CTP – Literature sources for PEM parallel process exemplar
... a letter from Karl Marx to M. Kovalevsky quoted in Ilyenkov (1977):
"... It is necessary to distinguish between that which the author in fact offers and that
which he gives only in his own representation. .... thus what Spinoza considers the
keystone of his system, and what in fact constitutes this keystone, are two quite
different things. .... Our job cannot be once more to paraphrase the theoretical
foundations ... Our job is to help the reader to understand the 'real inner structure' of
his system, which far from coincides with its formal exposition. ..."
Ilyenkov, E. V. (1977) Dialectical logic. Moscow: Progress Publishers.
---------------------------------Polanyi (1958) expressed by Whitehead (1985):
"... In grounding my epistemology in personal knowledge, I am conscious that I have
taken a decision to understand the world from my own point of view, as a person
claiming originality and exercising his personal judgement responsibly with universal
intent ..."
"... It is the act of commitment in its full structure that saves personal knowledge from
being purely subjective. ... Whether or not it is the truth can be hazarded only by
another, equally responsible commitment."
Polanyi, M. (1958) Personal knowledge. London: RKP.
Whitehead, A. J. (1985) An analysis of an individual's educational development: in
ed. Shipman, M. Educational research: principles, policies and practices. London:
Falmer.
---------------------------------Habermas and the Foundations of Critical Theory (Roderick 1986) and the relevant
section shows the author drawing on the writing of Horkheimer and Adorno in their
Dialectic of Enlightenment (1989).
".... the Enlightenment project of liberating humanity from myth and the unknown
has, by becoming an end in itself, turned into its opposite - a new and more powerful
force of domination. The old terror before the unknown becomes a new terror: the
fear of anything that cannot be calculated, standardised, manipulated or
instrumentalised. Enlightenment progress in scientific- technological knowledge
(=power), while creating the objective possibility for a truly free society, leads to the
domination of external nature, society and inner nature. What Lukacs analysed as the
reification of consciousness was the price the potential subjects of liberation payed for
the progressive overcoming of material necessity. Throughout the course of Western
civilisation, the rationality of myth, as well as the Enlightenment which replaced it as
reason only to become a myth itself, exposes Western reason as a destructive force.
Reason abstracts, conceptualises, and seeks to reduce the concrete and the nonidentical to identity, to destroy the otherness of the other. Horkheimer and Adorno
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locate the irrationality of what Weber analysed as rationalisation at its deepest source
- the identity logic which is the fundamental structure of Western reason. Human
liberation could be conceived, if at all, only as a complete break with mere formal
rationality and instrumental reason ...." (page 40)
Roderick, R. (1986) Habermas and the foundation of critical theory. London:
Macmillan.
---------------------------------Roderick (1986) summed up a central point of Marx's thinking as representing:
".... a ruthless critique of the priviledging of "ideas" ... a denial of their autonomy and
independent power. Ideas are not .... representations of facts or autonomous active
agents, but expressions of the real material life processes of human beings. .... These
'material conditions' are not simply an object of contemplation, but a field of action."
Roderick, R. (1986) Habermas and the foundation of critical theory. London:
Macmillan.
---------------------------------Carr and Kemmis (1983) drawing on Kuhn (1970:
"... A close examination of how science has developed reveals that personal,
subjective and social factors play a crucial role in the production of knowledge.
Indeed, the significance of these factors is such that "knowledge" can be more
accurately understood in psychological and sociological terms than in purely logical
or epistemological terms. When understood in this way, it becomes apparent that the
positivist conception of objective knowledge is nothing more than a myth."
Carr, W. and Kemmis, S. (1983) Becoming critical: knowing through action research.
Victoria: Deakin University Press.
---------------------------------Collingwood (1924)
'....and those parts of the work of art which he could not in some sort have invented
for himself will pass him by unseen. "How much, as one grows older, one finds in soand-so," people say, "that one never saw before!" .... For one never sees in anybody's
work but what one brings to it.' ..."
Collingwood, R. G. (1970) Speculum mentis. Oxford: OUP
---------------------------------Erich Fromm (1949) extended the scope of work of art to encompass life itself:
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"... living itself is an art, in fact, the most important and at the same time the most
difficult and complex art to be practiced by man. Its object is not this or that
specialised performance, but the performance of living, the process of developing into
that which one is potentially. In the art of living, man is both the artist and the object
of this art; he is the sculptor and the marble; the physician and the patient .... It is
interesting at this point to ask why our time has lost the concept of life as an art."
Fromm, E. (1949) Man for himself. London: RKP.
---------------------------------... the story of King Thoth described in Plato's Phaedrus. The following commentary
is from Norris (1987) and serves further to explicate that view:
"Writing is a dangerous gift because it substitutes mere inscriptions - alien, arbitrary,
lifeless signs - for the authentic living presence of spoken language. ... with the access
to writing, says the king, men's real powers of memory will rapidly decline, since they
will no longer need to remember anything at all - inwardly and actively get it by heart
... pupils will be widely read without the benefit of a teacher's instruction. ... The
effect of writing will thus be to break those peculiar ties that ... serve to ensure the
passage of authentic truth from each generation to the next. For it is only by
respecting the authority vested in the teacher, an authority achieved through mature
self-knowledge and not just acquired by reading other men's books, that the pupil can
arrive at genuine wisdom on his own account.
"... 'The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.' Such statements may be found across a
quite extraordinary range of the world's religions. ..."
Norris, C. (1987) Derrida. London: Fontana.
---------------------------------Lawrence Durrell (1986) ... the words he puts into the mouth of his anti-hero
Pursewarden:
"Truth is a matter of direct apprehension - you can't climb a ladder of mental
concepts towards it. ... Cupid and Psyche were facts to the Greeks, not concepts.
