivism is used in several ways:
- In ethics, cognitivism is the philosophical view that ethical sentences express propositions, and hence are capable of being true or false. See Cognitivism (ethics). More generally, cognitivism with respect to any area of discourse is the position that sentences used in that discourse are cognitive, that is, are meaningful and capable of being true or false.
- In psychology, cognitivism is the approach to understanding the mind which argues that mental function can be understood as the 'internal' rule bound manipulation of symbols. See Cognitivism (psychology).

Social context

The social environment or social context is a group of identical or similar social positions and social roles. Social environment of an individual is the culture that he or she was educated and/or lives in, and the people and institutions with whom the person interacts. For example, there are artistic environments (artists in a given area), educational environments (members of a university), political environments (members of a political party), etc. A given social environment is likely to create an environment solidarity among its members, who are more likely to keep together, trust and help one another and think in similar ways. This will likely influence a composition of a social circle. This is the sense of environment usually assumed in sociology, literature, history, art, and also often in common usage.

Etienne Wenger

Etienne Wenger (1952-) is an educational theorist and practitioner, best known for his formulation (with Jean Lave) of the theory of situated cognition and his more recent work in the field of communities of practice. Wenger holds that learning is an inherently social process and that it cannot be separated from the social context in which it happens. Wenger is originally from Switzerland but currently lives in the U.S., in California

Bibliography

- Lave, J., Wenger, E. (1991) Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
- Wenger, E. (1998) Communities of Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

External links

- [http://www.ewenger.com/ Etienne Wenger home page]
- [http://www.co-i-l.com/coil/knowledge-garden/cop/lss.shtml Communities of Practice: learning as a social system]

Activity theory

Activity theory (AT) is a Soviet psychological meta-theory, paradigm, or framework, with its roots in behaviourism. Its founders were Alexei Nikolaevich Leontyev, and S. L. Rubinshtein (1889-1960). It became one of the major psychological approaches in in the former USSR, being widely used in both theoretical and applied psychology, in areas such as the education, training, ergonomics, and work psychology.

The history of activity theory

The origins of activity theory can be traced to several sources, which have subsequently having given rise to various complementary and intertwined strands of development. This account will focus on two of the most important of these strands. The first is associated with the Moscow Institute of Psychology and in particular the troika of young and gifted researchers, Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky (1896–1934), Alexander Romanovich Luria (1902–77) and Alexei Nikolaevich Leontyev (1903–79). Vygotsky founded cultural-historical psychology, an important strand in the activity approach; Leont’ev, one of the principal founders of activity theory, both continued, and reacted against, Vygotsky's work. Leont'ev's formulation of general activity theory is currently the most influential in post-Soviet developments in AT, which have largely been in social-scientific and organizational, rather than psychological research. The second major line of development within AT involves scientists, such as P. K. Anokhin (1898-1974) and N. A. Bernshtein (1896-1966), more directly concerned with the neurophysiological basis of activity; its foundation is associated with the Soviet philosopher of psychology S. L. Rubinshtein (1889-1960). This work was subsequently developed by researhers such as Pushkin, Zinchenko & Gordeeva, Ponomarenko, Zarakovsky and others, as is currently most well-known through the work on systemic-structural activity theory being carried out by G. Z. Bedny and his associates.

Vygotsky

Verenikina discusses Vygotsky's contribution, beginning with the remark that "Vygotsky's life goal was to create a psychology adequate for the investigation of consciousness. He stated that consciousness is constructed through a subject's interactions with the world and is an attribute of the relationship between subject and object." Vygotsky also provided a "concept of the mediation of elementary (natural) mental processes by psychological tools (artificial devices for mastering mental processes) and internalisation." Vygotsky provided the initial impetus towards activity theory by introducing the notion of tool as a form of "mediated action" which "is externally oriented [and] must lead to changes in objects". Luria explains this: "Vygotsky supposed that higher mental processes are of a social origin... he suggested that the simplest form of [human conscious] behaviour can be found in tool- or sign-using, where a tool (or sign) can be used to reach a certain goal. Instead of the elementary scheme S→R (‘S’ for stimulus, ‘R’ for reflex), he proposed a new scheme S→ _x→ R) where S stands for stimulus, x for means (tool or sign), and R for reflex." Thus, Luria goes on to argue, explanation of complex phenomena such as human activity "is supposed to lie not in its reduction to single elements but rather in its inclusion in a rich net of essential relations."

