Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

Where Is the Mind Supposed to Be? 609
Rene Descartes in his famous “structures of thought” argument. Similarly, information processors
seek to track the flow of data from input, through abstraction, to propositional knowledge.
A machine unimaginable in Locke’s time, the high-speed computer, has been appropriated for
this task. The argument goes like this: When a computer program, designed to mimic processes
used by humans, produces behavior that parallels that observed in a real-life situation, the result
is said to constitute a “sufficiency proof,” which validates the information processing model.
The other two learning theories talked about earlier—the sociocultural and social constructivist
approaches—might appear to have an advantage over the head encased views just described when
it comes to knowledge validation because the processes they emphasize are overt rather than
covert. This is possible, I submit, because socioculturalists and social constructivists have made
a virtue out of what Scotus and Peirce would consider a great weakness in current approaches to
learning: This is the distinction, nominalist in origin, between content and process. As has been
shown, this distinction is a key feature of rationalism, empiricism, and even of Kant’s valiant
attempt to meld the two (see below). Thus, sociocultural theorists argue that mental activity, like
the physical activity involved in tailoring or weaving, can be externalized and modeled because
it is content free. The comprehension-monitoring activity taught during reciprocal teaching,
activities such as summarizing and question asking, while intended for reading, can be applied to
oral-language situations as well. Social constructivists make a similar point about “language-ing.”
They reject what they consider to be the outdated, modernist view of language as a container or
holder of knowledge and meaning. The function of language is to manage or coordinate human
relationships. Both sets of theorists, then, build on the notion that there is process without content.
History, including intellectual history, is filled with “what ifs.” One of the major what ifs
relates to Peirce’s effort in the late nineteenth century to resurrect Scotus’s unique version of
what, from the present-day perspective, could only be called “realist constructivism.” Peirce
argued forcefully that Scotus’s view did not get a fair hearing in the fourteenth century. It lost out
to Ockham’s nominalism on political and not philosophical grounds. Scotus’s belief that generals
or universals actually exist in individuals was viewed with suspicion by the humanists, who joined
forces with the nominalists to defeat this notion. They equated this idea with a more conservative
stance toward authority, the subtext for them apparently being that it takes extraordinary expertise
to tease out the regularity posited by Scotus. In that sense, the aversion nominalists and humanists
felt toward Scotus’s realism is not unlike the aversion social constructivists feel toward scientific
realists—a major factor in the ongoing “science wars.”
Peirce did not just base his realist constructivism on Scotus’s five centuries old work. He had a
more recent model, Immanuel Kant, who Peirce termed “his revered master.” Kant is best known
for his attempt in the late eighteenth century to reconcile the dramatically different stances taken
by rationalists and empiricists. In the first approach, reason runs roughshod over the senses, while
in the second the converse often appears to be the case. Kant’s well-known solution to these
problems was twofold: he argued that our perceptual apparatus is structured in such a way as to
compel us to compound or synthesize sensory input to produce “bundles” of spatially located
and temporally ordered sensation. Similarly, our cognitive apparatus all but mandates that we
conceptualize experience in certain predetermined ways. Thus, we always attend to the number
of objects in the experience, the intensity or “realness” of the experience, the scope of time of the
experience—whether, for example, we are dealing with things that are happening now or that will
happen in the future. Finally, we take note, again in a general sense, of the nature of the relation
we are coming to terms with—whether, for example, it is an object–attribute or cause–effect
relationship.
Less well known but of equal importance to Peirce was Kant’s insistence that what we come to
know about objects is their form or essence. Kant was the first modern philosopher to resurrect
the notion that both commonness (i.e., universals) and particularity coexist in individual things.