Curriculum & politics

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Review of "Dewey, Peirce, and the Learning Paradox"Author(s): Michael W. AppleSource: American Educational Research Journal, Vol. 36, No. 1 (Spring, 1999), pp. 77-81Published by: American Educational Research AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1163507 .

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American Educational ResearchJournalSpring 1999, Vol.36, No. 1, pp. 77-81

Review of "Dewey, Peirce, and the LearningParadox"Michael W. AppleUniversity of Wisconsin, Madison

Dewey, Peirce, and the LearningParadox"is quite an interesting paper.Not only does it deal with a problem of importance, but it does so inconceptually interesting ways. However, there are a number of conceptualand stylistic flaws that need to be dealt with before the paper is publishable.Some of these are ratherminor, but a number of them weaken the author'scase.First, let me note what I see as the strengths of this manuscript. Toooften education scholarship is seen as a subset of psychological scholarship.While this has its value, it all too often leads to a reductiveness that is

unfortunate. It does not sufficiently recognize the fundamentally socialquality of educational acts, and it all too often assumes that theoriesdeveloped within psychology are sufficient to have us think creatively abouteducational phenomena. As has been demonstrated many times, there is nonecessary one-to-one correspondence between psychological theory andeducational theories, decisions, and realities. While the author startswithinpsychology, he or she clearly recognizes the underlying social quality ofeducation (e.g., the paper's discussion of the role of discourse communitiesand intersubjective learning communities). Of even more import, he or shesituates what has been called the learning paradox back within the episte-mological traditions and debates that have arisen to expressly deal withthese kinds of issues. A good deal of psychological talk and research bothin psychology and education occurs in the absence of such philosophicalwork. Even when it is technically quite sophisticated, a significant portionof psychologically based research in education is often relativelynaive aboutthe weaknesses in its underlying conceptual apparatuses and categories.Thus, the author's attemptto resolve the apparent paradox by turning to thehistorical discussions within philosophy about the development of newperspectives is not only wise, but productive. Such a philosophical turn isto be commended. Would that more research not only in psychology but in

MICHAEL. APPLEs John Bascom Professor of Curriculumnd Instruction ndEducationalPolicy Studies at the Universityof Wisconsin, Department of Curriculumand Instruction, 225 N. Mills St., Madison, WI 53706. His specializations are curricu-lum studies and sociology of education.

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Appleeducational research in general was more conceptually nuanced and moreclearly grounded in the advances being made in epistemology and in socialphilosophy, to name but two areas.

Further, the turn to Peirce and Dewey and the positions that haveevolved from them do in fact provide a set of categories that help us thinkbetter about ways of coming to grips with-in essence, partly dissolving-the paradox. The presentation of Peirce and Dewey and of the "inductivists,""deductivists",and "postmodern constructivists"was very clear. The use ofconcrete examples that tied the conceptual claims to "real" vents was alsowell done. In particular,the differences among the four positions-as idealtypes-were expressed quite well, although as I shall say in a minute I havesome questions about these categories themselves. However, given thelinguistic extravagances of some postmodern theorists, I appreciated theauthor's clarity in his or her discussion of the basic focus on language "inthe world"that differentiatespartsof postmodern theories from some others.Let me now point to some of the conceptual and stylistic problems ofthe manuscript. I shall number these in ascending order according to theirplace in the manuscript.1. Avoid the use of words such as seminal whenever possible. WhileI do not wish to act as partof the "word-police," t is the case that terms suchas these are inherently masculine. Many authors have turned to germinalinstead.2. How Dewey/Bentley's position on ideas actually differs frompostmodern positions needs to be clarified more at this point rather thanleaving it solely until a later section of the essay.3. The jump from Descartes to Kant-as if Kant were only respondingto Descartes-is too abruptand rather ahistorical.Itoversimplifies the issuesand debates. J. H. Randall's The Careerof Philosophy (1965) may be usefulin clarifying the historical record and complexity here.4. The discussion of radical constructivism is too brief to do it justice.I too have some serious reservations about radical constructivism's argu-ments, but the treatment here needs to go further to make it moresubstantive.

5. Throughout the next section and the one following it (realist andpostmodernist), the modernist/postmodernist divide is rather stereotypical.It does not do justice to their complex interactions or to the ways manypostmodernists smuggle in foundational (and often modernist) claims orengage in linguistic pyrotechnics that are at times analytically suspect. Ofcourse, the same can be said for some modernist positions. But the real issueconcerns the creation of a false binary here that reinforces stereotypes abouteach position, rather than showing the creative tensions that exist and thefact that some of the most elegant epistemological positions actually try toput together elements of both. The construction of these binaries as idealtypes may be less useful than the author leads us to think. It would help ifthe author showed that these are leaky categories and that the categoriesthemselves are simply analyticconstructs thatmay not cover some important78



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Review of "Dewey,Peirce, and the Learning Paradox"work that trespasses over these somewhat artificialboundaries. (It wouldalso be in keeping with Dewey, since he based much of his own philosophi-cal and educational work on the dissolution of false dichotomies.)