Leontiev

After Vygotsky's early death, Leontiev became the leader of the activity theory research group and extended the framework in significantly new ways. This article can only briefly review Leontiev's contributions. Many of the specifics of activity theory set out below derive, at least in their original form, from Leontiev's work. Leontiev first examined the psychology of animals, looking at the different degrees to which animals can be said to have mental processes. He concluded that Pavlov's reflexionism was not a sufficient explanation of animal behaviour and that animals have an active relation to reality, which he called activity. In particular, the behaviour of higher primates such as chimpanzees could only be explained by the ape's formation of multi-phase plans using tools. Leontiev then progressed to humans and pointed out that people engage in "actions" that do not in themselves satisfy a need, but contribute towards the eventual satisfaction of a need. Often, these actions only make sense in a social context of a shared work activity. This lead him to a distinction between activities, which satisfy a need, and the actions that constitute the activities. Leontiev also argued that the activity in which a person is involved is reflected in their mental activity, that is (as he puts it) material reality is "presented" to consciousness, but only in its vital meaning or significance.

The West

Activity theory, except for a few publications in western journals, remained unknown outside the Soviet Union until the mid-1980s, when it was picked up by Scandinavian researchers. (The first international conference on activity theory was not held until 1986. The earliest non-Soviet paper cited by Nardi is a 1987 paper by Yrjö Engeström : "Learning by expanding"). This resulted in a reformulation of activity theory. Kuutti notes that the term activity theory "can be used in two senses: referring to the original Soviet tradition... or referring to the international, multi-voiced community applying the original ideas and developing them further." Some of the changes are a systematisation of Leontiev's work. Although Leontiev's exposition is clear and well structured, it is not as well-structured as the formulation by Yrjö Engeström. Kaptelinin remarks that Engeström "proposed a scheme of activity different from that by [Leontiev]; it contains three interacting entities—the individual, the object and the community—instead of the two components—the individual and the object—in [Leontiev]'s original scheme." Some changes were introduced, apparently by importing notions from Human-Computer Interaction theory. For instance, the notion of rules, which is not found in Leontiev, was introduced. Also, the notion of collective subject was introduced in the 1970s and 1980s (Leontiev refers to "joint labour activity", but only has individuals, not groups, as activity subjects).

Activity theory and information systems

The application of activity theory to information systems derives from the work of Bonnie Nardi and Kari Kuutti. Kuutti's work is addressed below. Nardi's approach is, briefly, as follows: Nardi saw activity theory as "...a powerful and clarifying descriptive tool rather than a strongly predictive theory. The object of activity theory is to understand the unity of consciousness and activity... Activity theorists argue that consciousness is not a set of discrete disembodied cognitive acts (decision making, classification, remembering), and certainly it is not the brain; rather, consciousness is located in everyday practice: you are what you do." Nardi also argued that "activity theory proposes a strong notion of mediation—all human experience is shaped by the tools and sign systems we use." Furthermore, she identifies "some of the main concerns of activity theory: [as] consciousness, the asymmetrical relation between people and things, and the role of artefacts in everyday life." She explained that "a basic tenet of activity theory is that a notion of consciousness is central to a depiction of activity. Vygotsky described consciousness as a phenomenon that unifies attention, intention, memory, reasoning, and speech..." and "Activity theory, with its emphasis on the importance of motive and consciousness—which belongs only to humans—sees people and things as fundamentally different. People are not reduced to 'nodes' or 'agents' in a system; 'information processing' is not seen as something to be modelled in the same way for people and machines." Nardi argued that the field of Human-Computer Interaction has "largely ignored the study of artefacts, insisting on mental representations as the proper locus of study" and activity theory is seen as a way of addressing this deficit. In a later work, Nardi et al in comparing activity theory with cognitive science, argue that "activity theory is above all a social theory of consciousness” and therefore “... activity theory wants to define consciousness, that is, all the mental functioning including remembering, deciding, classifying, generalising, abstracting and so forth, as a product of our social interactions with other people and of our use of tools." For Activity Theorists "consciousness" seems to refer to any mental functioning, whereas most other approaches to psychology distinquish conscious from unconscious functions.

