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Roche, B. & Barnes-Holmes, D. (2003). Behavior analysis and social constructionism: Some points of contact and departure. The Behavior Analyst 26, 215-231.
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Gilbert, G.N. & Mulkay, M. (1982).
Warranting scientific belief. Social
Studies of Science 12, 383-408.
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Lester, J. (2011). Exploring the
borders of cognitive and discursive
psychology: A methodological
reconceptualization of cognition and
discourse. Journal of Cognitive
Education and Psychology 10(3),
280-293.
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Edwards, D. (2006). Discourse, cognition and social practices: the rich surface of language and interaction. Discourse Studies 8(1), 41-49.
I found the readings and discussions from Monday boosted my background knowledge on DP. The dictionary only came out a few times today!
Edwards (2006) article was an example of using DP and cognitive psychology. Edwards went into detail about how a psychological state (like intention) can be realized through the actions of talk and text. Although there were a few psychological terms I was unfamiliar with, as I read the article I realized that I am more familiar with DP, DA, and CA and really focused on some of the nuances of the DP descriptions. My favorite phrases include "active management" p. 41 and "common sense topics" p. 42.
I had a hard time with the Roche & Barnes-Holmes article (2003), which made me feel completely lacking in background knowledge once again. The authors basically explained the similarities and differences between behaviorism and social constructivism (known to us as DA). The interesting section for me was "Language as a key feature of human action" (p. 221). Although behaviorism traditionally used non-human subjects and generalized their findings to human populations, current research (backed by Skinner, no less) examines language in relationship to a variety of human functions by actually studying humans. Both fields also believe that language comes from social interactions.
Gilbert and Mulkay's (1982) article was about how scientists come to their beliefs and the rationale behind those choices. This article uses interview transcriptions, but does not use Jeffersonian transcription. (Question: to be called DP or DA, do researchers have to use Jeffersonian transcription?) Scientists, when justifying their own research opinions, will use logical, well-defined descriptions based on "impersonal, standardized routines" (p. 400). When scientists justify changes to their previous opinions (usually due to someone else prevailing theory), non-cognitive factors are to blame for the original misinterpretation. The authors compare this derisiveness to what the division in social science research.
My Big Ah-ha!
Lester's (2011) article led me to reflect on the last readings, specifically Edwards and Potter's fight for the validity of DP in the field of psychology. There seemed to be a similar dichotomy in the field of cognitive psychology. All three authors give me the impression that they see major assumptions of their field on one side of the spectrum and DP on the other side. For example, in both sets of reading, the authors discuss the work of their field primarily focused on the individual- cognition is individualistic instead of socially constructed.
While I was reading Lester's work, I had an entire conversation in the margins of the page (I'm not kidding- check out the picture below). I couldn't understand why the middle ground seemed absent in these readings. To me, it seems like without individual cognition there would be no social interaction (in my mind, I was picturing a room full of vegetative patients), but also without social interaction there is limited individual cognition (for example- feral children often have limited cognitive ability because they have no interaction with people- they can't just start talking or understanding contexts once they are around people- they have actually lost that ability).
The individual vs. social construction of cognition makes me think about the old nature vs. nurture argument, and I've long thought- why not both? Then... I hit upon Lester's description of Vygotsky's work.... and thank goodness! Vygotsky believed in both! I realized that the either/or arguments were bothering me so much because they went against the work of my own field. In art education, we learn about and apply Vygotsky's scaffolding techniques to held individual students learn in social situations. So, to sum up... I understand my resistance to choosing the individual over the social constructions, and I'm glad that a researcher I know and respect showed up in my readings today to help me understand cognitive psychology and DP! As it says in the margin, "Good job, Vygotsky!"
Yeah, I noticed too that Roche was pretty dry and longer than necessary. It is HUGE, as you noticed, that most behavior analysis research is done with non-humans! To me, that really changes how I think about the findings and the role of language.
ReplyDelete"Gilbert and Mulkay's (1982) article was about how scientists come to their beliefs and the rationale behind those choices." I would modify this a bit and say that it is about how scientists RATIONALIZE their beliefs through their LANGUAGE choices. What do you think?
Gilbert and Mulkey didn't call their work DP or DA, their work is in a different but related field of the social study of science. To be called conversation analysis you have to use Jeffersonian. Many versions of DA do not, and early DP work did not rely as heavily on CA as it does now (revisit the Potter article for a review of this.)
What you are struggling with makes complete sense and is indeed the crux of the epistemology we are learning about. DP doesn't say there isn't individual cognition - it just says "let's not worry about it in our analysis."
"it seems like without individual cognition there would be no social interaction (in my mind, I was picturing a room full of vegetative patients), but also without social interaction there is limited individual cognition (for example- feral children often have limited cognitive ability because they have no interaction with people- they can't just start talking or understanding contexts once they are around people- they have actually lost that ability)."
DP would say - why is the distinction necessary? It's only the social interaction in the form of talk that is visible. It's only the language that we have to evaluate what is happening, but we have been very, very acculturated to thinking of language as somehow reflecting what is "in the mind", even though we have no evidence of any "individual mind" that isn't represented in language.
It's a huge paradigm shift.