The last post? Post-postmodernism and the linguistic u-turn

This paper adopts an autobiographical tone to review the linguistic turn and its demise at the hands Richard Rorty. Rorty, along with Continental philosophers like Lyotard rescued us from a philosophical delusion that we might achieve a neutral analysis resulting in linguistic and conceptual hygiene. This view became the basis of a highly influential doctrine in philosophy of education during the 1970s under R. S. Peters and the London school. I review the Wittgensteininspired movement and its conceptual affinities with postpositivism, postmodernism and postcoloniality as the dominating motifs of the age we have now passed beyond. © Michael A. Peters.This paper adopts an autobiographical tone to review the linguistic turn and its demise at the hands Richard Rorty. Rorty, along with Continental philosophers like Lyotard rescued us from a philosophical delusion that we might achieve a neutral analysis resulting in linguistic and conceptual hygiene. This view became the basis of a highly influential doctrine in philosophy of education during the 1970s under R. S. Peters and the London school. I review the Wittgenstein inspired movement and its conceptual affinities with postpositivism, postmodernism and postcoloniality as the dominating motifs of the age we have now passed beyond

How to Design and Fly your Humanly Space Object in Space?

Today’s space exploration, both robotic- and human-exploration driven, is dominated by objects and artefacts which are mostly conceived, designed and built through technology and engineering approaches. They are functional, reliable, safe, and expensive. Building on considerations and concepts established in an earlier paper, we can state that the current approach leaves very little room for art and design based objects, as organizations—typically led by engineers, project and business managers— see the inclusion of these disciplines and artifacts as nice to have instead of a genuine need, let alone requirement. In this paper we will offer initial discussions about where design and engineering practices are different or similar to each other and how to bridge them. We will also highlight the benefits that domains such as design or art can offer to space exploration. Some of the design considerations and approaches will be demonstrated through the double diamond of divergence-convergence cycles of design, leading to an experimental piece called a “cybernetic astronaut chair”, which was designed as a form of abstraction and discussion point to highlight a subset of concepts and ideas that designers may consider when designing objects for space use, with attention to human-centered or humanly interactions. Although there are few suggested functional needs for chairs in space, they can provide reassuring emotional experiences from home, while being far away from home. In zero gravity, back-to-back seats provide affordances—or add variety in a cybernetic sense—to accommodate two astronauts simultaneously, while implying the circularity of cybernetics in a rather symbolic way. The cybernetic astronaut chair allows us to refine the three-actor model proposed in a previous paper, defining the circular interactions between the artist or designer; object or process; and user or observer. We will also dedicate a brief discussion to the process of navigating through the complex regulations of space agencies, from solicitations through development and testing, to space flight. The provided insights to designers and artists, related to agency-driven processes and requirements, may help to deconvolute the steps and may lead to flying their objects or artifacts in space

From conditioning to learning communities: Implications of fifty years of research in e‐learning interaction design

This paper will consider e‐learning in terms of the underlying learning processes and interactions that are stimulated, supported or favoured by new media and the contexts or communities in which it is used. We will review and critique a selection of research and development from the past fifty years that has linked pedagogical and learning theory to the design of innovative e‐learning systems and activities, and discuss their implications. It will include approaches that are, essentially, behaviourist (Skinner and Gagné), cognitivist (Pask, Piaget and Papert), situated (Lave, Wenger and Seely‐Brown), socio‐constructivist (Vygotsky), socio‐cultural (Nardi and Engestrom) and community‐based (Wenger and Preece). Emerging from this review is the argument that effective e‐learning usually requires, or involves, high‐quality educational discourse, that leads to, at the least, improved knowledge, and at the best, conceptual development and improved understanding. To achieve this I argue that we need to adopt a more holistic approach to design that synthesizes features of the included approaches, leading to a framework that emphasizes the relationships between cognitive changes, dialogue processes and the communities, or contexts for e‐learning

Development

ABSTRACTThis essay is about Jean Piaget’s late theory, but it is also an advance of my broader historiographical argument regarding the role of intellectual history in uncovering our science’s still-relevant “neglected invisibles” (introduced in Burman, 2015). It does this by building on recent scholarship in the History of Biology to show how Historians of Psychology can contribute to contemporary science without falling prey to “presentism” (i.e. the bias introduced into historical narratives as a result of the framing afforded by contemporary concerns). To wit: when the present itself has been biased by past disciplinary politics, then it is not “presentist” to show that this bias exists. Nor is it presentist to follow the consequences of this biasing back to the original sources, and then highlight the resulting neglected invisibles that have continuing contemporary relevance. I do that, here, by leveraging recent scholarship showing that development was actively suppressed from the evolutionary discourse during the 20th century. Because this is starting to change, with the rise of “evo-devo” (the new synthesis of evolutionary and developmental biology that augments the old synthesis of Darwin and Mendel), and because the biological discourse provides meta-theory for evolutionary thinking in adjacent areas, the conditions of possibility for theory in psychology and epistemology are also changing: ideas that were once dismissed as unthinkable can be reconsidered in new light. Therefore, here, I turn to what Piaget called his “hazardous hypotheses,” and reexamine his long-neglected proposals—building on Baldwin and Waddington—for a single unifying evolutionary, developmental, psychological, and epistemological mechanism.PLAN FOR THE BOOKThe handbook will cover how psychological ideas have evolved from past to present. The book will be organized much as an introductory-psychology text is, except that the goal of each chapter will be not merely to present the most recent theory and research, but rather the intellectual history of this theory and research. The book will be an intellectual history of psychology, but whereas textbooks on the history of psychology are virtually all organized chronologically, with successive chapters covering the history of ideas in all of the fields combined at different times in the past, our volume will be organized topically, with history reviewed for each of the major topics of investigation in psychology. We believe the topical organization has a large advantage over a strictly chronological one, in that fields have evolved differently, and when one does a strictly chronological book, progress in each given field tends to be given short shrift in favor of generalities. Obviously, there is no one “right” way to organize an intellectual history, but we believe that our topical approach will provide readers with the most scholarly, comprehensive, and useful history of the field. For better or worse (and we believe, for worse), students of psychology are learning less and less history of their field. The senior editor has authored several textbooks, and when he gets back reviews, the tendency almost always is for referees to recommend that historical material be cut back or even dropped. They may be responding to student preferences or their own ideas about pedagogy, but one scarcely can understand the present if one does not understand the past. George Santayana’s statement, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” applies equally well to the history of ideas as to the history of political and economic institutions. We believe that the subject matter of psychology demands historical scrutiny. The history of psychology allows us to see how psychological knowledge has been created and what role it has played in what people say and believe about being human, whether the topic is how they think, feel, or interact with each other. <br/