An explanation of activity theory

This section presents a short introduction to activity theory, and some brief comments on human creativity in activity theory and the implications of activity theory for tacit knowledge and learning.

Activities

Activity theory begins with the notion of activity. An activity is seen as a system of human "doing" whereby a subject works on an object in order to obtain a desired outcome. In order to do this, the subject employs tools, which may be external (e.g. an axe, a computer) or internal (e.g. a plan). As an illustration, an activity might be the operation of an automated call centre. As we shall see later, many subjects may be involved in the activity and each subject may have one or more motives (e.g. improved supply management, career advancement or gaining control over a vital organisational power source). A simple example of an activity within a call centre might be a telephone operator (subject) who is modifying a customer's billing record (object) so that the billing data is correct (outcome) using a graphical front end to a database (tool). Kuutti formulates activity theory in terms of the structure of an activity. “An activity is a form of doing directed to an object, and activities are distinguished from each other according to their objects. Transforming the object into an outcome motivates the existence of an activity. An object can be a material thing, but it can also be less tangible.” Kuutti then adds a third term, the tool, which ‘mediates’ between the activity and the object. “The tool is at the same time both enabling and limiting: it empowers the subject in the transformation process with the historically collected experience and skill ‘crystallised’ to it, but it also restricts the interaction to be from the perspective of that particular tool or instrument; other potential features of an object remain invisible to the subject...”. As Verenikina remarks, tools are “social objects with certain modes of operation developed socially in the course of labour and are only possible because they correspond to the objectives of a practical action.”

The levels of activity theory

An activity is modelled as a three-level hierarchy. Kuutti schematises processes in activity theory as a three-level system. Verenikina paraphrases Leontiev as explaining that “the non-coincidence of action and operations... appears in actions with tools, that is, material objects which are crystallised operations, not actions nor goals. If a person is confronted with a specific goal of, say, dismantling a machine, then they must make use of a variety of operations; it makes no difference how the individual operations were learned because the formulation of the operation proceeds differently to the formulation of the goal that initiated the action.” The levels of activity are also characterised by their purposes: “Activities are oriented to motives, that is, the objects that are impelling by themselves. Each motive is an object, material or ideal, that satisfies a need. Actions are the processes functionally subordinated to activities; they are directed at specific conscious goals... Actions are realised through operations that are determined by the actual conditions of activity.” Engestrøm developed an extended model of an activity, which adds another component, community (“those who share the same object”), and then adds rules to mediate between subject and community, and the division of labour to mediate between object and community. Kuutti asserts that “These three classes should be understood broadly. A tool can be anything used in the transformation process, including both material tools and tools for thinking. Rules cover both explicit and implicit norms, conventions, and social relations within a community. Division of labour refers to the explicit and implicit organisation of the community as related to the transformation process of the object into the outcome.” Activity theory therefore includes the notion that an activity is carried out within a social context, or specifically in a community. The way in which the activity fits into the context is thus established by two resulting concepts:
- rules: these are both explicit and implicit and define how subjects must fit into the community;
- division of labour: this describes how the object of the activity relates to the community.

The internal plane of action

Activity theory provides a number of useful concepts that can be used to address the lack of expression for ‘soft’ factors which are inadequately represented by most process modelling frameworks. One such concept is the internal plane of action. Activity theory recognises that each activity takes place in two planes: the external plane and the internal plane. The external plane represents the objective components of the action while the internal plane represents the subjective components of the action. Kaptelinin defines the internal plane of actions as “The human ability to perform manipulations on an internal representation of external objects before starting actions with these objects in reality.” For a more detailed explanation, see Verenikina. The concepts of motives, goals and conditions discussed above also contribute to the modelling of soft factors. One principle of activity theory is that many activities have multiple motivation (‘polymotivation’). For instance, a programmer in writing a program may address goals aligned towards multiple motives such as increasing his or her annual bonus, obtaining relevant career experience and contributing to organisational objectives. Activity theory further argues that subjects are grouped into communities, with rules mediating between subject and community and a division of labour mediating between object and community. A subject may be part of several communities and a community, itself, may be part of other communities.