6. The category of ideas needs to be unpacked throughout the firsthalfof the article.Much rests on our intuitions about what the author means (orindeed what Dewey and others mean) when he or she discusses thesethings. As it stands now, it is basically an empty set or, better yet, a place-markerthat acts as something of a sliding signifier throughout the first halfof the paper. What counts as an idea, especially when it lies outside oflanguage? Does this also include the more phenomenological accounts ofthinking found in, say, Merleau-Ponty (1962) or the phenomenologicalpsychologists and theiremphasis on the role of the body in human knowingor, say, Stuart Hampshire's analysis of thinking in Thought and Action(1959)? Some clarification is necessary here.7. The two sections on metaphors are richlydetailed and internallywell-crafted.However, it is not always sufficiently clear how specifically all of thishelps us solve the learning paradox. The reader must do a good deal ofinterpretivework to pull it all together. Thus, it would be quite useful if theauthor spent more time at the end of each of these sections pulling theclaims together and directly relating them back to what is at stake here. Thisis largely a stylistic problem and would not be too difficult to solve I think.

8. The example of Darwin is interesting. But, given the recent explosionof work in the history of science on Darwin, why draw only from Ghiselin?There are multiple interpretations and historical accounts of what Darwindid and meant and how he creatively took account of the political/religiouscontext of his theory's possible reception. Stauffer'sdetailed and annotatededition of the Origin(1975), for example, deciphers Darwin's own notes andmakes the story much more complicated. Mybasic point, however, is to askthe author to take more care in claiming that Darwin did x for y reasonwithout more support from what is a very contentious area of historicalscholarship.9. This concluding section is much too brief. It does not begin to tie allof the arguments together, much less document how the interesting argu-ments the author advances are fully useful in solving the learning paradox.Of equal importance, the connections between teachers and new theoriesare not clear. How does the claim that "the abductive or idea-basedapproach deserves a chance in the classroom" have anything to do with theanalytic arguments advanced in the body of the paper? None of thearguments for an abductive approach-as interesting as they are-aregrounded in schools or classrooms. Instead, a conceptual apparatus isproposed to help us think "better"about the ways we talk and think about(in Bruner's 1973 apposite phrase) going "beyond the information given."The connections between the use of new metaphors and theories and theirapplication to classrooms cannot simply be stipulated. The claim aboutclassroom use seems to come out of left field. It is also a bit naive. And thisbrings me back to an issue I raised earlier.

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AppleThere is a distinction between epistemological and psychological theo-ries and issues and pedagogical ones. Solving one may have no necessarybearing on the other. This was recognized clearly, for example, early on in

the structure of disciplines movement during the 1960s and 1970s. This iswhy writers such as Philip Phenix in Realms of Meaning (1964) andelsewhere spent so much time distinguishing between the epistemologicalstructure of the disciplines and their pedagogical structures.The two maynot be the same. The author needs to think more carefullyabout what mightbest be called the problem of recontextualization--the movement ofknowledge and processes from one context to another. Basil Bernstein'sdiscussion of recontextualizing rules in his The Structuring of PedagogicDiscourse (1990) may be helpful here, as might the more socially groundeddiscussion in Apple's Official Knowledge (1993).10. Finally, there are a number of insightful points made by the authorabout the ways in which Dewey and Peirce employed a more communalsense of the generation of ideas. How Dewey and Peirce's positions differfrom the postmodern concerns with language communities and the socialconstruction of our ideas about truthis still a bit opaque. Dewey's work hasbeen incorporated within the sociology of knowledge, where he is oftenseen as one of the American progenitors-sort of an American Mannheim.The concluding section could usefully bring together the core arguments theauthor believes separates Dewey from the epistemological relativism ofsome post positions while still preserving a vision of the inherently socialgrounds of validating acts of knowing. This might have to include more onthe ways in which the social and the epistemological intersect in, say, Deweyand might require that the author place more emphasis on the social thanhe or she now does. In addition, this might require describing more clearlyhow community (be it a discourse community or other kind) functions. Atthe very least, it would be importantto return to his or her discussion of theother three categories-and especially the more postmodern position-torestate more clearly how the traditions embodied in and growing out of thework of Peirce and Dewey take us in more positive directions.Even with these criticisms, "Dewey, Peirce, and the LearningParadox"is a thoughtful paper. It does demonstrate a number of the conceptualweaknesses of dominant approaches, and it does suggest some importantways in which a returnto Dewey and Peirce might be productive. However,I do not think that it is ready for publication at this time without clarifyingand deepening a number of its key arguments and examples and withoutwriting a considerably more detailed, integrative, and elegant concludingsection. However, there is no doubt in my mind that it has considerablepotential.

ReferencesApple, M. W. (1993). Official knowledge. New York: Routledge.Berstein,B. (1990). Thestructuringofpedagogicdiscourse.New York:Routledge.Bruner,J. (1973). Beyond the information given. New York: Norton.80



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Review of "Dewey,Peirce, and the Learning Paradox"Hampshire, S. (1959). Thoughtand action. New York: Viking.Merleau-Ponty,M. (1962). Thephenomenology of perception. London: Routledge &Kegan Paul.Phenix, P. (1964). Realms of meaning. New York: McGraw-Hill.Randall,J. H., Jr. (1965). The career of philosophy (Vol. 2). New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press.Stauffer, R. (1975). Charles Darwin's natural selection. New York: CambridgeUniversity Press.

Manuscriptreceived March9, 1998Accepted August 28, 1998

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