Analogical as against analytical thinking! ..."
Durrell, L. (1986) The Alexandria Quartet. London: Faber and Faber.
---------------------------------Wittgenstein (1972) spoke about climbing ladders:
"My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anybody who
understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them as steps - to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after
he has climbed up it.) He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the
world aright." (p 151)
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Wittgenstein, L. (1972) The blue and brown books. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
---------------------------------Gadamer (1989) warns:
‘The question arises how far the dialectical superiority of reflective philosophy
corresponds to a substantive truth and how far it merely creates a formal
appearance.'
Gadamer, H-G. (1989) Truth and method. London: Sheen and Ward.
---------------------------------Thompson (1990):
"The reconstruction of institutions and social structure may induce subjects to reflect
upon the circumstances in which they act; and such reflections may enable subjects to
grasp, not so much the effort to exist, but rather those conditions of their existence
which had hitherto remained opaque."
"It may be suggested .... that the factual underdetermination of scientific theory
elevates the self-reflection of the subject to a crucial epistemological role."
Thompson, J. B. Critical hermeneutics Cambridge: CUP.
---------------------------------Foucault (1984) in Bernstein (1991):
"Modern man .... is not man who goes off to discover himself, his secrets and his
hidden truth; he is the man who tries to invent himself. This modernity does not
'liberate man in his own being'; it compels him to face the task of producing himself."
Bernstein, R. J. (1991) The new constellation. Cambridge: Polity Press
---------------------------------Campbell (1976):
"... Whorf (1956) has demonstrated ... to what extent the language learned in infancy
determines not only the manner in which one's thoughts and feelings have to be
expressed, but also the very patterns of those thoughts and feelings themselves. ... the
imprints of our parish are within us, tattood on the insides of our skins."
Campbell, J. (1976) The masks of God: creative mythology. Harmondsworth:
Penguin.
Whorf, B. (1956) Language, thought and reality. Massachusetts: MIT Press.
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---------------------------------Richard Bernstein (1991)
"... One of the primary lessons ... is that we engage in critique as second person
participants and not as third person neutral observers."
Bernstein, R. J. (1991) The new constellation. Cambridge: Polity Press
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The action-reflection cycle
Question 1:
What is our initial concern?
Question 2:
Why are we concerned?
Question 3:
What do we think we can do about it?
Question 4:
What kind of "evidence" can we collect to help us make some judgments
about what is happening?
Question 5:
How can we collect such "evidence"?
Question 6:
How can we check that our judgment about what has happened was
reasonably fair and accurate?
---------------------------------Habermas argues that when speakers are communicating successfully, they
will have to defend their meaning by using these four claims.
1. That they have uttered something understandably — or their
statements are intelligible.
2. That they have given other people something to understand — or are
speaking something true.
3. That the speaker is therefore understandable — or their intentions are
recognized and appreciated for what they are.
4. That they have come to an understanding with another person — or,
they have used words that both actors can agree upon.
Quoting the source of Habermas' (1976) four criteria of social validity in
reaching a shared understanding:
"... I shall develop the thesis that anyone acting communicatively must, in
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performing any speech action, raise universal validity claims and suppose that
they can be vindicated (or redeemed). Insofar as he wants to participate in a
process of reaching understanding, he cannot avoid raising the following –
and indeed precisely the following – validity claims. He claims to be:
a)
b)
c)
d)
Uttering something understandably
Giving (the hearer) something to understand
Making himself thereby understandable
Coming to an understanding with another person.
The speaker must choose a comprehensible expression so that speaker and
hearer can understand one another. The speaker must have the intention of
communicating a true proposition (or a propositional content, the existential
presuppositions of which are satisfied) so that the hearer can share the
knowledge of the speaker. The speaker must want to express his intentions
truthfully so that the hearer can believe the utterance of the speaker (can trust
him). Finally, the speaker must choose an utterance that is right so that the
hearer can accept the utterance and speaker and hearer can agree with on
another in the utterance with respect to a recognized normative background.
Moreover, communicative action can continue undisturbed only as long as
participants suppose that the validity claims they reciprocally raise are
justified." (Habermas, 1976, pp.2-3)
Habermas, J. (1976) Communication and the evolution of society. London;
Heinemann
(See also Polanyi's (1956 ibid.) ideas on personal knowledge, affirmation and
conviviality in enhancing the quality of the personal validity of our beliefs
about the worthwhileness of our productive lives in education.)
---------------------------------As one suggestion for reducing the turgidity of much research writing, I
suggest that three of the traditional academic games of name-dropping could
themselves be dropped. These I call 'genuflecting', 'sandbagging', and
'kingmaking'. Let me illustrate these terms with this piece of invented report
writing.
Piaget (1926) showed that children develop in stages and so it is no surprise
to find that libraries for children are usually organised according to levels of
complexity for readers (Adams, 1980; Brown, 1982; Collins, 1988). In
planning this investigation we started with the view stated by Davidson (1981,
p.1) that any collection of writings is a library. In designing our questionnaire,
we used a modified form of that used by Edwards (1987)
I describe the reference to Piaget as genuflection (meaning ritualistic
obeisance to one of the founding parents of educational theory), the
references to Adams, Brown and Collins as sandbagging (meaning adding to
a statement inert defences to make it look secure), and the reference to
Davidson as kingmaking (meaning giving undue authority to somebody by
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citing their unresearched utterance). On the other hand the reference to
Edwards is appropriate and necessary; indeed it would be plagiarism not to
cite her. The purpose of references should be to support the claim to
knowledge of the paper, not the claim to being well-read of the author!
Bassey, M. (1992) Creating Education through Research. British Educational
Research Journal, Vol. 10, No.1, 3-16.
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