Human creativity

Human creativity plays an important role in activity theory, that “human beings... are essentially creative beings” in “the creative, non-predictable character”. Tikhomirov also analyses the importance of creative activity, contrasting it to routine activity, and notes the important shift brought about by computerisation in the balance towards creative activity.

Learning and tacit knowledge

Activity theory has an interesting approach to the difficult problems of learning and, in particular, tacit knowledge. Learning has been a favourite subject of management theorists, but it has often been presented in an abstract way separated from the work processes to which the learning should apply. Activity theory provides a potential corrective to this tendency. For instance, Engeström's review of Nonaka's work on knowledge creation suggests enhancements based on activity theory, in particular suggesting that the organisational learning process includes preliminary stages of goal and problem formation not found in Nonaka. Lompscher, rather than seeing learning as transmission, sees the formation of learning goals and the student's understanding of which things they need to acquire as the key to the formation of the learning activity. Of particular importance to the study of learning in organisations is the problem of tacit knowledge, which according to Nonaka, “is highly personal and hard to formalise, making it difficult to communicate to others or to share with others”. Leontiev's concept of operation provides an important insight into this problem. In addition, the key idea of internalisation was originally introduced by Vygotsky as “the internal reconstruction of an external operation”. Internalisation has subsequently become a key term of the theory of tacit knowledge and has been defined as “a process of embodying explicit knowledge into tacit knowledge”. Internalisation has been described by Engeström as the “key psychological mechanism” discovered by Vygotsky and is further discussed by Verenikina.

Applications

Software design

Activity theory is being applied to tackle the complexity of elusive design problem. For details and further information, please see a special issue of Computer Supported Cooperative Work Special Issue on Activity Theory and the Practice of Design.

References

- Leontiev, A. Problems of the development of mind. English translation, Progress Press, 1981, Moscow. (Russian original 1947).
- Nardi, Bonnie A. (ed.). Context and consciousness: activity theory and human-computer interaction. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1996.
- Verenikina, I. “Cultural-Historical Psychology and Activity Theory”. In Hasan, H., Gould, E. and Hyland, P. (Eds) Information systems and activity theory: tools in context, 7–18. University of Wollongong Press, 1998, Wollongong.
- David F. Redmiles (ed). Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), Special Issue on Activity Theory and the Practice of Design. 11(1-2), 2002. Also see [http://www.ics.uci.edu/~redmiles/activity/final-issue.html Activity Theory and the Practice of Design].

Distributed cognition

Distributed cognition is a school of psychology developed in the 1990s by Edwin Hutchins. Using insights from sociology, cognitive science, and the psychology of Vygotsky (cf activity theory) it emphasises the social aspects of cognition. Distributed cognition is a branch of cognitive science that proposes that human knowledge and cognition are not confined to the individual. Instead, it is distributed by placing memories, facts, or knowledge on the objects, individuals, and tools in our environment. Distributed cognition it is a useful approach for (re)designing social aspects of cognition by putting emphasis on the individual and their environment. Distributed cognition views a system as a set of representations, and models the interchange of information between these representations. These representations can be either in the mental space of the participants or external representations available in the environment.

References

- Hutchins, E. (1995) Cognition in the Wild (ISBN 0262581469) (MIT Press).
- Hutchins, E. (1995) "How a cockpit remembers its speeds". Cognitive Science, 19, 265-288.
- Norman, D.A. (1993) "Thin

Situated cognition

Further reading

See also

Cognitive psychology

Major research areas in cognitive psychology

Famous and/or influential cognitive psychologists

See also

Related lists

External links

Pragmatism

American philosophy

Pragmatism in history

Notable pragmatists

References

Ethnomethodology

History and Influence

Some leading policies and methods

References

See also

External Links

Vygotsky

Biography

Work

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Heidegger

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Philosophy

Being and Time

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Der Spiegel interview

Obligations and unsplendid silence: Celan at "Todtnauberg"

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Cinema

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Sources

Cognitivist

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Etienne Wenger

Bibliography

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Activity theory

The history of activity theory

Vygotsky

Leontiev

The West

Activity theory and information systems

An explanation of activity theory

Activities

The levels of activity theory

The internal plane of action

Human creativity

Learning and tacit knowledge

Applications

Software design

References

See also

Distributed cognition

References